'Horrified': Around The World, American Allies Are Stunned.

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'Horrified': Around the world, American allies are stunned.

"The U.S. has stood for many ideals we dearly share," said analyst Ziya Meral. "Now we are witnessing an America spiraling down into chaos."

America's allies and adversaries can't believe what they are witnessing unfold in Washington, D.C.
a police officer punching an Australian cameraman and using his shield to strike him in the chest, while another officer uses a baton to hit the correspondent as the news crew attempts to flee.

Violent, chaotic scenes like this have been seen elsewhere around the globe —
but other countries are reacting with horror as they are not used to seeing them in the heart of the U.S. capital.

After days of nationwide demonstrations over the death of George Floyd, police were using tear gas, projectiles and mounted officers to forcefully scatter peaceful protesters near the White House, all so President Donald Trump could walk to St. John's Episcopal Church for a photo opportunity.

"They don't care; they are being indiscriminate," Amelia Brace, the correspondent with Australia's Channel 7, said breathlessly after running from the scene. "They chased us down that street. They were firing these rubber bullets at everyone. There's tear gas now and we're surrounded."

The sight of officers repeatedly striking a foreign news crew has left many international observers with the sense that this is new, unwelcome territory for the land of the free.

There has been rhetoric and symbolism many regard as authoritarian, with Trump telling police to "dominate the streets"
and a Black Hawk military helicopter was dispatched to fly low over the demonstrators in Washington, D.C.

"With all of its shortcomings, the U.S. has stood for many ideals we dearly share," said Ziya Meral, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank.

___''Now we are witnessing an America spiraling down into chaos, poor governance, social friction, poor policing and poor leadership."
"The city on a hill no longer inspires or shines,"

Ragıp Soylu, a correspondent with the Middle East Eye news outlet, tweeted wryly,
__"Congrats, America! You have joined the Middle East nations where you can no longer peacefully protest outside the presidential palaces."

Police officers wearing riot gear push back demonstrators shooting tear gas next to St. John's Episcopal Church outside of the White HousePolice officers wearing riot gear push back demonstrators next to St. John's Episcopal Church outside of the White House on Monday.Jose Luis Magana / AFP -

On Tuesday, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said in a radio interview that the country has been reviewing the travel advisory for both Washington and Chicago.

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6-3-2020

European Allies Have Reportedly Stopped Looking To Trump For Leadership:
“I Don’t Want To Be In The Room With The Guy;” Have Now Turned “Their Backs On Him”
At this rate, we won't have any allies if Trump has his way.

Donald Trump’s presidency is a complete disaster, not just because of domestic unrest and a deadly pandemic that has claimed the lives of more than 108,000 Americans, but also because our longtime allies want nothing to do with him.

As long as Trump remains in office, our relationship with our allies will become more strained. And that strain was evident when German Chancellor Angela Merkel declined Trump’s invitation to the G7 summit he plans to host at the White House later this year.

Relations abroad have only worsened because of the mass protests across the United States and Trump’s brutality against protesters.

In fact, Merkel believes Trump is only angling for a photo-op with G-7 leaders so he can claim that they endorse him. She’s so repulsed by Trump that she doesn’t want to even be in the same room with him.

“The G7 is a Trump show, with no negotiation,” German analyst Ulrich Speck explained.
“The old G7 is gone. For Trump it’s not multilateral in spirit but unilateral, just a meeting to serve one purpose — his re-election.”

“She knows that any event, Trump will spin as if the others are implicitly endorsing him, and that’s the last thing she wants to do,” Brookings Institution senior fellow William Drozdiak added, going on to quote Merkel saying she doesn’t “want to be in the room” with him.

Even France is getting tired of Trump’s bullsh*t despite French President Emmanuel Macron’s effort to work with him.

“In France toward Trump is a mix of sadness and anger,” French Institute of International Relations director Thomas Gomart said.
“Our main ally refused to exercise leadership during the corona crisis and is every day more provocative toward its allies and is creating divisions that are very actively exploited by China.”

He’s not wrong. China recently mocked Trump for hiding from protesters in a bunker even though he urged Chinese officials to meet and make a deal with protesters in Hong Kong. China has also noted Trump’s hypocrisy on human rights, making it impossible for the United States to claim the moral high ground on that issue when Trump is ordering the police and military to tear-gas American citizens, a potential violation of international law restricting the use of chemical weapons against civilian populations.

Despite the coronavirus originating in China, Trump failed to act to prevent the pandemic from becoming a full-blown crisis here, resulting in our nation having the most cases and the most deaths while endangering the world with a potential second wave.

The British and Canadians also raised a rare vocal protest against Trump for inviting Russian President Vladimir Putin to the summit even though Russia had been kicked out of what used to be the G8 for invading and annexing the Crimea from Ukraine during the Obama administration.

Former Obama adviser Julianne Smith explained just how bad these souring relations are for Trump and pointed out that he isn’t getting along with authoritarian leaders he admires either.

“It all shows just how out of touch Trump is with allies,” Smith said.
“This is a man isolated at home and abroad.
He is trying to find friends in other places, knowing that relations with traditional allies are bad.
But there are serious strains even with the authoritarians he admires, like Xi Jinping and even Putin.”

“[Trump] continues to believe allies can be abused and mistreated and that he can order them around and at the same time count on them,” she continued.
“He doesn’t understand that while the U.S. is powerful, it doesn’t always call the shots. [N]ow there is a sense of America’s weaknesses being exposed, and a feeling that the emperor has no clothes.”

Trump’s failures have not only weakened us domestically, he has put our national security in serious jeopardy.
The United States would not be as powerful on the international stage without our friends backing us up.
The idea that we can go it alone because of our military is a fallacy that has been proven utterly and embarrassingly wrong.

The only way to fix this mess is for Americans to vote in November. Because we may not have any allies left in four years if Trump wins another term.

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6-24-2020

A uniquely humiliating moment’:
London-based journalist explains why allies gone from ‘admiring’ the US to ‘feeling pity for America’

Contrary to the claims of the United States’ right-wing media, most residents of Europe, Australia, Japan, Canada or New Zealand are not longing to move to the U.S. — they have heard all the horror stories about medical bankruptcies, mass incarceration and a lack of upward mobility.

The rest of the developed world has continued to hope that the U.S. will overcome its problems, but in 2020 — with the U.S. being rocked by the coronavirus pandemic and huge protests in response to the killing of George Floyd on May 25 — long-time allies are worried.
And London-based journalist Tom McTague discusses their worries in an article published by The Atlantic on June 24.

In the past, McTague explains, Europeans felt everything from admiration to envy to resentment where the U.S. was concerned.
But in 2020, many of them are feeling “pity.”

“It is hard to escape the feeling that this is a uniquely humiliating moment for America,” McTague writes.
“As citizens of the world the United States created, we are accustomed to listening to those who loathe America, admire America and fear America — sometimes all at the same time.

But feeling pity for America? That one is new, even if the schadenfreude is painfully myopic.
If it’s the aesthetic that matters, the U.S. today simply doesn’t look like the country that the rest of us should aspire to, envy or replicate.”

Europeans, McTague notes, have been horrified by Floyd’s killing and Trump’s response to it.
And in order to gauge “how this moment in U.S. history is being seen in the rest of the world,”
the journalist says,
he “spoke to more than a dozen senior diplomats, government officials, politicians and academics from five major European countries — including advisers to two of its most powerful leaders — as well as to the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.”

“From these conversations, most of which took place on the condition of anonymity to speak freely, a picture emerged in which America’s closest allies are looking on with a kind of stunned incomprehension,
unsure of what will happen, what it means, and what they should do —
largely bound together with angst and a shared sense, as one influential adviser told me, that America and the West are approaching something of a fin de siècle,” McTague writes.

In Europe, according to McTague, Trump represents “a caricature of” the U.S. that is “brash, grasping, rich and in charge.”

“In the president and first lady — the burning cities and race divides, the police brutality and poverty —
an image of America is beamed out, confirming the prejudices that much of the world already have while also serving as a useful device to obscure its own injustices, hypocrisies, racism, and ugliness,” according to McTague.

Bruno Maceas, Portugal’s former minister to the EU, told McTague,
“The collapse of the American Empire is a given.
We are just trying to figure out what will replace it.” But Blair is much more optimistic about the United States’ future.

“I think it’s fair to say a lot of political leaders in Europe are dismayed by what they see as the isolationism growing in America and the seeming indifference to alliances,” Blair told McTague.

“But I think there will come a time when America decides in its own interest to reengage.
So, I’m optimistic that America will, in the end, understand that this is not about relegating your self-interest behind the common interest. It’s an understanding that by acting collectively in alliance with others, you promote your own interests.”

McTague stresses that the events of 2020 have made Trump’s reputation even worse in Europe.

“The street protests, violence and racism of the past few weeks have erupted at the very moment the country’s institutional failings have been exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, reinforced by its apparently unbridgeable partisan divide —
which is now even infecting parts of the American machine that have so far been untouched:
its federal agencies, diplomatic service, and the long-standing norms underpinning the relationship between civilians and the military,” McTague explains.
- “All of this is happening in the final year of the first term of the most chaotic, loathed and disrespected president in modern American history.”

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