Latest news with #post-American
Miami Herald
19 hours ago
- Business
- Miami Herald
London's ‘Little America' is no more. What's taking its place?
From the Eagle Bar on the top floor of the new Chancery Rosewood Hotel in Mayfair, the views across London are unobstructed, save for a gilded aluminum eagle, its wings spread wide, which crowns the midcentury modern building that once housed the U.S. Embassy to the United Kingdom. The Americans pulled up stakes in 2018, relocating the embassy to a giant fortified cube on the south bank of the Thames. They left behind the eagle, along with a collection of monuments and memorials in the adjoining Grosvenor Square — relics of what was once an American citadel in its ancestral land. John Adams lived on the square. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had his wartime office there. A statue of Franklin Roosevelt gazes across the patchy lawn. Diplomats threw star-spangled election night parties, while hopeful travelers lined up outside for visas. During the Vietnam War, protesters clashed with police under the trees. Now, Grosvenor Square is being recast for a post-American age. The Chancery plans to open to guests in early September, its Persian Gulf owners having converted the Brutalist landmark, designed by Eero Saarinen, into a Rosewood luxury hotel, with junior suites starting at 1,400 pounds (nearly $1,900) a night. The square, which lies in front of the hotel and has a different owner, is closing this week for a 13-month refurbishment. The project will add lush plantings that celebrate biodiversity and link the 6-acre expanse, which has fallen into a state of neglect, more closely to its 18th-century Georgian roots. The owner, Grosvenor Property, insists it is preserving the legacy of a place once known as 'Little America.' But Grosvenor Square attests to how much the world has changed, not least since President Donald Trump returned to the White House. Start with the fact that the embassy was bought by investors from Qatar, whose government recently gave the Trump administration a Boeing 747 as a replacement for Air Force One. 'If you're trying to attract people, if you're trying make money, highlighting America's prominence is not the way to do it,' said Leslie Vinjamuri, the director of the U.S. and Americas program at Chatham House, a research group in London. 'It's a good time to take a step back, to play it down a bit.' Ties between Britain and the United States ebb and flow, she noted, in a 'special relationship' that is neither as serene nor as harried as often portrayed. A new global crisis could swiftly bring these old allies back together. But Trump's acrimonious dealings with Europe have indisputably changed the mood. 'There is just a sense of pulling apart between the U.K. and the U.S.,' said Vinjamuri, who will leave London this month to become CEO of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Trump, who has a soft spot for the royal family and other totems of imperial Britain, complained bitterly about the sale of the embassy. He blamed it, wrongly, on his predecessor President Barack Obama. (The decision was made during the George W. Bush administration because of security concerns.) 'We had the best site in all of London,' Trump said in 2018. The new location, in a redeveloped industrial section of London known as Nine Elms, was 'lousy,' he said, spurning an invitation to a ribbon cutting. Indeed, since the days of Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde, Grosvenor Square has been synonymous with posh London. The Grosvenor family laid it out in the 1720s to anchor the expansion of its property empire into West London. With grand dimensions and an elegant oval shape, it attracted wealthy residents, who were given keys to their own private Eden in the capital. (It became a public park after World War II.) It also attracted Americans, starting with Adams, who lived on the northeast corner from 1785 to 1788 as America's first envoy to Britain. After Eisenhower quartered himself there, it was nicknamed 'Eisenhower Platz.' The Roosevelt statue was paid for with donations from ordinary Britons as a gesture of gratitude to the United States for its aid in the war. Nothing sealed the American connection like the opening of Saarinen's chancery in 1960, a hulking nine-story building that was the first purpose-built embassy of any country in London. In its early days, it was reviled by some critics as a jarring intrusion on the genteel Georgian symmetry of the square. 'It had this sense of America being big and bold, and in a British context, a sense of 'Wow, how American,'' said Matthew Barzun, the last U.S. ambassador to have an office in the building. Barzun, who witnessed ups and downs in the trans-Atlantic relationship over Syria and Brexit, said the old embassy was designed to be 'light and open and welcoming.' But after the terrorist bombings of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, 'we added more and more fences and bollards,' he said. 'You start out building things to keep people out,' Barzun said, 'but you end up trapping people in.' Converting a diplomatic fortress into a sleek, five-star hotel was a design and engineering test for Qatari Diar, a real estate company backed by Qatar's sovereign wealth fund. The Qataris brought in Rosewood, a luxury hotel chain that was started in Dallas and is now owned by a Hong Kong conglomerate. 'Creating warmth was the biggest challenge,' said Michael Bonsor, the hotel's managing director, as he offered a sneak peek. 'You have this juxtaposition of one of the most secure, fortified buildings in London, where Marines used to run around with machine guns. It wasn't the most hospitable building in the world.' Dapper and discreet, Bonsor could have been a diplomat if he hadn't gone into hospitality. He said the hotel would make nods to its past, but would avoid becoming a Cold War-style theme park. In addition to the eagle, which is a protected landmark, the hotel has reinstalled statues of Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan that once flanked the building (the statues are wrapped in tarp to protect them during construction). Inside, the Chancery has retained some of Saarinen's design elements, notably his exposed-concrete ceiling. But prizewinning British architect David Chipperfield has reconfigured the building to add an atrium with cascading chandeliers. Two palatial penthouses are named after Elizabeth and Charles, monarchs not presidents. The hotel said their scale would appeal to guests from the Middle East. Across the street, the proprietors of Grosvenor Square are similarly aware of the tug between past and present. While they will retain the FDR statue, as well as a memorial to victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, they plan to add serpentine paths and extensive plantings to soften the square's stark appearance. 'The austere design, which was important during the Cold War period, has had its day,' said Cordula Zeidler, a heritage and design expert who advised Grosvenor Property. 'Having more plantings is both a Georgian concept and something people want today.' James Raynor, the newly named CEO of Grosvenor, acknowledged the complicated political backdrop to the project. But he said, 'I don't think we should be altering it for the long term on the basis of short-term noise.' In turbulent times, Raynor even holds out hope that the 18th-century square can still serve as a 21st-century bridge. 'Will the park by itself change the diplomatic relationship between the countries?' he said. 'I doubt it. But it will allow us to recognize what the two countries have done for each other.' This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Copyright 2025
NDTV
26-05-2025
- Business
- NDTV
Is Donald Trump Doing The World A Favour By Isolating The United States?
United States President Donald Trump's tariffs against most of the world tanked stock markets, disrupted the U.S. bond market and destabilized the global economy. Trump has economically and politically threatened American allies, shattering the unity of the western world. But Trump's chaos may have inadvertently produced an opportunity to create a better world. Some western commentators argue that the U.S. has been a benevolent superpower. That may have been true for a small group of mostly western states that have benefitted from American domination. But much of the Global South was victimized by American military, economic and political interventions. Losing dominance? The West could be in the midst of losing its dominant position in the global order. This is probably inevitable, but it may not be the tragedy some western commentators assume it to be. In most of the world, there is a desire for a more equitable world order that doesn't feature the moral, racial and cultural double standards of the western-dominated system. A world where American and western power is limited and contained could not only end up being more peaceful but, over time, more prosperous. Without the co-operation of the allies alienated by Trump, it may be harder for the U.S. to initiate conflict around the world as it often has since the end of the Cold War. In a recent Foreign Affairs article, American political scientist Stacie Goddard argues the emerging multipolar, post-American world will be one in which great powers — primarily the U.S., Russia and China — will divide the globe into 'spheres of influence.' The U.S. is seeking to maintain disproportionate power in Asia. Closer to home, neighbours of the U.S. have reason to fear American expansionism. By contrast, even if it has imperialist ambitions, Russia doesn't have the military might to dominate Europe. It's a country of 144 million people with one-sixth the GDP of the European Union. Russia can cause trouble within countries with sizable Russian minorities, but its ability to project power is limited, as demonstrated by its grinding war in Ukraine. China's stance The Chinese have scored a win against Trump's tariffs with a 90-day tariff pause that's being hailed as vindication of China's defiant negotiating strategy. China called Trump's bluff and won as global stocks soared. This has bolstered China's goal to have a sphere of influence. However, Chinese foreign policy is largely non-interventionist and, compared to the U.S., remarkably restrained. China may intimidate its rivals in the South China Sea, Senkaku Islands, and Taiwan, but it does not easily resort to military force. China has not resorted to military force since its war with Vietnam in 1979. China is committed to most of the guiding structures of the current international system and values a stable and mutually beneficial global economic order that enables it to focus on and improve its domestic development. Its export-oriented economic sectors need customers abroad. Unlike the West, China has a vested interest in helping the Global South develop and prosper in order to create those customers. Asian trade alliance? The Chinese are using their resources to promote economic and technological development in the Global South. As China spreads its renewable energy technologies globally, some of the poorest countries may leapfrog carbon-based fuels and go directly to renewable energy to make development affordable and attainable, and to mitigate climate change. In response to Trump's tariffs, China, South Korea and Japan have discussed a renewed free-trade arrangement. President Xi Jinping has toured Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia to encourage a common front against American actions. Asian states are wary of China, but they remain committed to global trade. The U.S. may be retreating from globalization, but the rest of the world is not, though China's manufacturing dominance concerns many states. Emerging international order New institutions may help to manage the evolving world order. The BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates — have created the New Development Bank (NDB). China has created the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The United Nations remains the favoured instrument of global diplomacy, even if western states have been accused of undermining its authority and efficacy. The European Union will continue as a major global power in the emerging international order, but on a more even footing with the rest of the world. Europe is reconsidering its trade war with China. In the words of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission: ' The West as we knew it no longer exists.' Western states will undoubtedly continue to try to exercise disproportionate global influence. Canada has suggested that 'like-minded states' form an alliance to promote international trade and institutions that remain dominated by western interests. This idea seems designed to continue marginalizing the Global South in the international decision-making process. Most Global South states are not high-functioning liberal democracies. Many struggle with the legacies of colonialism while managing an international system dominated by the West that keeps them subservient. Others have created governments that fit their particular circumstances, cultures and levels of development. But many weaker countries generally share a commitment to international law that is seemingly stronger than the West. They need a stable, predictable, fairly applied set of global rules more than stronger nations. Ironically, the decline of the U.S. may facilitate a much more genuine and legitimate rules-based international order. America's loosening grip Readjusting the world economy away from the U.S. to a more diverse, evenly distributed economic model will be difficult and disruptive. Nonetheless, loosening the American grip on global power is an essential first step towards achieving a more just and balanced international order. For putting this process in motion, the world may owe Trump a measure of thanks. (Author: Shaun Narine, Professor of International Relations and Political Science, St. Thomas University (Canada)
Atlantic
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Crisis of American Leadership Reaches an Empty Desert
In Tiné, a barren desert town in eastern Chad, the first humanitarian crisis of the post-American world is now unfolding. Thousands of people fleeing the civil war in Sudan's Darfur region have recently arrived there after enduring long journeys in relentless, 100-degree heat. Many have nothing—they report being beaten, robbed, or raped along the way—and almost nothing awaits them in Tiné. Due in part to the Trump administration's devastating cuts to foreign aid, only a skeleton staff of international humanitarian workers are on hand to receive them. There are shortages of food, water, medicine, and shelter in Tiné, and few resources to move people anywhere else. Several months ago, I was reporting in Sudan with the photographer Lynsey Addario. She recently returned to the region and spent several days photographing and speaking with some of the people who are streaming into Tiné. According to aid workers on the ground, more than 30,000 people have arrived there since regional fighting intensified in mid-April, and more than 3,500 are now arriving every day. The photos below capture the desperation of people with nowhere to go, the absence of infrastructure to help them, the desolation of the empty desert. Most of the people in Tiné and nearby towns are coming from Zamzam, a famine-stricken camp for displaced people in North Darfur. Aid trucks carrying food have long had difficulty reaching Zamzam, thanks to ongoing violence, bad roads, and the Sudanese government's reluctance to let international organizations operate in areas controlled by its rivals. Over the past few weeks, the Rapid Support Forces, the militia that is the Sudanese army's main antagonist, raised the stakes further. The RSF tightened its siege of El-Fasher, the largest city in North Darfur, and began shelling Zamzam itself. The core of the RSF consists of Arabic-speaking nomads, once known as the Janjaweed, who have long been in conflict with the non-Arab farmers in this part of Sudan. Their lethal rivalry is not a religious dispute—both sides are overwhelmingly Muslim—and the ethnic differences are blurry. Nevertheless, refugees in Tiné say RSF soldiers are interrogating people escaping from Zamzam and El-Fasher, and murdering men who look 'African' instead of 'Arab,' who speak the wrong language or who come from the wrong tribe. 'If your language is Arabic, they will let you go,' a woman named Fatima Suleiman recounted. Those who did not speak it, she said, were murdered on the spot. Her dark-skinned son, Ahmed, a student who knows some English, was spared because he speaks Arabic too, though his friends were not as fortunate. He watched them get gunned down. In theory, the Trump administration still supports emergency humanitarian aid. But in practice, the cuts to logistics and personnel, the abrupt changes to payments, and the associated chaos have hampered all of the international humanitarian organizations working in Tiné and everywhere else. The Chadian Red Cross lacks transport for the wounded. The World Food Program's supplies are unreliable because support systems have been cut. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is cutting staff due to budget constraints. Jean-Paul Habamungu Samvura, who represents UNHCR in eastern Chad, said that in his 20-year career, he could not recall refugees ever being offered so little. 'Our big donor is the U.S.,' Samvura said. But in February, UNHCR was instructed to alter its services. 'Things we are used to seeing as lifesaving activity, like providing shelter, are no longer considered lifesaving activity,' he explained. That leaves his team with an unsolvable problem: 'Where to put people at least to give them a bit of shading.' Some of his staff have been told that their jobs will end as soon as June, but the crisis will not end in June. Local Sudanese groups, part of a mutual-aid movement called Emergency Response Rooms, are collecting donations from overseas and have begun offering meals to refugees, as they do all over Sudan. But if the number of displaced people continues to grow as the scale of the disaster expands, these volunteers will also need more resources, if only to ensure that everyone in Tiné eats a meal every day. Eyewitnesses report people dying of thirst on the way to Tiné, and malnourished children arriving among the refugees. This is a dramatic moment in a devastating war. More people have been displaced by violence in Sudan than in Ukraine and Gaza combined. Statements about Sudan are regularly made at the UN and in other international forums. And yet the people in these photographs seem to have been abandoned in an empty landscape. As the United States withdraws and international institutions decay, their ordeal may be a harbinger of what is to come.
The Guardian
14-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
It is difficult to imagine a post-American world. But imagine it we must
'People speak with forked tongues about America,' a veteran foreign correspondent once said to me. It was a long time ago – during a debate about whether the US should intervene in a foreign conflict – and I have never forgotten it. What they meant was that just as the US is condemned for foreign intervention in some instances, it is also called upon to do so in others and then judged for not upholding its moral standards. That dissonance persists, and is even more jarring as we approach the 100th day of Donald Trump's second term. There is a duality to how the US is seen: as both a country that wantonly violates international law and as the only one capable of upholding that system of law and order. This duality, always tense, is no longer sustainable. I have felt this ambivalence myself – the contradictory demand that the US stay out of it but also anger that it is not doing more. In Sudan, Washington frustratingly refuses to pressure its ally, the UAE, into stopping pumping arms and funding into the conflict. But what proof or history is there to support the delusional notion that the US cares about a conflict in which it has no direct interest? It is an expectation of moral policing from an amoral player that I remember even in childhood, after Iraq invaded Kuwait and the Arab world was rocked with fear of regional war. A fierce debate in our classroom in Sudan on the merits of US intervention was silenced by one indignant evacuee from Kuwait, who said that the most important thing was to defeat Saddam Hussein. Her words occasionally echo in my mind: 'We must deal with the greater evil first.' Even in Gaza, as Congress passed package after package of billions in military aid to Israel, there remained some residual hope – long extinguished now – that the phone call to Benjamin Netanyahu would finally come. And even as Trump emboldens Vladimir Putin, abandons Ukraine and slaps tariffs on allies, you can detect that belief in the fundamental viability of the US as an actor that can still default to rationality, and even morality. But, for the first time that I can remember, the conversation is going in a new direction. The appeals to the difference between the presidency and other more solid US institutions are quieter now, as universities, law firms and even parts of the press kowtow to their erratic new king. The questions now being asked are about how Europe and the rest of the world can pivot away from the US, from its USAID programmes nestled within the health budgets of developing countries, and its global system of military assistance and deterrence. But they sound less like practical suggestions and more like attempts to get heads around a reality that is impossible to countenance. The challenge is technical and psychological. It is difficult to imagine a post-American world because America crafted that world. When the US becomes a volatile actor, the very architecture of the global financial order starts to wobble. We saw this in the crisis of confidence in the dollar in the aftermath of Trump's 'liberation-day' tariffs. The robustness of the rule of law and separation of powers – cornerstones of confidence in an economy – are also now in doubt, as the administration goes to war with its own judiciary and the president himself boasts about how many people in the room with him made a killing out of his stock market crash. Is it insider trading if your source is the president? Just as formidable is the mental task of divestment from the US. A friend who holds a green card but lives under an illiberal regime in Asia told me that, deep down, he always felt protected from the dangers of his country's domestic politics by the knowledge that there was a safe haven to which he could retreat in case of persecution. No longer, as legal residents and visitors are hounded by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) or turned away at the border. I know others who have cancelled work trips to the US for fear of deportation or blacklisting. With that insecurity comes an awareness that, for some in the global south who always knew that the US was not a benign presence, there was still the belief that there was something within its own borders that curbed its excesses. This was partly true, but also a reflection of US cultural power. The pursuit of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, 'give me … your huddled masses', the Obama hope iconography; all resonant and powerful touchstones. They are now reduced to dust. It is one thing to know that the US was never the sum of these parts, but another to accept it. And there is a fear in accepting it. Because, for all its violations, the advent of a post-US world induces a feeling of vertigo. A world in which there is no final authority at all might be scarier than a world where there is a deeply flawed one. What is daunting is the prospect of anarchy, a new world where there is no organising principle in a post-ideological, everyone-for-themselves system. Not a cold war order divided into capitalist, communist and non-aligned. And not a post-cold war one divided into western liberal overlords, competing non-democracies and, below them, smaller clients of both. But what the US's breakdown should really trigger is not overwhelm and bewilderment, but a project to build a new global order in which we all have a stake. What the US chooses to do in terms of foreign and economic policy can affect your shopping basket and the very borders of the nation state in which you live. It remains the world's largest economy, has the world's largest military, and is the home of the world's most powerful entertainment complex. This centrality combined with its collapse reveals the fact that the problem goes deeper than Trump. The world was always dangerously overexposed to whatever direction the US took. Ironically, this all might be the beginning of a process that leads to genuine 'liberation days' for other countries, but not the US itself. There is pain ahead, but also a sort of independence. Above all, there might finally be a recognition that the US's definition of peace and prosperity was always its own, enforced by sheer force of power and propaganda. Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
Washington Post
09-04-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Trump's tariffs make the ‘post-American world' a reality
You're reading an excerpt from the WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest, including news from around the globe and interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. For a generation, analysts and commentators have been discussing the advent of a 'post-American world.' The term, popularized by journalist and broadcaster Fareed Zakaria in a 2008 book, was a warning to the Washington establishment not to be too comfortable with the peerless status of the United States as the world's superpower. China was on the rise, the U.S. share of global wealth and power was growing smaller and the old certainties of the Pax Americana were on the wane.
