Bloomberg Businessweek (July 2025)

Год выпуска: July, 2025

Автор: Bloomberg Businessweek

Жанр: Бизнес

Издательство: «Bloomberg Businessweek»

Формат: PDF (журнал на английском языке)

Качество: OCR

Количество страниц: 100

The End of American Moral Leadership

Over the past century, US foreign policy has been guided by the notion that as a country we’d do well by doing good—that there are dividends, both moral and material, from helping our friends and neighbors. Now the administration of President Donald Trump is unraveling that philosophy with startling speed. How other branches of the American government, countries and multinational companies respond in the months and years ahead will be the defining question of at least the rest of our lives.

America’s practitioners of altruistic statecraft were famous for their high-minded ideals and soaring rhetoric. “I need not tell you gentlemen that the world situation is very serious,” said Secretary of State George Marshall in 1947 to students at Harvard University, in a speech still replete with historical resonance. He was introducing the Marshall Plan, the program to rebuild the war-torn countries of Western Europe. “It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.”
Universally lauded by historians, the Marshall Plan (worth about $170 billion in today’s dollars) had ample precedent. Through a program called lend-lease, Franklin D. Roosevelt had supplied Great Britain with arms to fight Nazi Germany during the 1930s without asking for any payment, arguing that when your neighbor’s house is on fire, you ensure the fire won’t spread by giving them a garden hose without haggling over the price. Winston Churchill called it “the most unsordid act in the whole of recorded history.”

Of course, America has repeatedly fallen short of its own values. The war in Vietnam, backing tyrants in the Middle East and Latin America, the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib—the list is long and, to use Churchill’s word, sordid. But American presidents, regardless of party, generally embraced the conception of the US as an ethical superpower. That certainly was as true of Jimmy Carter, who put human rights at the center of his foreign policy, as it was of his successor, Ronald Reagan, who blended moral leadership with fierce anticommunist policies in backing such initiatives as Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America and humanitarian assistance to poor countries. “With the exception of some clear examples, such as Vietnam, the American public has believed that its leadership in the world is principled and worthwhile,” says Robert Keohane, a professor of international affairs at Princeton University. “And Trump has tried to overturn both of those premises.”

In doing so, Trump has drawn on another set of strong American traditions: isolationism, nativism and narrow self-interest. His forebears are Henry Ford in the 1920s, the radio demagogue Father Coughlin from the ’30s and Senator Joseph McCarthy from the ’50s, who all argued that security and prosperity at home were more important than any higher international resolve. “Under President Trump, the dollars of hardworking American taxpayers will always be spent wisely, and our power will always be wielded prudently and toward what is best for America,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in prepared remarks for his Senate confirmation hearings. Trump framed the philosophy more bluntly in a social media post last year, drawing a tidy contrast with FDR and Harry Truman’s munificence in Europe: “No more foreign aid giveaways. From now on, the U.S. only gives loans. If they don’t pay us back, they get nothing.”

The Trump administration wasted no time in implementing this uncompromising vision. It dismantled the US Agency for International Development, a spiritual successor of the Marshall Plan, and says it cut more than 80% of all grants to the developing world. It suspended portions of Pepfar, an effort that was nothing if not altruistic, introduced by President George W. Bush in 2003 to fight the spread of HIV around the world. Trump has withdrawn from international climate agreements and global health organizations, suspended contributions to the World Trade Organization and paused the enforcement of domestic corruption laws, saying they hurt American business and the resources are better used combating drug cartels and criminal organizations. “It’s been the rawest kind of isolationism,” says historian Jon Meacham. “There’s the sense that what this retreat is saying to the world is that you’re on your own.”

And the world has taken note. In an Ipsos poll conducted in 29 countries this spring, 46% of respondents said the US will have a positive impact on the world in the future, down sharply from 59% last fall. (In Canada, which Trump covets as the “51st state,” the 33-point decline over that same period was the largest drop in the survey’s history.) For the first time, respondents viewed China as a better influence; 49% said it would have a positive effect on world affairs, up 10 points.

If principled actions are a way to accumulate soft power—to get other countries to voluntarily support America’s interests— then the president has readily surrendered this leverage. “Trump is quite willing to throw away the power of attraction and the power of being admired,” Keohane says. “He doesn’t care about it. He wants to be admired personally for being strong and tough and dedicated. But he doesn’t care about admiration for American society spilling over into support for America’s policy or goals.” China, which in its dealings with the rest of the world has never prioritized human rights, freedom of the press or any notions of conscientious capitalism, appears to be the beneficiary.

Now it’s up to other institutions to either slow America’s moral retreat or fill the vacuum it’s left. Although the US Congress so far has been remarkably deferential to the president, American courts are showing mettle, blocking Trump’s executive orders to suspend health research grants, restoring visas to international students and protecting Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America from Trump’s spending cuts.
Other countries are stepping up too. While the US is dropping requirements that companies disclose their climate emissions, the European Union is setting new environmental standards, requiring companies to submit in-depth reports on their environmental impact (page 42). With Trump abandoning the fight against bribery and corruption, authorities in France, Switzerland and the UK in March announced an international task force, ensuring that multinationals don’t relax their enforcement programs. “Between Europe and the United States in the last 10 years, there’s been a huge improvement in using technology to really begin to hold more bad actors accountable,” says Gary Kalman, executive director of the US branch of Transparency International, a global organization that combats corruption. “Now there’s indication they’re saying, ‘Hey, wait a minute, we don’t actually think backtracking is going to be helpful for the world.’”

It was a simpler time in 1947, when Marshall righteously told the Harvard students: “Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.” The Trump administration is arguing that Marshall’s legacy, a peaceful global order largely composed of free democratic countries, ultimately hurt the interests of Americans. That’s the essence of the Trump Doctrine: Marshall’s long-ago dream is now obsolete.

Remarks

• With America in moral retreat, who will light the way?

In Context

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• Five Questions: Citadel’s Ken Griffin
• Trump tries to stoke a homegrown copper industry
• The secondary luxury market is thriving. So are fakes
• A Walk With: Rocket Mortgage’s Dan Gilbert

In View

• Why Trump’s coercion tactics might backfire
• Will MAGA math drastically reduce US debt?
• It’s round, cheesy—and a solid economic indicator

In Depth

• The failure of corporate climate pledges
• A snapshot of companies caught in their backslide
• Remaining steadfast, Europe leads a greener way
• Call it what you will, climate change is real
• What happened to Big Food’s big plans about methane?
• Microsoft’s Brian Marrs on carbon slashing
• Ones to Watch: 12 leaders still seeking real progress

After decades adrift, Gap aims for a comeback

The Shark Tank guy is out to fix health care

Cheap rooms? Free waffles? It’s Hampton Inn

Pursuits

• Top Shelf Special: Foraging for beer
• What CEOs drink when they’re not drinking
• Kanpai! American-made sake has its moment
• A good investment that tastes better than crypto
• Maker’s Mark distills its first Estate Whiskey
• Do shorts have legs?
• With exclusive train travel, it’s a far cry from all aboard
• Behind the curtain at Si Newhouse’s Condé Nast
• What to read, watch and listen to in July
• The surf is always up at these wave pools

Last Thing

• Riddle your way through this currency mystery

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