America is pulling back from the world
=America is pulling back from the world
By Peter Apps March 29, 2016
For many Americans, the attacks on Brussels must have felt like more of the same. Once again, militants struck, the systems designed to stop them failed and all the blood and treasure of 15 years of “war on terror” appears more wasted than ever.
From an outsider’s perspective, though, the way in which the United States reacts appears to be subtly shifting. Almost without noticing, America is beginning to dramatically rethink the way in which it interacts with the world.
As with so many things, Donald Trump is the clearest manifestation of the trend. For all his talk of “making America great again,” the foreign policy he has begun to outline — particularly in interviews with senior editors at the New York Times and the Washington Post — smacks of outright isolationism.
Trump himself, it should be said, specifically rejects that label.
Getting stuck on the semantics misses the point. On a much, much broader level — from the country at large to the corridors of the White House — feelings are also changing. Frustrations, regrets and a rethinking of how much America can or should do drips from almost every line of the must-read interview with President Barack Obama published earlier this month in the Atlantic.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, several current and former U.S. officials have told me they no longer really feel they know what their country was trying to achieve in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere. Such soul-searching is rarely done publicly, but it appears widespread.
cont'd
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2016/03/29/trump-or-not-america-is-pulling-back-from-the-world/
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