I try again, louder this time. “After four long years, America is finally back! We’re ready to resume our international obligations!”
The members of the United Nations Human Rights Council are looking in every direction—except at me. I feel a tug on the sleeve of my suit jacket. I glance down and note that the representative from Morocco is passing me a slip of paper.
All I see are numbers. “This is… a bill?”
She nods. “Your international obligations.”
“Fifty-two billion dollars?”
“Four years of non-payment of U.N. contributions. We rounded it up.”
“That’s a lot of—“
She interrupts. “It doesn’t begin to cover the costs of the damage you did. We’re still preparing that bill.”
Read the room is what they tell you in Diplomacy 101. This room at U.N. headquarters, however, needs no reading. It’s an open book—a mix of indifference, amusement, and outright hostility.
The chair of the committee, a gentleman from South Korea, clears his throat and motions for me to sit down. Then the meeting continues. And so does my humiliation.
Oh, in case you didn’t realize, I’m the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. I was initially thrilled to take the job. For a former career foreign service officer, an appointment like this is the top of the ladder. Before the second set of Trump years began, I quietly worked my way up from the consular service and the ambassadorship in Malawi to deputy undersecretary of state for Latin American affairs. Even after Trump arrived back in the White House, I remained a firm believer in the “international community,” though I’d be hard-pressed to tell you anymore exactly what that is.
“How can we know that the next administration won’t pick up where Trump left off and go on a fresh rampage?”
Long ago, I pledged my allegiance to liberal internationalism, which, in my country nowadays, is like admitting to being a Shaker or an alchemist. Call me quaint, but I’ve always believed that the world needs to abide by certain rules and regulations. We all accept traffic laws, right? We assert our individuality by choosing the cars we want, but we also agree to stop at red lights, stay in our lanes, and maintain certain speeds. Violators are penalized.
The international community has a similar set of guidelines. Countries can assert their sovereignty by flying a particular flag, issuing colorful stamps, and singing boastful national anthems. But we also agree—most of us, at least—to certain rules of the road: Don’t invade other countries; don’t force children into your army; don’t kill off or, for that matter, deport a significant percentage of your own population. And yet, despite the international penalties, all too many countries still insist on being scofflaws.
To be ambassador to the U.N. is like being appointed to the rulemaking committee. Who wouldn’t be excited?
Well, me, to be exact, after my first day on the job.
Look, I knew it was going to be tough. The last four years, during which Trump 2.0 dumped on anything with the word “international” attached to it, were an affront to me and so many others. Thanks to Elon Musk’s infamous DOGE, I didn’t have to participate in that charade of diplomacy. Like many of my colleagues, I was purged in those days of “government efficiency” and forced into early retirement. From my perch at a D.C. think tank, I then watched Trump’s grim assaults and the backlash that ensued with a mixture of horror and schadenfreude.
Over the last four years, we liberal internationalists planned and plotted how we would make things right when we finally returned to power.
How naïve we were!
Trump Abroad
At first, Trump was merely predictable. Returning to the Oval Office in January 2025, he sang from a familiar hymnal by withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, the U.N. Human Rights Council, the World Health Organization, and UNESCO. He stopped paying U.N. dues, which pushed many agencies to the edge and put a virtual stop to peacekeeping globally. He cozied up to strong men like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman. He made bold promises—end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours—that (no surprise!) he didn’t keep.
Then he started to innovate.
He imposed tariffs on everyone and anyone—allies like Canada, adversaries like China, incredibly impoverished countries like Lesotho, and uninhabited places like the Heard and McDonald Islands. He threatened to tear apart the global economy so that he could protect a few industries in the United States. Without an industrial policy to boost promising sectors of the U.S. economy, however, his tariff war ended up badly hurting American consumers and producers alike.
Of course, our new administration has just removed almost all of those tariffs, but it was way too late. “Honey,” the Canadian ambassador told me, “we diversified. We found new trading partners. And why would we want to go back to crazy now?”
The attacks on foreign aid, meanwhile, were unprecedented. (Boy, was that word overused during the Trump era!) In the administration’s first four months alone, more than 97,000 adults and 200,000 children died because of the funding freeze on foreign assistance and the dismantlement of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Over the course of the next four years, more than 100 people died every hour, thanks to Trump’s and Musk’s disastrous cuts to USAID and other places. By the end of the Trump administration, that amounted to the deaths of 3 to 4 million people globally.
Those numbers are, of course, in the genocidal range. In effect, it was no different than the Nazi policy of culling the German population of the sick, the old, and the disabled—but this time it was applied to the global population. I don’t know what bill the U.N. will present to me for the loss of all that life, not to mention all the environmental damage to the planet, but however large, it will end up being of only symbolic value. We just don’t have the money—or, frankly, the desire—to pay such reparations.
What can’t be assessed monetarily is the demonstration effect of Trump’s flouting of the international rules of the road. Other strong-armed leaders—in Turkey, India, Argentina—followed Trump’s playbook, of course, just as he had taken cues from Hungary and Russia. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine surely inspired Trump to grab Greenland in 2027. And that illegal seizure of the world’s largest island—which our administration is determined to reverse—no doubt encouraged Israel to annex the West Bank and Gaza, Russia to grab Moldova, and China to attempt its takeover of Taiwan.
Trump’s attacks on international institutions effectively unraveled the norms of global cooperation. Everyone is now scrambling to mine the seabed for its minerals. Almost everyone ignores arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court. The big powers do what they want, and the smaller powers do what they can.
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said that “there’s no such thing as ‘society.’” Trump one-upped her by denying that there even was an “international community.” Through his actions, and in collaboration with autocrats the world over, he nearly denied it out of existence.
Trump at Home
What the Trump administration did at home was, of course, no better than what it did abroad—especially if you weren’t a rich white man. For instance, what started out as a campaign against undocumented immigrants turned into a full-blown attack on foreigners. Everyone without full citizenship was presumed guilty, rounded up indiscriminately, and deported to conflict zones or Salvadoran prisons, stopped at the border for “smuggling” or similar nonsense, or even penalized for speaking out against the murder of Palestinians. Then the administration began blocking foreign students from coming here to study, starting with the Chinese.
“Harvard, Yale, Stanford: these institutions used to be our Mecca,” the South Korean ambassador told me recently. “Now we’re telling our students to go anywhere but the United States.”
“But we’re back,” I repeated weakly.
“For how long?” he asked. “How can we know that the next administration won’t pick up where Trump left off and go on a fresh rampage?”
We’ve just inherited a government that resembles a city destroyed by a retreating army.
And in truth, many Americans are asking the same question after the cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and veterans’ benefits. They now look at the federal government warily, like a victim of three-card monte who’s allowed to win the first couple times only to be taken to the cleaners.
Of course, we’ve resurrected the Biden-era industrial policies that favored green tech. But MAGA lives on. Campaigns to block those policies are still being waged in courts that are now all too keen to punish federal “overreach.” In incorrigibly red states, even ones where the 2028 presidential election was unexpectedly close, governors are determined to flip off the feds. As I write this, “stop the steal” rallies over election 2028 are edging ever closer to violence, survivalists are grabbing their go bags, and there’s increasing talk in some communities of massive noncompliance with the federal government.
Red-blue animosity certainly preceded Donald Trump. These days, however, we seem to be on the brink of an all-out color war in this country. According to the MAGA crew, you’re either with them or against them (and the other side pretty much believes the same thing). The color purple? It’s been purged from our vocabulary.
The Whittling Away of Government
We’ve just inherited a government that resembles a city destroyed by a retreating army. It’s not just the ruined institutions—the gutted State Department, the defunct Education Department, or the eviscerated system of federal funding for scientific research and development. It’s the nationwide cynicism regarding government. Even before Trump, “politics” was increasingly becoming a dirty word. Now, it’s a toxic waste dump.
Our new administration has, of course, promised to build back better. But thanks to Trump, the American public no longer seems to believe that government should have a place in their lives or in the life of the country. Voters no longer have an appetite for foreign aid. They don’t support democracy struggles overseas, peacekeeping missions, or cooperation to address climate change. At home, the United States desperately needs immigrants to pick crops, construct buildings, and staff restaurants, among so many other things, but attitudes toward the undocumented have hardened.
Americans have become dangerously accustomed to the privatization of government. NGOs and wealthy foundations have taken over the work of USAID. Corporations are running the Postal Service and Amtrak. Financial services institutions have turned Social Security into a casino. The federal government, once dismissed as a fussy nanny, is now viewed as guilty of breaking and entering.
Sure, voters are fed up with corruption. That’s the main reason they ejected Trump and his party from office. But having come to associate government with corruption for so many years, many Americans now want as little of it as possible.
Honey vs. Vinegar
The precipitous decline in trust can be seen at the international level as well.
“We’ve decided to put you in the time-out corner,” the Malaysian ambassador tells me. “Until America can prove that it can behave itself.”
“But look at what we did eight years ago,” I protest, “when the Biden administration made nice with the U.N.!”
“And then came Trump 2.0, which was a lot worse than the first version.”
“We can’t afford to sit in a corner for four years. The world can’t afford it.”
“Consider yourself lucky. Some countries want to treat you like North Korea. Sanction you, blockade you, quarantine you to contain the virus of MAGA.”
“But you can’t do that to a…a… “
“A superpower? In all your talk about returning to the international stage, you still haven’t apologized.”
“Trump wasn’t one of us,” I point out. “We’re the good guys.”
“The Germans apologized for what the Nazis did.”
She had a point, though I couldn’t concede it. Another lesson from Diplomacy 101: America means never having to say you’re sorry.
The big powers do what they want, and the smaller powers do what they can.
We’ve now rejoined all the U.N. institutions. We’ll pay our arrears (well, a solid portion of them anyway). We’re prepared to take Putin into custody for the International Criminal Court if he ever foolishly sets foot on U.S. soil. But no, we don’t have the political will to actually join the ICC. There are limits to what the American people are willing to do.
“You have to help me here,” I tell the Malaysian diplomat. “If you and your middle-income countries don’t let us out of the corner and show us some respect, the MAGA crowd will capitalize on your public shaming. They’ll win the next election and you’ll get what you most fear. The return of MAGA for a third time will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“We’ll take our chances.”
I smile bewitchingly. “We could lower the price of our oil and gas exports.”
“Solar and wind are cheaper,” she points out.
Time to switch tactics. “Aren’t you the smallest bit worried about China? Might you not need a little help defending your territorial claims in the South China Sea?”
“You’re smiling,” she says. “But this is really a threat.”
“I’m offering to help.”
“No, you’re threatening not to help. Just as the last administration didn’t help Taiwan.”
My smile widens to show my teeth. A final take-away from Diplomacy 101: What you can’t achieve with honey, you can usually accomplish with an aircraft carrier.
“What did I tell you?” I remind her, this time with more grim determination than enthusiasm. “America is back.”
