America's Loss of Standing in the World, Let Me Count the Ways

Sure, we peaked in WWII, though the Korean War was an effort to unsplit a country, and Vietnam was a disastrous opposite effort. Still, we've spent decades creating moral, ethical, democratic, scientific, and, yes, financial leadership. We were at the helm of the financial world, and our dollar became the de facto world currency. All of that is threatened.

Imagine how dangerous he'd be if he knew what he was doing. (Hard to imagine.)

Read this piece on what else Trump is squandering with his violation of the Iran agreement.

Prior to, well, yesterday, the US could claim a moral high ground. Its extraterritorial financial control might be objectionable, yes, but absent some coordinating mechanism like that, there would always be a competitive race among politicians and bankers to allow themselves to be persuaded that Mexican drug lords are just legitimate businessmen from a hardscrabble country and why should the Iranians be prevented from getting nukes when the world winks at the Israelis? The US may not be the ideal global financial policeman, but like every other kind of global policeman that it is, it may be better than no policeman at all.

However, now, specifically with respect to its enforcement of financial sanctions on an apparently compliant Iran, it is the United States that seems, even among its Western partners, to be the rogue state in need of policing. However begrudging European acquiescence to extraterritorial US sanctions may have been two days ago, it is more begrudging today.