• Foreign & Public Diplomacy
• United States
• China
• Russia
• Howard W. French

February 26, 2025, 2:35 PM View Comments ()

As someone who wrote a book about Beijing’s relationship with Africa close to the beginning of its boom, I have long been accustomed to fielding questions from Western reporters about China taking advantage of far weaker countries with a practiced skepticism.

Isn’t Beijing’s assiduous courting of the continent nothing more than a bid to control Africa’s vast storehouse of mineral wealth? Isn’t its would-be generosity in the form of enormous infrastructure loans a cleverly disguised trap to handcuff African countries with debt, the better to dominate and exploit them?

The counterpart to questions like these, whether explicit or implied, was that the poor and weak of the world could be sure that with the United States and its Western allies came business ties, economic engagement, and a baseline of respect for their vaunted principles—supposedly universal values like justice, fairness, transparency, human rights, hostility to corruption, and respect for law.

The naiveté of this sort of framing always made me wince because as a historian and journalist, I know well how often Washington has cast aside high principles in favor of geopolitical advantage or expediency. Across the decades, there have been examples on every continent, such as the overthrowing of Iran’s Mossadegh government in 1953, support for brutal and corrupt dictatorships in Latin America and the Caribbean throughout the Cold War, and support for one-man rule in Africa like the Mobutu regime, whose eventual toppling in a long and costly continental war after three ruinous decades in power I covered as a reporter.

But throughout all this, and under both Republican and Democratic governments, Washington managed to sustain the beautiful music of values at just high enough of a pitch to remember, or at least to continue hoping, that U.S. power could never be completely separated from timeless virtues. Until now, that is.

It is far too early to know exactly how U.S. President Donald Trump’s putative peace overture to Russian President Vladimir Putin will pan out or even what the terms of any American offer to Ukraine will be in support of. Waves of shock and disbelief have already washed over both sides of the Atlantic at the United States casting its vote at the United Nations General Assembly alongside countries like North Korea and Belarus against a resolution that would have merely stated the obvious: naming Russia as the aggressor in its war with Ukraine. Even Beijing and Tehran refrained from supporting Moscow.

In many ways, however, I find this less shocking than Trump’s language and demands, reflected in early drafts of negotiating positions exchanged with Kyiv. The United States was demanding not only to be reimbursed for its military support for Ukrainian sovereignty, but it was also seeking the equivalent of scalping fees to profit from it. Yes, Washington, pushing a novel mercenary form of mercantilism, was asking for a 100 percent markup or more for its assistance to a country that had been invaded and is facing a clear existential threat.

With French President Emmanuel Macron at his side this week, Trump’s head bobbed as he droned on about himself boastfully. “I do deals. That’s what I do. I’m a deal guy,” he said. What I would like to know is where are all the critics of China in Africa now? Has Beijing ever proposed anything so crass and one-sided or bereft of any consideration of virtue?

I don’t write a paragraph like that lightly, and it is certainly not to flatter China. These words were written in a kind of anticipatory mourning for the country that I was born and grew up in, the United States that I have tried to believe in even at its worst—something that I, as an African American, believe I have intimate direct knowledge of.

Yes, it is shocking to see a second term Trump unbound from the need for reelection, freed from criminal liability by the Supreme Court, and broadly enabled by supine Republican majorities in both houses of Congress hastily lay waste to a postwar alliance system in favor of what he seems to prefer: a concert of strongmen. But what shocks me more, what jolts me to the core, is the apparent abandonment of any pretense of higher ethic or honor in association with power and profit.

In the scheme of things, my own sense of loss, though, is a minor consideration. If this is what America First is going to mean, then this will increasingly come to mean America alone. The early signs of this are already proliferating, despite the studious efforts of Macron, and Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba before him, to appear to get along with Trump and to agree in public as much as they could without compromising themselves or their nations’ interests.

In his first major statement after his party placed first in Germany’s recent election, Friedrich Merz, who has openly mused about whether the United States would long remain a democracy, said, “My top priority, for me, will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that we can gradually achieve real independence from the U.S.A. I would never have thought that I’d be saying something like this on TV, but after last week’s comments from Donald Trump, it’s clear that this administration is largely indifferent to Europe’s fate, or at least to this part of it.”

More recently, the Trump administration has reportedly begun discussing eliminating Canada from the exclusive Five Eyes intelligence consortium that links the United States with the country, as well as the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.  A United States without principles is less indispensable than before, though. The question to ask today is: In a world where the United States threatens Canada and Greenland with annexation, how long will it be before allied countries like these even wish to share intelligence with Washington?

Similar questions will soon arise all over Europe, which the United States, notably beginning under the previous Trump administration, has assiduously pressured to avoid sharing militarily sensitive technologies with China. In a world of increasingly narrow calculations of national self-interest, how long will it make sense for Europe to forego lucrative sales to such a large market? One of the first places to look for an answer will be the Netherlands, whose unrivaled lithography machines are used to etch the most advanced semiconductors. It has deferred to the United States at a cost to itself by withholding this cutting-edge equipment from what could be the world’s largest market.

Thus far, I have written mostly of the interests of the rich and powerful countries of the North Atlantic, but Trump’s rash changes of course go much further. How else to understand the overnight demolition of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the apparent abandonment of U.S. commitments to global development that goes with that? Day by day, power is being severed more and more deeply from any sense of duty or responsibility toward others that goes with privilege.

What the political and institutional forces that are empowering Trump seem insufficiently alert to is that the international credit and goodwill that took the United States decades to amass can be wiped out in a matter of months, perhaps never to be reconstituted. The Biden administration’s four years may come to be seen as a brief parenthesis where Washington tried to reassure its partners and the world that it still stood behind its friendships and clung, however imperfectly, to its proclaimed values—and then came the resumption of a kind of self-indulgent and destructive nihilism.

Despite Trump’s constant hints at a desire to reign as a king or to perpetuate himself in office beyond the end of his second term, the odds remain that this aspect of the U.S. Constitution will hold, and he will depart the scene. In the meantime, Putin and perhaps Chinese President Xi Jinping will indulge and flatter Trump, all in the knowledge that he is doing their work for them and setting the stage for a greatly diminished America in the future.