The Erosion of Credibility: A System Under Strain

Opinion

A system conceived to discipline power and anchor leadership in responsibility now appears increasingly hostage to impulse, bravado, and fabrication

By Karma Yogi

I do not believe that those who surround Donald Trump possess either the courage or the stature required to remind him of a time-proven adage: when you are in a hole, stop digging. The echo chamber appears too comfortable, the incentives too distorted, and the fear of contradiction too entrenched for such elementary wisdom to penetrate the inner sanctum of power.

Were Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Foster Dulles — architects, in their different ways, of the post-Second World War international order — to revisit the country they once respectively governed and served, one suspects they would struggle to recognise it. More unsettling still, they would likely question the fitness of its current leadership for responsibilities that demand restraint, judgment, and respect for institutions. A system conceived to discipline power and anchor leadership in responsibility now appears increasingly hostage to impulse, bravado, and fabrication. Last week we addressed Trump’s fault lines under the title: ‘When Lying Becomes A Method’.

“How much institutional decay, social cost, and international instability must accumulate before accountability takes the form the Constitution itself foresaw? At what point, in other words, does impeachment cease to be a political taboo and become a democratic necessity?” Pic – The Guardian

What depths has the United States descended to! What a loss of credibility this represents! Washington, once a reference point, has become a spectacle. The world watches, incredulous, as the administration of what was long the principal custodian of the liberal international order is reduced to caricature. Even the most remote corners of the globe — once attentive to American leadership — now find material for satire where they once sought guidance. Fun-filled but disparaging cartoons run galore.

Power: Flattery v/s Restraint

This is not merely a matter of rhetorical excess. It reflects a worldview in which multilateralism is treated as an encumbrance rather than a necessity. Consider, for instance, the notion — floated with characteristic bravado — of a parallel, UN-like structure grandly labelled a Board of Peace. The reaction was swift and unforgiving. It was received not as innovation but as parody, promptly rechristened the “Bored of Peace.” The episode betrayed not creative thinking, but a fundamental misunderstanding of why multilateral institutions exist in the first place: not to flatter power, but to restrain it.

That disdain has been translated into decisions with tangible human consequences. Withdrawal from the Paris Climate consensus; disengagement from development-centred bodies such as the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development; and the deliberate drying up of funds essential for the UN system to function have collectively accentuated the misery of the world’s poorest. These are not abstract policy choices. They weaken humanitarian reach, undermine development capacity, and erode the fragile safety nets upon which millions depend.

Diplomacy, meanwhile, has been reduced to ultimatums. Threats of war are brandished with alarming casualness. International relations are reframed around a crude doctrine of ‘do what I say, not what I do.’ Rules are invoked selectively; obligations are imposed on others while being disavowed at home. The cumulative effect is corrosive, hollowing out the very idea of a rules-based order.

Diplomacy as a spectacle

The contrast with serious leadership could scarcely be sharper. At Davos, Mark Carney addressed the World Economic Forum with a sober, evidence-based appeal for institutional renewal — arguing that stability, legitimacy, and long-term prosperity require predictability, cooperation, and disciplined power. It was an argument rooted in facts, history, and responsibility.

Set against this, one recalls the US President’s rambling harangues about Greenland — repeatedly referred to as Iceland — accompanied by the preposterous claim that its inhabitants “love him,” that they call him “Daddy.” Such assertions would be risible were they not symptomatic of a deeper problem: the replacement of policy with performance, of diplomacy with spectacle, and of fact with fantasy.

Nowhere is this inversion more grotesque than in the realm of peace itself. It takes a particular genius for irony to clamour for the Nobel Peace Prize and boast of having halted eight wars, while presiding — within the first six months of office — over the dropping of more than five hundred bombs. It is peace exalted in speeches, yet delivered by airstrike.

Nor do these gestures spare those at home in whose name they are ostensibly undertaken. Trade disruptions rebound upon domestic industries; tariffs translate into higher consumer costs; strategic uncertainty unsettles markets. The American worker and the middle class absorb the shock. Even the dollar, long a symbol of stability and confidence, shows signs of strain amid fiscal indiscipline and institutional unpredictability. Power projected without restraint has a habit of returning home as vulnerability.

This is not an episodic lapse; it is a pattern. Falsehood becomes method. Impulse substitutes for policy. Institutions are treated as inconveniences. Allies are lectured, adversaries provoked, and the global commons neglected. Leaders have lied before, and democracies have survived. What is new is the normalisation of contradiction as a governing technique—where reality itself is contested by assertion, and correction is denounced as disloyalty.

Which brings us back, inexorably, to the central question. When a president persistently undermines the institutions his predecessors helped build, starves the mechanisms that alleviate global suffering, threatens peace with words as lightly as others sign treaties, and governs through contradiction rather than coherence, the issue is no longer stylistic or ideological. It is constitutional.

Previously, I had asked the question: who will bell the cat, and when? If the system continues to hesitate, how much institutional decay, social cost, and international instability must accumulate before accountability takes the form the Constitution itself foresaw?

At what point, in other words, does impeachment cease to be a political taboo and become a democratic necessity?

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 6 February 2026