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Terry Glavin: Trump's rule-breaking belligerence lowers the bar everywhere

If you act like an unprincipled rule breaker with no scruples about betraying friends, other heads of state will start acting the same way

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It’s a peculiar, rarely acknowledged but readily measurable effect of the pugnacious truculence President Donald Trump has adopted in his treatment of the United States’ traditional friends, allies and trading partners. The American abandonment of principled global leadership is lowering the bar for competent and disciplined statesmanship in democratic states almost everywhere.

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It’s quite true that the decline in the United States’ reputation for diplomatic integrity and fair dealing did not begin with Donald Trump. It’s also true that several European leaders have managed to maintain their standards, and the American president’s compulsive tariff manipulations and the trade anarchy his administration has loosed upon the world does require fairly dramatic adjustments in response.

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But within the political classes of the NATO countries and Latin America, Trump’s vulgar excesses have tended to allow the vice of petty animosity towards the United States to be reconfigured as virtue. Policies that were only recently understood by democratic governments as irresponsible, unseemly and reckless have been recalibrated against the degraded standard the White House is setting.

It’s a state of affairs that may be most........

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