Last week was a disaster for the United States. President Donald Trump embraced Russia as a peace partner without demanding that it pay any price for its illegal invasion of Ukraine. And then, in a statement that turned morality upside down, the president blamed Ukraine for causing the war.
The United States has betrayed allies before, but I cannot think of a time when we turned against a democratic ally to side with a dictator pursuing a war of unprovoked aggression.
I cannot think of a time when we started running a protection racket — a pay-to-play global extortion theme designed to force other countries to pay tribute or risk invasion by stronger powers.
Moreover, President Trump has tried to justify his stance with bald-faced lies about a country and its leader fighting for its continued existence. He is sending a message loud and clear to anyone listening — the United States is not a reliable partner.
Certainly not in war. He demands that Ukraine give over rare-earth mineral rights for past support without any promise of continued military support. He has signed on to Putin’s version of how the war began. The United States is not a country with which any sane nation at war would want to share a foxhole.
We are not reliable in deterrence either. Our threats to abandon our NATO allies of 80 years are proof of that, as is our abandonment of a security partner three years into a shooting war.
Nor are we a reliable partner in commerce. President Trump is slapping tariffs on Canada and Mexico, thereby breaking the terms of the USMCA treaty he negotiated and signed in his first term.
We are no longer a reliable neighbor either. Referring to Canada as a potential 51st state and threatening to take over Greenland, Panama and Gaza by force if necessary.
So what happens when America betrays its friends, turns alliances into shakedowns, fetes the dictator in Moscow, and justifies this with outright, unashamed lies?
No one knows whether Ukraine will survive. Will China take our abandonment of the rest of the world as a green light to take Taiwan? Will Putin take advantage of his useful idiot in the White House to take another European nation by force?
For those few Americans who have some sense of history and remember Munich and Yalta, will the U.S. leadership in the agreements at Riyadh make it become the current label of the principle that great powers keep what they can grab and smaller countries suffer the consequences? We should remember that Riyadh is the capital of an absolute monarchy that dismembers dissidents.
The Riyadh Principle is that America repents the values it has promoted in foreign policy since the end of World War II. It disavows the democratic values we have supported and the whole claim to “American exceptionalism.”
Andrew T. Morehead is a retired foreign service officer and Eaton resident.
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