Overseas, Some React With Alarm to Trump’s ‘America First’ Pledge
HONG KONG — In the Philippines, nationalists rallied outside the United States Embassy in Manila, setting fire to an American flag with a picture of President Trump’s face. In China, state media highlighted the “violent” protests that accompanied his inauguration.
In Germany, the vice chancellor warned of a “drastic radicalization” in American politics and said Berlin stood ready to fill the void left by an isolationist Washington. And in Britain, Prime Minister Theresa May said she would tell a skeptical Mr. Trump how important NATO and the European Union are for European and world stability.
“With the threats we face, it’s not the time for less cooperation,” she told The Financial Times. Mrs. May is supposed to travel to Washington to meet Mr. Trump soon, perhaps as early as this week.
In countries around the world, small demonstrations and alarmed reactions greeted Mr. Trump’s ascent to power and his inaugural pledge: “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first.” But some world leaders embraced the new reality, seeking to accommodate a galvanizing political force whose message has been echoed in mass movements across continents.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, who was the first world leader to meet with Mr. Trump after his election in November, has called Japan’s alliance with the United States an “axis of Japan’s foreign and security policies,” even though Mr. Trump was vocal as a candidate in attacking Japanese trade practices and questioning American military support for the country.
But in Berlin, where Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government has been rattled by anti-immigrant discontent before upcoming elections, Sigmar Gabriel, the vice chancellor, said there were “highly nationalist tones” in Mr. Trump’s speech, which he said reflected a “drastic radicalization” of United States politics. ”You have to take the man seriously,” Mr. Gabriel said.
He said that if Mr. Trump made good on his pledges to rip up trade deals and disregard longstanding alliances, Germany stood ready to fill the void.
“Should the United States start a trade war with China and all of Asia, then we as Europeans and Germans are fair partners,” Mr. Gabriel said. “Europe and Germany need a strategy geared toward Asia and China — and we have new opportunities.”
President François Hollande of France, battling nationalist currents in his own country, did not wait for Mr. Trump to give his address before suggesting that France’s course would divert from Washington’s new direction.
“We are in an open world economy and it is not possible nor advisable to want to be isolated from the world economy,” he said. “We must not imagine France closed with respect to the rest of the world.”
But the far-right French politician Marine Le Pen, a serious candidate to succeed Mr. Hollande in elections this spring, declared that Mr. Trump’s victory had opened “a new era in the cooperation between nations.”
Ms. Le Pen will join other far-right leaders from the Netherlands, Germany and Italy in the German city of Koblenz on Saturday, just a day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, at a conference to consult and celebrate what they consider a popular shift in their direction.
In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte, whose bloody antidrug campaign has been criticized by the United States and other Western nations, welcomed the new president and his apparent willingness to stop telling other leaders how to govern.
“The Philippines welcomes President Trump’s foreign policy direction,” a spokesman for Mr. Duterte, Ernesto Abella, said in a statement. Referring to Mr. Trump’s statement that Americans would not “seek to impose our way of life on anyone,” Mr. Abella said that his approach “promises a more placid and mutually beneficial relationship, especially with longstanding allies like us.”
There were the usual gestures of cooperation, mixed with hope that Mr. Trump’s angry and nationalistic words would not mean an American retreat from global responsibility.
“With great power comes great responsibility,” Lithuania’s president, Dalia Grybauskaite, wrote on Twitter. “Confident in global leadership of the USA! Congratulations @realDonaldTrump!”
Other observers were struck by the dark tones of Mr. Trump’s speech. In Japan, Goro Hashimoto, a special editor at the right-leaning Yomiuri Shimbun, the world’s largest-circulation newspaper, compared Mr. Trump’s speech to President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address — and not favorably.
“When I heard Kennedy’s speech when I was a child, I was so excited,” Mr. Hashimoto said. “He talked about American values as well as the benefits for the world. Trump didn’t talk in that way.”
Some European politicians were blunt. “Hostile inauguration speech,” the former Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt wrote on Twitter. “We can’t sit around & hope for US support & cooperation. Europe must take its destiny & security in its own hands.”
Josef Joffe, the publisher and editor of Die Zeit, the German weekly, criticized Mr. Trump’s views on Germany, NATO and the European Union and wrote in the Guardian: “In the next four years, Trump can do impressive damage. The upside today is that the demagogues of the 1930s did not have to stand for re-election.”
The left-leaning Guardian itself compared Mr. Trump’s speech to a declaration of war in an editorial. “In 1933, Roosevelt challenged the world to overcome fear. In 2017, Mr. Trump told the world to be very afraid,” it said, adding that the speech’s “America First nationalism was crude and shameless.”
The columnist Matthew Parris, writing in The Times of London, called Mr. Trump “a turkey” and said that “a rather small person has made it to the highest office.” He warned British Conservatives, including the government, that “flirting” with Mr. Trump, despite promises of post-Brexit trade favors, could end badly, reminding them of the fate of another prime minister, Labour’s Tony Blair, after “our years of poodling to George W. Bush.”
In Beijing, Mr. Trump’s swearing-in took place at 1 a.m. Saturday local time, and well into the day, there was no official reaction to his inaugural address from a government whose statements are tightly scripted. Hours before the inauguration, a government spokeswoman had repeated standard boilerplate about the importance of bilateral relations between China and the United States.
Relations “have had their ups and downs, but they have continued to move forward,” Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for China’s Foreign Ministry, told reporters. “China-U.S. relations should push forward from this new starting point to make greater progress.”
China’s official caution appears to have been codified in an explicit directive. China Digital Times, an American-based website that tracks Chinese media and regularly reports on leaked orders from China’s propaganda apparatus, published a directive that forbade the country’s online news organizations to run photos of the inauguration or include it among their top five news stories of the day.
Zhang Zhe, a Chinese student who is pursuing a doctorate in political science at Brown University in Rhode Island, watched Mr. Trump’s inauguration together with his parents. The picture Mr. Trump presented of “American carnage” did not register with the family, Mr. Zhang said in an email.
“My parents have only been in America for a few months and they don’t know much about it, but even they could not bear what Trump said,” Mr. Zhang wrote. “My father asked me, this president, ‘Why does he describe the United States as a society that is worse off than China’s old feudal society?’”
While China’s official reaction was muted, Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, was quick to offer her congratulations to Mr. Trump.
“Democracy is what ties Taiwan and the U.S. together,” Ms. Tsai tweeted within a minute of Mr. Trump’s swearing-in. “Look forward to advancing our friendship & partnership.”
Congratulations @realDonaldTrump. Democracy is what ties Taiwan and the US together. Look forward to advancing our friendship & partnership.
Last month, Ms. Tsai called Mr. Trump to congratulate him on his victory, the first leader of Taiwan to directly communicate with a United States president or president-elect in decades. The United States does not have formal diplomatic ties to Taiwan, which China considers its own territory, and the phone call elicited strong criticism from Beijing.
Other leaders and politicians were also effusive. In Australia on Saturday, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia, whose government has banished refugees who tried to reach Australia by boat, took to Twitter to wish Mr. Trump “every success” and predicted “a great future ahead of us.” And in Brazil, an ultranationalist legislator, Jair Bolsonaro, expressed glee over the inauguration.
“Congratulations, new president of United States of America,” Mr. Bolsonaro, a conservative former army paratrooper who is preparing his own presidential bid in the 2018 election, said on Twitter.
But others in Brazil saw ominous signs for the future.
“We can root for the possibility that Trump is merely trying to bluff the world with his offensive rhetoric on trade and global elites,” said Marcos Troyjo, a Brazilian economist and diplomat who writes on international affairs for the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. Still, Mr. Troyjo said that Mr. Trump’s first moves as president signaled that he was already creating a “stockpile of uncertainty and turbulence.”
“Time to buckle your seatbelts and cross your fingers,” Mr. Troyjo said.
P.C: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/world/donald-trump-reaction-france-germany-japan-brazil.html
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