On America's role in the world

In the past few years, I have the fortunate opportunity to travel to many foreign countries including Israel, Switzerland, France, UK, Denmark, Hungary, Estonia, Brazil, and Japan.

When I chat with people (as you know I do), and they ask me about American politics. I express my sadness at the amount of discord we currently have. 

I'm pretty patriotic, believe in the ideals of America, and think that the Constitution is one of the greatest documents of all time.

While Europeans, in particular, like to poke fun at Americans, deep down, I think they admire what America represents.

They may make comments about how much we spend on defense, but in their moments of intellectual honesty, they will admit, "when things get nasty, we're pretty glad you do it."

They also recognize that, if America totally opened its borders, there would be 1 billion people who would try and immigrate the next day.

They understand that, despite all of our flaws, we have a product that is in ridiculously high demand worldwide.

They want us to lead.

We're not doing it.

And I'm not going down the anti-Trump or anti-GOP route. I think the Democrats are just as bad. Trump may be failing us now, but Obama failed us in Iran and N. Korea...and probably China.

I'm not sure where/why we became this way, but I think it's a symptom of a disease internal to the US which I don't fully understand.

I'm not saying the US is better in all respects than every other country and there are plenty of reasons why someone (rationally) would choose to live there.  All I am saying is that, at this stage in world history, I believe America has a unique role to play and we're not playing it.

Republicans and Democrats share the blame and I wish (I know, naively) that they could see what I see when I talk to people.