Donald Trump won enough votes in the Electoral College to become president. His voters -- in a blind fury -- made him the most powerful man in the world. Now Trump -- also in a blind fury -- is destroying his country's democracy and the Western Alliance. Jonathan Manthorpe writes:
Donald Trump’s apparent admission that he shared secret information with visiting senior Russian officials has intensified questions both at home and abroad about his fitness to govern.
This latest scandal will add to the unease about Trump already evident among the United States’ 27 allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ahead of their first face-to-face summit with the president next week.
Far from making America great again, he is empowering the Chinese:
China’s Communist Party leaders are masters of taking advantage of other country’s follies, or lapses of attention. Trump’s dumping of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership — which was always as much a security alliance to constrain Beijing’s ambitions as it was a trade deal — created a vacuum that Xi is happy to fill.
The U.S. president’s empty bluster over North Korea’s nuclear missile program and his evident lack of interest in confronting Beijing’s de facto occupation of the South China Sea have convinced many Asia leaders that Washington is no longer a reliable friend or patron.
And in Europe support for the United States is dwindling. Sharing intelligence information with Russia will not improve relations there:
Washington’s allies will be alarmed, to put it mildly, that their secrets are not safe with this blustering loudmouth. Since the end of the Second World War, the so-called ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence-sharing agreement between the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand has been the reinforced steel at the core of the Western Alliance.
If the U.S. president cannot be trusted with friends’ secrets, then no one is safe.
And that's just the point. As long as Donald Trump is president, no one is safe.
Image: ipolitics
