Xenia Wickett

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Mike Pompeo, as CIA director, testifies during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in February. Photo: Getty Images.

It should come as no surprise that Rex Tillerson was fired as secretary of the US State Department this week. While there were hopes, early on, that he might prove effective, he was neither trusted by President Trump nor liked by the foreign service. From a US perspective, his successor, Mike Pompeo, might well do better. However, he will likely be more uncomfortable for America’s allies, including the UK.

Tillerson’s exit adds to the growing list of departures from senior positions around Trump. As a recent Brookings study showed, around 43 per cent of White House and executive branch senior staff left the Trump administration in its first year; to compare, this is more than triple the rate during the Obama administration and double that of Reagan.…  Seguir leyendo »

Donald Trump meets Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago on 7 April. Photo: Getty Images.

Donald Trump’s first two months in office were focused principally on domestic policy, but over the past few weeks, international events have jumped to the top of the agenda. He met with Chinese President Xi Jinping at his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida, ordered a missile strike in response to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons against its own people in Syria, claimed to have directed an ‘armada’ towards North Korea and sent Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to Moscow.

In January, my co-authors and I examined all these issues in a Chatham House Report on America’s International Role Under Donald Trump, which concluded that, as the campaign bluster faded away, a number of constraining factors – domestic, international and personality driven – would provide the guidelines for Trump’s foreign policy.…  Seguir leyendo »

With Europe distracted by Brexit and its own internal concerns, and the US led by Trump, Western leadership is now absent. Photo by Getty Images.

European leaders and policy-makers were confounded, like so many Americans, by Donald Trump’s election as the 45th president of the United States. As so many others, they are now scrambling to make sense of the consequences. So what will it likely mean?

A Trump presidency will lead to profound changes in America’s engagement with the world. At its base, it will represent a transition back from the highly internationalized and engaged America that we have known since the beginning of the 20th century.

This should, in fact, come as no great surprise to Europe. This transition is exactly what America has been speaking of for decades now – the desire to step back from being the world’s policeman.…  Seguir leyendo »

Artwork representing a divided nation by American artist David Datuna circles around the Trump Tower in New York City. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

This morning the US and the world wakes to a fundamentally altered political, and geopolitical, landscape. The US has followed the UK and a number of other European states in rejecting the establishment and globalization and opting for nationalism and populism. Trump’s win will resonate far beyond America’s borders.

But the victory celebrations among team Trump will likely be short-lived. Tomorrow he must figure out how he’ll reconcile, and govern, a desperately fractured and combustible nation.

When President Trump takes office on 20 January he inherits an immense burden. The manifold challenges facing the unlikely commander-in-chief are hard to overstate. The greatest of these will be domestic, and none more serious, pressing or testing than the task of rebuilding an ‘inclusive’ America, and re-engaging an intensely disenfranchised, polarized electorate.…  Seguir leyendo »

The US−UK ‘Special Relationship’ is in decline, and a British decision to leave the EU would hasten its demise. As Great Britain increasingly becomes just one of America’s many strategic relationships, Brexit would speed the transfer of US attention and energy from the UK to the continent. This, however, does not need to be inevitable. The necessary ingredient to reverse this decline is stronger British leadership internationally.

The US government has made it abundantly clear that its preference is to see the UK remain in the European Union. In January 2013, when David Cameron had not yet committed to a referendum, Phil Gordon, the US assistant secretary of state for European affairs bluntly stated that it is in the American interest for the US ‘to see a strong British voice in that European Union.’…  Seguir leyendo »