A 500 TON HEARTLESS BLUNDER

Five hundred tons of food stacked and now on the verge of rotting in an AbuDhabi warehouse will be incinerated, at a cost of nearly a million US dollars and who knows how many lives. No, it’s not about the money. This is a news story though, that could reach every corner of the world that is in communication with itself. It is a story of heartlessness that may not live long but while it does it has a special horror that will burn brightly. It is a stinging footnote to our foreign policy of slothfulness, inattention, disinterest and callous incompetence.

In the 15 or so years we lived and served abroad, from steamy West Africa to the boulevards of Paris to the searing heat of Pakistan the treasures of Tunisia, the grand monuments of ancient Egypt, and many places in between, we were always concerned about what our international friends thought about the United States. In the role of the senior US Intellignece official in country, in addition to managing liaison with host intelligence services and mounting sensitive collection operations, projecting the best possible image of our country was also a constant feature of daily business. Many of those years we were called the ugly American. Earlier we were pummeled in the press and in frequent protests because of our war in Vietnam. We were, as a nation, either too strong, too present everywhere, too rich, and in the eyes of many others we were the ones who stood up to the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact, or donated life saving food and medicine to the starving, and broadcast forbidden information to denied areas via RFE, VOA and their kin. We have always been many things to many people, but in the many exchanges over the history of our postings and associated travel we were usually admired, respected, maybe not always loved, but never were we dismissed as superficial, irrelevant or uninvolved.

We are in a different place now. The image others have of the US may not be fully evident to us here at home, but we know without hesitation that we are no longer admired or respected as we were in another time, and almost certainly we are not loved. Foreign leaders conceal their mistrust of the president with flattery, never sure of what will follow. The book our international friends is keeping on us has many of the causes, too many to restate, but among them America’s trashing of its long term alliances, its capricious, tough-guy tariffs, mortifying treatment of its immigrants, the unwelcoming of new immigration, and rising signs of racism. Internally we are divided in ways that defy quick solutions, we argue viciously, we cannot settle on a course forward, and we are now home to our own version of oligarchical rule. In other words, a mud pie of conflicting priorities.

But the failure to give one of Mr. Trump’s ubiquitous thumbs-up bromides when it was sorely needed, and which would have signaled a go-ahead for the UN and other international aid agencies to distribute those 500 tons of life-sustaining food to a mix of needy nations before it went bad outranks—at least for the moment—other misdeeds. It reveals a cold, uncaring nature at the center of the American government, apparently so steeped in its search for itself that it could not act in a timely manner. And that sleepwalking detachment humiliates an already distressingly fallen international reputation.