BRUSSELS — In the name of “America First,” President Trump has pulled out of the Paris climate agreement and questioned the usefulness of the United Nations and NATO, displaying his distaste for the multinational institutions the United States had constructed and led since World War II.
As the coronavirus crisis escalates across the globe, the United States is stepping back further, abandoning its longtime role as a generous global leader able to coordinate an ambitious, multinational response to a worldwide emergency.
During both the economic meltdown in 2008 and the Ebola crisis of 2014, the United States assumed the role of global coordinator of responses — sometimes imperfectly, but with the acceptance and gratitude of its allies and even its foes.
In 2003, President George W. Bush established a program, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, that has provided as much as $90 billion and is considered the largest single effort against a single disease. It is credited for saving many thousands of lives in Africa alone.
But the United States is not taking those kinds of steps today.
“There is from President Trump’s America a selfishness that is new,’’ said Jan Techau, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin. While all nations act to protect themselves, he said, the United States traditionally saw that responsibility as having a broader reach.
With Mr. Trump’s unembellished nationalism and slogan of “America First,’’ his efforts to blame first China and then Europe for the coronavirus, and his various misstatements of fact, “it means that America no longer serves the planet,’’ Mr. Techau said.
“America was always strong on self-interest but it has been very generous,” he said. “That generosity seems to be gone, and that’s bad news for the world.’’