As it’s been noted by The New York Times, different are taking the new US President differently. There was dismay in Britain, applause in Russia and silence in Japan when Trump was inaugurated. French populists found hope, Mexican leaders expressed concern and Germany’s vice chancellor offered an allusion to his country’s dark past.
It’s been stated that in his first speech as president of the United States, Donald J. Trump showed the world he could be as divisive abroad as he is at home. His vow to place America first — and his threat to upend longstanding alliances, trade deals and many other tenets of the liberal democratic order the nation has chosen for nearly 70 years — was received across the globe with fear, silence and glee, sometimes within the same country.
According to the French media source Agora Vox, those who do not want to admit that a drastic change was long overdue, fight against the change and continue to hide problems instead of trying to solve them. Such people will remain on the sidelines of history, or, if they are politicians, they force their steps to drag behind those who accepted the path of change.
In this regard, the interest of the people of the world towards the events that are happening in the United States is unprecedented, and there’s an ever mounting number of articles that are provide reasoning as to what we can expect from the 45th US President. It’s been noted that a particular number of countries that are dreading Donald Trump the most, among them one can find: Mexico, Japan, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Germany, and France.
It is still extremely difficult to make any predictions regarding the foreign policy that Washington will be pursuing. The United States is not the only state to find itself in a completely new situation, since there’s a long list of states that have put all of their chips in the political casino of Barack Obama, and now they are completely broke. So now these players can try to grind their way back to the top of international politics by accepting the new rules of the game, or move aside and watch other players from the shades.
As noted by the British Telegraph, Trump’s victory led the West as we know it to its demise. The European Union is on its last legs, as Brussels is preparing to kiss it high status goodbye, with little to no to expectations being connected with the EU and NATO. Europe will have to face the disastrous migrant crisis on its own, along with a number of serious economic and financial challenges. These difficulties have only accelerated the fall of the European Unit as a whole. And we shouldn’t forget that the war in Ukraine is still carried on and the EU bears responsibility for this, no matter how much it would like to frame Russia.
Under these conditions, major European political figures, for the most part, have been trying to hide the problems they created instead of solving them, which will inevitably results in the complete degradation of the EU, along with the fall of all of the Obama era politicians. No wonder that Donald Trump in his recent interviews with the German and British media sources have shown his awareness about the sorry state that the EU has found itself in. There’s nothing unusual about local political players trying to adjust to the changing political game, but they don’t have much time to do that if they want to have a chance of staying relevant.
Grete Mautner is an indepenent researcher and journalist from Germany, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
