Also on Medium.com
What’s on the line for America’s status in the world?
There’s a recognized value to having friends. The American Psychological Association says “Research from around the world shows that having social connections is one of the most reliable predictors of a long, healthy, and satisfying life.”
But losing friends does happen in spite of friendship’s benefits, and the loss of a friend is more likely to happen than making a new friend. Making a new friend can be hard. We lose a friend when we disagree, when circumstances on one or the other side change so significantly that the bond stretches and breaks. We can also lose old friends when we make new ones. A new person coming on the scene, just by injecting some excitement into a relationship gone too predictable or too stale, can fracture an existing friendship.
We can also lose friends, of course, through actual death or the slow death of physical separation. In the one case, because there’s no more reciprocity. In the second, because they are ‘out of sight, out of mind.’
All of this true enough, but the question is what happens if, through a whole constellation of such events and circumstances, someone loses all their friends? Especially if the loss happens because that someone voluntarily gives them all up? Of course if someone does give up all their friends, in the words of Greta Garbo, it’s because they “want to be alone.” (She later clarified that she really wanted to be left alone. It’s a big distinction.) In this case, if the psychologists are correct, that someone is facing a short, sickly, unsatisfying life.
Scaling up the friends issue to the national level, is it in the interest of a country, say the United States, to want to have friends? It’s probably undeniable that a lot of the other 193 countries in the world would like to be friends with the US, and it’s easy to see why. America is rich and powerful. It’s good to have friends in high places because you can call on them when times are tough. That’s what friends are for, among other benefits.
We in the U.S. know this about ourself and, so, we can be selective about who we take on as friends. We can set the conditions under which we will return an overture, meaning we want to assure ourself that the friendships we acknowledge aren’t there just so they can mooch off us. The proof that they are not just moochers is shown by their willingness to give up tokens of their friendship — other than their undying appreciation. What are we going to get back from them for our birthday, say? Quite often we help them along by giving them a wish list of the things we’d like.
On the wish list are items such as buying stuff we make (e.g., movies and weapons), selling us stuff we don’t already have (e.g., rare earth metals), giving us bits and pieces of their land to use (e.g., military bases), doing things our way (e.g., capitalism) and not doing things we don’t like (e.g., abortion). We can also put on the wish list some intangibles, like that a potential friend not be friends with a country we’re an enemy of.
Since both parties know what they want, establishing the friendship will depend on a negotiation to see who’s willing to do what. If there’s enough of a consensus on enough terms, we exchange rings and do the ‘I do’s.’
When you’re the biggest kid in the schoolyard, you often have the option not just of making (or coercing) friends, but letting friends go. Again, scaling up to the global level, this can happen because the big kid, meaning America, changes the items on the wish list or because other countries break the terms of the friendship, or both. (Here is a supporting news article from Romania on the US flight from Europe: “Trump’s America is no longer an ally Europe and Romania can count on.”) In the Second World War, we were friends with the Soviet Union. Because of the cold war and the arms race, we ended the friendship. During the space race, we became loose friends again. When Russia invaded Ukraine, we ended the friendship, again. Now the signs in the second Trump administration suggest that we’re back in marriage counseling, again. A very fickle friendship.
This back and forth relationship with Russia seems to be on again, though we’re renegotiating the terms, not just dusting off the old contract. It looks like Russia will require us to shed some of the loyalties we established with western Europe in the NATO pact and almost certainly with Ukraine. Russia hates NATO. On Russia’s side, it looks like it’ll have to allow more entry to American products (weapons?) and even the possibility of establishing military bases on Russian soil. We probably also want Russia to weaken it’s friendship with China. A tit-for-tat for us weakening ours with Europe.
So what will we achieve as a country by jeopardizing our alliance with the other 31 NATO countries. We won’t be there for them, but they won’t be there for us either. We will certainly be regarded as an unreliable friend, a stigma which will just as certainly make forming new friendships difficult. Potential friends will still come to kiss the ring, but it’s a legitimate question as to how deep they’ll bow.
How will South American countries, for instance, feel about a tie with an iffy so-called hemispheric friend who is as likely to send them down the river as assist them when necessary. We’ve already proven historically that we can be intrusive and rigid — think about our 70 year long economic embargo of Cuba and our covert involvement in the internal politics of Chile, Haiti, Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela, etc., etc.
Alternatively, China is extending a hand in friendship to these countries and its hand is being shaken. The same in sub-Saharan Africa. Other alliances will strengthen as ours weaken. We’ll see that happen almost immediately as the recipients of USAID programs search out alternative funding sources. USAID, which was just axed in a DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency, but more honestly Government Extinction) coup, was a valuable tool for building American good will.
The biggest kid on the block can be, on the one hand, the captain of the football team and the prom king, but, on the other hand, he can also be the school bully. The United States at one time or another has played both roles. Case in point, we have tried over the years to make friends in the Middle East to diffuse the tensions that have lingered there over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We’ve played the peacemaker often. We’ve made friends with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the Emirates.
But when we put Gaza on our friendship wish list in order to build it out as the Riviera of the eastern Mediterranean, at the expense of displacing two million Palestinians, we’ve blown a hole in those friendships. It’s classic bullying, pushing around the weak. Even if laying our claim to Gaza is just bullshit, a prank boast that we’d never act on, it still comes across as a threat. That’s what bullying so often is, and friends don’t like it. The same with laying claim to Greenland, to Panama, to Canada! All bullshit, maybe, but gee whiz doesn’t it reveal a flaw in the argument that the U.S. is a trusted friend? Isn’t it strong evidence instead that we are at best an inconsistent, unreliable friend?
The trouble with giving up your friends is that those now ex-friends will look for new friendships. And they will find them. See the case in point about China above. The good things they had agreed to exchange with us, they will now exchange with new friends. It won’t be just hard stuff we lose in this bad bargain. Our brand as one of the good guys will exist as some corroded and rusted out artifact, sunken in the hegemonically renamed Gulf of Mexico waiting for a future archaeologist to discover. Eventually we’ll have to admit to ourselves that we were bullies and that we’re alone because of it.
I’m not naive that the wealth of the United States can’t insulate us to a large extent from the world’s full disdain. It will, for a time. The almighty dollar backed by our imposing military will certainly buy the appearance of friendship. But those friendships will be soft; they’ll have been coerced, rather than freely given. Losing them will be easier than replacing them.
