Familiarity breeds contempt, the old saying goes. And with the advent of television over the last few decades the Presidency has been thoroughly demystified, stripped of the ineffable majesty that once it possessed. People started thinking that anybody could do it. And then when Watergate rolled around it seemed to confirm the worst fears of all those who had looked with suspicion upon the occupants of high national office. Namely, the suspicion that they were all crooks.

Many people seemed to fall back on this notion to counteract their despair or justify their support for the Trump administration. How much damage could he really do? Didn’t thousands of officials and public servants really run the country, rather than the President? Did it really matter that much which of the two dull and uninspiring choices were picked? And, most of all, wouldn’t the nature of the job, the snugness of the strait-jacket of official responsibility force any occupant into roughly the same mould?

The answer, it turns out, is no. It is indeed possible to do this important job badly. This became abundantly clear to everyone watching Trump receive German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the White House recently. For starters there was the awkward proffered handshake from the Chancellor, either rebuffed or unnoticed by the President. But much more worrying was the press conference after. Lets just take a moment to examine why.

U.S. power in the world has for decades been built not just on their military might but on a series of treaties and undertakings for mutual and multi-lateral defense. These have allowed the projection of global American power in a way impossible for even the great Imperial powers of days gone by. Networks of bases across the world and support from allies enable American power to be projected anywhere in the world extremely quickly. Key among these arrangments is NATO, originally designed to provide security for Western Europe and balance Soviet hegemony of the East (what would become the Warsaw Pact). The key to this organisation is a comittment to mutual defence, that an attack on one part would be responded to by all members. This freed them from the risk of intimidation and invasion by larger powers, underwritten by the military might of the United States in whose interest it is to preserve a grouping so advantageous to their own security and power.

This is why it was so concerning during the campaign to hear Trump say that support for NATO allies was conditional upon them ‘paying their fair share’. Concerns that Trump was confusing NATO with a mafia protection racket were fully realised when he told the German chancellor that some countries (like Germany) owed ‘vast sums of money’ to NATO for their common defense.

This is simply not how it works. NATO (More specifically, the North Atlantic Council) has set a target of defense spending amounting to 2% of GDP for each member state. That is, they should provide for their own defense to the amount of 2% of their GDP. Trump seems to think that the arrangement involves them cutting cheques to NATO or Washington for that amount to subsidize others defending them, like a contractor sending an invoice for services rendered. That is to leave entirely to one side the valube of 2% as a metric. Small nations could increase their spending to that level while achieving no appreciable increase in military capacity. Even large nations could easily increase funding without buying anything the Alliance really needs. You could double the size of the German army, for instance, but without adequate logistics, sea and airlift capacity and armarment it would just mean more soldiers wandering around in Bavaria.

There are several problems with him having said this. Firstly, it is an unedifying spectacle for the President to be seen chasing money like some two-bit loanshark. It is especially problmeatic considering he is asking for money he is not, in fact, owed. Even worse is that he is doing it in the presence of one of the few truly important U.S. allies, upon whose co-operation U.S. hegemony rests. But all of these are mere irritations compared to the real issue with this kind of public snub, this televised airing of the ignorance and stupidity of the most powerful man on earth. Beause such a man is unlikely to inspire others to follow him, and therefore unable to provide leadership.

Such outbursts hasten the decline of Americna power. If Trump was trying to kill Pax Americana, the system of U.S. backed alliances and undertakings that has kept much of the world free from major wars since 1945, he could scarcely do a better job of it. He killed the TPP, and whatever you think of that agreement it was orchestrated by the U.S. Countries were draged, cajouled, bribed and begged to join. American soft power was expended in a way it has not been for years in pursuit of this new arrangment to establish global trade rules for the coming century. Even if killing it was a good thing (a proposition I think is debatable at best), how receptive will those same states and governments be to trust the word of the U.S. Government now that they have been left standing at the altar? Abandoned at the eleventh hour without a word of apology or any kind of consolation after, in many cases, expending their own political capital at home to back the deal?

It is hard to imagine they will be as receptive as they were before. In such ways are great powers undone, and hegemonys lost. So much of this stuff is about perception, and of the two on the stage during Merkel’s visit  to Washington only one looked like the leader of the Free World. And for the first time in living memory, it wasn’t the American President.