Center for Preventive Action / Council on Foreign Relations
Uri Friedman and Annabelle Timsit, The Atlantic: Global Conflicts to Watch in 2018
“The U.S. is now the most unpredictable actor in the world today.”
As conflicts ignite and burn and flicker out around the world, U.S. officials assess the dangers they represent back home. Not all of these conflicts directly threaten American interests, which is why the Council on Foreign Relations conducts an annual survey to help U.S. leaders prioritize threats in the year ahead. For the past decade, this survey has focused on the risks posed to America by foreign actors. Now it’s reckoning with the risks America poses to the world—and to itself.
“The U.S. is now the most unpredictable actor in the world today, and that has caused profound unease,” said Paul Stares, the director of CFR’s Center for Preventive Action, which produces the annual survey. “You used to be able to pretty much put the U.S. to one side and hold it constant, and look at the world and consider where the biggest sources of unpredictability, insecurity are. Now you have to include the U.S. in that. … No one has high confidence how we [Americans] would react in any given situation, given how people assess this president.” This president might welcome the development. “I don’t want people to know exactly what I’m doing—or thinking,” Donald Trump wrote in 2015. “It keeps them off balance.”
Read more ....
WNU Editor: So among foreign policy experts .... many now see the U.S. (i.e. President Trump) as the most unpredictable actor in the world today. That is quite a mental leap .... when one looks at the multiple wars and conflicts that the U.S. sees itself in the world today .... wars and conflicts that President Trump inherited.
Posts
