Is America alienating its allies?
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Does "America First" rhetoric weaken America's position as a global leader? Or does it help the United States to scale back past policies that have been criticized as 'overbearing' in the past?
Political Junkie Ken Rudin said the current administration views the role of diplomacy differently than American administrations have in the past.
"Until Donald Trump, every administration did believe in diplomacy," Rudin said, "Forget about whether their policies were unpopular, they never went out of their way to antagonize enemies."
Michael Wahid Hanna is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. He said the current disruption in the way the U.S. is conducting its foreign relations could cause problems.
"It matters what happens elsewhere. We don't do foreign policy and diplomacy as a charity. We do these things because they are good for the United States," Hanna said. "One of the big problems with the way [President] Trump approaches the international stage and many of his supporters do as well, is they view this in zero-sum terms where the United States wins and other people lose and that's not the way the world economy works and it's not the way we as Americans have thought about our place in the world for many decades. And, on the whole, that has benefited the United States."
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