“My team is losing, battered and bruising./ I see the high-fives between the bad guys.” Taylor Swift’s “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince” song is a critique of America’s domestic politics, but it could well be our theme song on the world stage today too, as many at home and abroad talk of America’s decline.
Some pundits and experts speak of a multipolar world in which many global powers hold sway. Others assert we’ve shifted to a world of two competing superpowers, with America countered by a rising China.
The one thing they seem to agree on is that the American century is over, with the United States no longer dictating the path of world events. This comes against a backdrop of a more violent world, with 2022 and 2023 seeing more conflict than any other years since the end of the Cold War, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. All of this threatens American, and global, security.
However, as Swift, a global megastar, has demonstrated, a setback need not precipitate a downfall. If anyone knows how to land an epic comeback, it’s her. She might not be an authority in foreign policy, but she understands relationships, and at its core, that’s what international affairs is all about.
While talent has been an essential factor to her success, that alone wouldn’t generate the kind of loyalty Swift inspires and the kind of influence she wields the world over. What separates her from her peers is authenticity, credibility and honesty. In a world where lesser pop stars feign perfection, Swift exposes her flaws and holds herself accountable for them. A savvy influencer, she knows this is what her audience wants: music that tells her real story.
[ Steve Chapman: How Taylor Swift restored my faith in humanity ]
This is what makes her the world’s biggest superstar today. If America wants to be the world’s biggest superstar state, it ought to lean into those values too.
To start, it takes some humility and recognition of the role we played in our own decline. We are the “Castles Crumbling” that Swift sings of. “Once, I was the great hope for a dynasty./ Crowds would hang on my words, and they trusted me./ Their faith was strong, but I pushed it too far./ … And here I sit alone, behind walls of regret/ Falling down like promises that I never kept.”
Many countries today won’t follow our lead because of the promises we haven’t kept. Take the climate crisis, in which the United States urges developing countries to give up fossil fuels, even as our own government expands oil and gas drilling and still subsidizes the fossil fuel industry. We need to lead by our example, not our demands.
[ Letters: Bring an end to the billions of dollars in fossil fuel subsidies in the US ]
Our credibility also suffers when we don’t hold others to account. Our partners face no consequences for thumbing their noses at us, and the resulting impunity means that those we support directly harm our interests.
Consider Saudi Arabia, where America has bet that, if we provide military hardware and support, Saudis will help us by keeping oil prices in check. For this, we repeatedly turned a blind eye to the kingdom’s horrific human rights record. But Saudi Arabia has used OPEC to slash oil production repeatedly anyway, in cahoots with Russia just when we needed increased pressure on Moscow. This bet hasn’t paid off.
Swift’s Saudi Arabia was Kanye West, now known as Ye, who bullied and embarrassed her. At first, Swift thought she needed to make amends, even though he was the one acting badly. That only fueled his bad behavior (as impunity always does). His offenses became a liability, so she learned from this and walked away.
“There I was giving you a second chance./ But you stabbed me in the back while shaking my hand/ And therein lies the issue, friends don’t try to trick you,” Swift sings in “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.” With partners like these, who needs enemies?
With Israel, our long-standing relationship blinded us to the extreme direction its government has taken in recent years and blocked us from decisive action to change its approach to Gaza. The United States still acts like this is the Israel it partnered with in the 1990s for a path to Middle East peace. Helping Israel today means recognizing our partner has changed. Instead of unconditional love, we need tough love to press Israel to change course.
We should know “All Too Well” that it’s Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel now. While President Joe Biden gives him a bear hug, he “breaks (us) like a promise,” rebuffing U.S. advice even as he asks for more military hardware — and gets it. But “Band-aids don’t fix bullet holes.” With Netanyahu, we’ve got “Bad Blood.”
“Did you think we’d be fine?/ Still got scars on my back from your knife/ So don’t think it’s in the past./ These kind of wounds, they last and they last.”
President Joe Biden is greeted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after arriving at Ben Gurion International Airport on Oct. 18, 2023, in Tel Aviv, Israel. (Evan Vucci/AP)
When it comes to adversaries, Swift leans into hard work and uses the rules to her advantage — another good lesson for a stronger foreign policy. Swift was crushed when her old record label was sold to mega-manager Scooter Braun (an ally of her old foe Ye), giving him the rights to her master recordings up to 2018. By then, Swift knew well enough to negotiate to own her music rights going forward. To recover control of her prior work, though, Swift rerecorded a decade’s worth of her old songs, a massive lift that paid off, giving her copyright over all the new versions — which are obviously preferred by her hundreds of millions of fans.
I imagine this would be her approach to competition with China too. She knows it doesn’t pay to be a bully (ask Ye). Instead of boogeyman-ing the adversary with unilateral tariffs and trade restrictions, a Swiftie approach would work with allies and within the international order to hold China to account for violating fair trade practices, stealing intellectual property and engaging in economic espionage.
This contrasts with some recent recommendations from the U.S. House Select Committee on the competition between the U.S. and China to be more aggressive with China in ways that could themselves risk violating international law. A better approach would be to invest more at home to make American businesses more competitive, while using international law to pressure China. Calling for the enforcement of international law is more credible when you’re abiding by it too, anyway.
Swift would surely support how Biden values allies. One of Biden’s biggest foreign policy successes has been rebuilding our partnership with NATO and using that to build a strong multilateral response to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Swift puts a premium on allies too. She has had many romantic partners over the years and even wrote songs about most of them. Despite breakups under public scrutiny, she has managed to keep most of her exes onside even after the romance ends. One even starred in one of her recent music videos. The same honesty and authenticity that rally her fans are the secret sauce to Swift’s success with exes, too, and that broad support only makes her stronger.
Friendship bracelets for world leaders created by global Swiftie Sara Martire. (Sara Martire)
It takes a skilled diplomat to know which disappointments are worth ending relationships and which merely merit changing them. That doesn’t mean she trusts easily again, though. As Swift says in “End Game”: “I bury hatchets, but I keep maps of where I put ’em.”
If the United States wants to rebuild its superstar status, it needs to build a broader support base too. Our traditional allies are with us, but that isn’t enough to tackle climate change, manage pandemics or expand peace in an increasingly fractured world.
America’s coalition of support for Ukraine was significant but hasn’t expanded since the early days of the war, with many important players — including China, India and South Africa — still refusing to condemn Russia’s aggression. Fifteen African countries abstained from the United Nations vote demanding Russia leave Ukrainian territory.
Across the Global South, many American partners don’t understand why they should support Washington’s priority, when Washington offers little to address theirs. Conflict plagues many African states, from the Sahel to Sudan to the Democratic Republic of Congo, and debt is undermining development across much of the rest. These crises affect far more people than Gaza and Ukraine but receive a fraction of international attention. If America wants more reliable partners, it needs to be a better partner to others as well. This means engaging with them as partners rather than just pawns in a great power game.
“It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me,” Swift declares in “Anti-Hero.” “I’ll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror.” The world today is facing unprecedented challenges. To help resolve them, the United States needs to face up to its own weaknesses first.
While we claim to be the indispensable nation representing democracy, human rights and accountability, that often isn’t how we act. The America the world sees doesn’t always look like the America we sing songs about.
“America the Flawed”? Such a song might not be a catchy anthem, but Swift has shown us that being real and honest has more pull than pretending to be perfect.
If we could tell our story of redemption, putting in the hard work at home and having flaws but overcoming them, perhaps we could build a worldwide fan base capable of addressing the global challenges we all face.
Elizabeth Shackelford is a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune. She was previously a U.S. diplomat and is the author of “The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age.”
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
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