Many years ago, I asked a friend who had been hired as a senior foreign policy official what he’d learned in government that he didn’t know beforehand. He replied: "I used to think policymaking was 75% about relationships. Now I realize it’s 95% about relationships.”
It’s very hard to do big things alone. So competent leaders and nations rely on relationships built on shared values, shared history and shared trust. They construct coalitions to take on the big challenges of the age, including the biggest: whether the 21st century is going to be a Chinese century or another American century.
In that contest the Chinese have many advantages, but until recently America had the decisive one — we had more friends around the world. Unfortunately, over the last month and a half, America has smashed a lot of those relationships to smithereens.
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