How We See It
The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump
In just a few short years, the United States has gone from the anchor of the international order to one of its greatest sources of instability. Allies are rethinking their security arrangements, trading partners are hedging, and much of the world is recalibrating both its perception of and relationship with the US.
On September 30, New America’s Power, People, and Planet Initiative will host a virtual conversation about the new book How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump, a collection of essays by journalists from a dozen countries describing how their own nations regard a changing America.
Edited by Madeleine Schwartz, editor in chief of The Dial, an international magazine based in Paris, the collection features writers from India to Canada, Ireland to South Africa, Cuba to Ukraine. Michelle Kuo describes Taiwanese citizens enrolling in civil-defense courses as they weigh Washington’s reliability against the threat of a Chinese invasion; Lucía Cholakian Herrera traces the dollar’s enduring hold on the Argentine imagination even as its value slips; and Muhammad al-Zaqzouq writes from Gaza of an America he still admires, even as it denies him the visa that would let him leave a war zone.
In illuminating the twilight of Pax Americana as seen from beyond Washington, the book also puts America’s current tumult in global perspective. The forces reshaping the United States — inequality, ineffective politics, social division – are present in many nations, contributing to a global political turn with uncertain consequences.
Join Schwartz for a discussion moderated by Gordon LaForge, co-director of the Power, People, and Planet Initiative. Together they will explore what these outside perspectives reveal about America’s place in a changing world and what Americans stand to learn by looking outward.