Nearly a year into the Trump presidency, countries around the world are scrambling to adapt as the White House has struggled to fill key government positions, scaled back the State Department and upended old alliances. Now some nations are finding that even if they are frustrated by President Trump’s Washington, they can still prosper from robust relations with the California Republic and a constellation of like-minded U.S. cities, some of which are bigger than European countries.
Brown’s 10-day trip to Europe, which ended Tuesday, was just the latest in a growing transatlantic back-and-forth that bypasses the Trump-era White House. In July, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio headlined a protest in Hamburg against the Group of 20. Several European countries have stationed ambassadors in Silicon Valley to boost trade ties.
Meanwhile, state and municipal governments are expanding or building new offices to help them manage the increased interest in Europe and Asia. This year, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (D) created the position of deputy mayor for international affairs to better manage relations with foreign governments.
Last week Garcetti huddled in Los Angeles with the Israeli president and Armenian defense minister. The latter stopped by on his way to a peacekeeping conference and briefly described his country’s ongoing dispute with Azerbaijan over the breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region.
The mayor’s motives for taking the meeting were simple. “We have a big Armenian population in Los Angeles that cares about events in Armenia,” said Nina Hachigian, who filled the international affairs position and previously served in the Obama administration as U.S. ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Many world leaders say they have no illusions that they can avoid the White House on critical issues at the core of global stability, especially those related to security. But they have embraced efforts by Democratic governors and mayors to present a different face of U.S. power to the world, albeit at a lower level than the White House or State Department.
“There is an impression by politicians here that President Trump in person is no longer the voice of the free Western world,” said Christian Ehler, a German lawmaker who heads the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with the United States and helped broker Brown’s visit to Brussels. “We are much more carefully looking now to the diversity of what is being discussed in the United States, and we see that California is one of the powerhouses of the world economically.”
Typically I would think that overall this would be a bad idea, because even though states do indeed make individual economic deals with foreign governments, the main negotiations have always been the work of the White House.
However since we have a White House that is currently critically understaffed, and in constant disarray, I am not sure what other options exist for keeping things moving forward.
One has to wonder however if this may devolve into a kind of quiet economic civil war where blue states continue to make trade deals and negotiate exchanges of information with foreign governments, which inflates their coffers, while red states sit on their hands waiting for the Republican White House to lead the way, and slip further and further into abject poverty?
Of course the solution to this is to elect a Democratic President next time and the entire country will have the opportunity to prosper as one.
Jerry Brown seems to already be doing the job, so maybe he really will be the best bet in 2020.
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