The state of international politics can be summed up by looking at the most prominent statements of the last week from the leaders of countries, as measured by U.S. news coverage, with the key lines listed here by country. You can’t help noticing that one of these is not like the others.
- Canada: Canada is unwavering in our commitment to fight climate change and support clean economic growth.
- France: If we do nothing, our children will know a world of migrations, of wars, of shortage. A dangerous world.
- United Kingdom: While we have made significant progress in recent years there is, to be frank, far too much tolerance of extremism in our country.
- United States: Despite the constant negative press covfefe
“Covfefe” might be thought to be an attempt by a man’s fingers to tap out “coverage” on a touch screen while his brain, in a half-asleep stupor, is screaming “coffee!!” but the White House added fuel by insisting the next morning that the tweet was complete as posted. What happened? Everyone who tweets live, tweets in error sometimes, but this is not a case of an isolated misstatement. Trump’s only significant policy statement of the week, a Rose Garden announcement on climate policy, was nonsense of a different kind. It might have been stated in known Earth-language words, but there was no logic or sense to be found behind the words. Maybe, one might think, the message was just badly formed or badly delivered on this occasion, but follow-up comments from White House and diplomatic officials contradicted each other as widely as one could imagine possible, as if senior officials had not been briefed at all and were left to just make stuff up. It leaves little leeway to imagine that the White House, in fact, has a climate policy. This came just a week after, at a major summit meeting, Trump barely participated and seemed not to quite understand where he was.
This state of incoherence is a hole in the world, which had fallen into the habit of looking to the United States for leadership. The late Zbigniew Brzezinski noticed this predicament before most of us and had commented on it a month ago:
Sophisticated US leadership is the sine qua non of a stable world order. However, we lack the former while the latter is getting worse.
Brzezinski made a career of world order, but obviously, there is more at risk than that. In U.S. politics, this could be the end of the Republican Party. Everywhere, if global energy policy cannot be reformed, the land that half of the world’s human population lives on could be converted to ocean in one or two lifetimes. In the world order, the status of the United States has been knocked down a peg in each of the last two weeks, and it could easily fall much farther in the weeks to come.
The White House staff has tried to find ways to make its mercurial leader less of a daily threat. World leaders now seem to realize they must do the same when it comes to the challenges facing the world. Trump’s call to renegotiate has fallen to the ground, barely noticed. One can hardly negotiate with a man who cannot state a position. The White House is still standing, but there is no one home. What do we do now? Of course, the answers are there to be found. I am sure what we will find is that there is a great deal of work for all of us to do.
