Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Wednesday that the United States’ role on the global stage has been “diminished” under President Donald Trump. And he warned it could take a long, long time to restore.
Appearing on “The Late Show,” Buttigieg reflected on how America’s standing in the world has changed since his student days.
Host Stephen Colbert aired footage of Buttigieg as a Harvard student in 2001, asking whether the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. would reshape how Americans viewed their global role.
Colbert then asked Buttigieg how he sees that role now.
Buttigieg replied: “Diminished, sadly.”
“I mean, when I was a student, it was just understood that the U.S. was the leading nation in the world — not just the biggest, not just the richest, not just the most powerful, but the country that people looked to because of our values as well as because of our strength,” he continued.
But under Trump, he argued, there “are now, by some measures, more people around the world who trust China to do the right thing than the United States.”
“That should bother every patriotic American,” he warned. “You don’t have to be a foreign policy buff to be concerned about that or to be affected by that. That affects everything from our security as a country to the prices we pay at the store.”
Buttigieg warned it could take “a generation to establish the credibility and the trust that the U.S. had it almost seemed by right” previously.