Donald Trump gave his first State of the Union speech to Congress on Tuesday. His address was not just widely watched on television, but also discussed extensively on social media, and it has become the most-tweeted-about State of the Union address by any US president, highlighting Trump’s current global prominence.
While the speech was carefully crafted to emphasize some bipartisan themes, it did not lack controversy, with Democrats focusing on its divisiveness. On the domestic front, the president majored on the economy by touting his recent tax cut package success; the 2.4 million jobs created since he moved into the White House; and the fact that the stock market has soared in the last 12 months. He also outlined his key domestic priorities for 2018, including rebuilding US infrastructure such as roads and bridges.
Yet it was not just US audiences who watched Trump’s address and many international viewers will, unfortunately, have been underwhelmed by what they heard. Trump’s key international messages — including his decision to keep open the controversial Guantanamo Bay facility; doubling down on building the so-called wall on the Mexican border; and ending US involvement in key trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, while also threatening the North American Free Trade Agreement — will not be well received across much of the world.
There will also be some disappointment internationally that Trump failed to decisively tackle the issue of the so-called Dreamers: The approximately 700,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. Their status was thrown into uncertainty last September, when Trump announced plans to end an Obama-era program that enabled them to legally live and work in the US.
Moreover, the president’s implicit threat to “help ensure American foreign-assistance dollars always serve American interests, and only go to friends of America” could potentially impact a wide range of countries, including in the Middle East. While this may well resonate with many US citizens tired of Washington’s aid going to states that don’t always support key US government policies, it would remove US leverage with states vital to the nation’s foreign policy needs.
The speech is so significant, potentially, because it indicates the direction of travel of his first year of office will continue. These last 12 months have seen key US decisions, from withdrawing from the Paris global climate treaty to questioning the future of key alliances like NATO, which have undermined US soft power with many allies. While the president is unrepentant, he may badly need this eroded goodwill in 2018, given the range of international challenges he faces, including the North Korea nuclear stand-off, which he cited in his speech as perhaps the biggest national security challenge on the horizon.
At a time when Washington is facing a series of complex foreign policy challenges, the president's team would benefit from more engaged, supportive and stronger allies.
Andrew Hammond
While the idea of soft power — the ability to achieve goals by attracting and co-opting others, rather than by coercing — is sometimes misunderstood and criticized, history underlines the key role it has played as a means of obtaining outcomes that policymakers have sought. For example, Washington used soft power resources skillfully after the Second World War to encourage other countries into a system of alliances, such as NATO, the IMF, World Bank, and the UN.
Yet Trump, who had more than 130 meetings and telephone calls with foreign leaders in 2017, seems set on a different course, and his apparent disdain for international treaties and organizations that don’t bend to his will is already provoking a backlash. A few weeks ago, for instance, Gallup found that the image of the US leadership in the last year is significantly weaker across 134 countries worldwide, with median approval of the US leadership at a new low of 30 percent.
This finding adds to the Pew Global poll of last summer, which found that about three-quarters of the thousands surveyed internationally had little or no confidence in Trump’s global leadership and policies. Indeed, the Pew poll showed Trump already enjoys less support than George W. Bush did at the height of his own foreign policy travails, amid the controversy of the Iraq invasion in 2003.
At a time when Washington is facing a series of complex foreign policy challenges, the Trump team would benefit from more engaged, stronger, and supportive allies. And this is true in issues ranging from helping to find a resolution to the nuclear stand-off in Korea; moving forward the president’s promised peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians; combating the continuing threat from international terrorism; and tackling the range of threats posed by sizeable, revisionist powers such as Russia.
Yet a key problem Trump faces is that, while he enjoys significant popularity in a small number of countries, including Israel, many of his policy ideas and occasionally wild rhetoric threaten a sustained, deep spike in anti-US sentiment. The tragedy is that this could undercut much of the work that has been undertaken in the last decade to enhance US soft power, potentially creating a disabling (rather than enabling) environment for covert and overt cooperation and information sharing with US officials.
Coming into office in 2009, Barack Obama confronted a situation in which anti-US sentiment was at about its highest levels since at least the Vietnam War. The key factor driving this was the international unpopularity of the Bush administration’s policies, not least the war in Iraq.
While Obama made much progress with his global public diplomacy efforts, the scale of the challenge he faced meant that he left much to do for his successor. For instance, despite the early promise of his Cairo speech in his first term, in which he sought to reset US relations with Muslim-majority countries, there remain deep pockets of high anti-Americanism in several key states like Pakistan.
It is in this context that Trump’s speech and first year of foreign policy is being judged by many internationally, with a large body of the global populace still skeptical and nervous about what his presidency may bring. While the president has had a tough 2017 in terms of international opinion, it could get worse in 2018 if he continues on the current course.
Andrew Hammond is an Associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.