Najam in BU Today on Trump’s First Year in Office
Adil Najam, Dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was asked shortly after the 2016 United States presidential election to predict what then President-Elect Donald Trump might do during his first year in office. Najam was recently asked to follow up on that prediction and provide an assessment of Trump’s first year in office.
Najam’s assessment was published in BU Today on January 19, 2018 as part of an article entitled “One Year In, How’s Trump Doing?”
From the text of the article:
Unfortunately, 2017 may have been the year that America stopped trying to be great, at least in its international relations.
Donald Trump has led a truly remarkable—even dramatic—turnaround from America’s being a great power that shapes as well as leads the international system to seeing itself as victim of an unfair international order. Nowhere was this shift more apparent than in Trump’s speech to the United Nations in November, when he invoked the word “sovereignty” 21 times. Such is the rhetoric of the weak, not the great.
It was already evident that Trump’s America is not isolationist as much as it is unwilling to accept the mantle of global leadership. US abdication on climate change was not news. But the fact that the rest of the world did not care, react, or think it consequential was a sure sign that American power and influence ain’t what they used to be.
Adil Najam is the inaugural dean of the Pardee School and was a former Vice Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore Pakistan. Learn more about him here.