President Donald Trump is engaged in an "abdication" of U.S. global leadership, said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations said.
His comments came during an interview on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" on Tuesday night.
Haass, who served in the State Department under President George W. Bush, maintained the current administration is not isolationist. And he cited military strike in Syria and Afghanistan.
"The reason I use the word 'abdication' is what they've done is unilaterally — it wasn't forced on them — they chose to walk away from many of the institutions, frameworks, introduce questions into alliances that have really formed or informed American foreign policy now for nearly three quarters of a century," he said.
"What's so interesting, what's really unprecedented, it wasn't because we don't have the capacity. We're still the world's strongest economy, the world's strongest military.
"We've essentially decided in many cases that we simply don't think it's worth it, that we don't want to do it anymore. I think that's flawed. It's based on a real misreading of the costs and benefits of U.S. leadership."
And he said it has made U.S. allies "less reliant on us" in the short run and "diminished respect" for the government. And he added that Trump has introduced a degree of "unpredictability" and "unreliability" into U.S. relationships.
"What I think it has done is accelerated the move by others to carry out a more independent foreign policy that doesn't defer as much to the United States," he said.
Meanwhile, Newsweek reported that a study by Eurasia Group, said U.S. influence in the world will continue to decline in 2018.
The group advises hedge funds and multination corporations about the impact of politics on business, the magazine noted.
"We now see more clearly a world without leadership," the authors of the report said.
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