“Don’t make any sudden
moves” is the advice offered to the new president by Richard Haass of the
Council on Foreign Relations, which has not traditionally been known as a beer
hall of populist beliefs.
Haass meant the president should bring his National Security
Council together to anticipate the consequences before tearing up the Iran
nuclear deal, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem or shooting down a missile
being tested by Kim Jong-Un.
In arguing against rash action, Haass is correct.
Where the CFR and the establishment are wrong, and Donald Trump
is right, however, is in recognizing the new world we have entered.
The old order is passing away. Treaties and alliances dating
from the Cold War are ceasing to be relevant and cannot long be sustained.
Economic patriotism and ethnonationalism, personified by Trump,
seem everywhere ascendant. Transnationalism is yielding to tribalism.
The greater danger for President Trump is that the movement he
led will be abandoned, its hopes dashed, and the agenda that Trump rejected and
routed will be reimposed by a Republican Establishment and its collaborators in
politics and the press.
Again, it was Trump who read the nation right, which is why he
is taking the oath today.
The existential threat to the West no longer comes from the
East, from a Russian army crashing through Poland and Germany and driving for
the Elbe and Fulda Gap.
The existential threat to the West comes, instead, from the
South.
The billion-plus peoples of the Maghreb, Middle East and
sub-Sahara, whose numbers are exploding, are moving inexorably toward the Med,
coming to occupy the empty places left by an aging and dying Europe, all of
whose native-born populations steadily shrink.
American’s bleeding border is what concerns Americans, not the
borders of Estonia, South Korea, Kuwait or the South China Sea.
When Trump calls NATO “obsolete,” he is saying that the great
threat to the West is not Putin’s recapture of a Crimea that belonged to Russia
for 150 years. And if the price of peace is getting out of Russia’s face and
Russia’s space, maybe we should pay it.
George Kennan himself, the architect of Cold War containment of
Stalin’s Russia, admonished us not to move NATO to Russia’s border.
Of Brexit, the British decision to leave the EU, Trump said this
week, “People, countries want their own identity, and the U.K. wanted its own
identity … so if you ask me, I believe others will leave.”
Is he not right? Is it so shocking to hear a transparent truth?
How could Europe’s elites not see the populist forces rising?
The European peoples wished to regain their lost sovereignty and national
identity, and they were willing to pay a price to achieve it.
Apparently, the Davos crowd cannot comprehend people who believe
there are more important things than wealth.
Yet while President Trump should avoid rash actions, if he is to
become a transformational president, he will spurn an establishment desperately
seeking to hold onto the world that is passing away.
Article V of the NATO treaty may require us to treat a Russian
move in the Baltic as an attack on the United States. But no sane president
will start a war with a nuclear-armed Russia over Estonia.
No Cold War president would have dreamed of so rash an action.
Rather than risk such a war, Ike refused to send a rifle or
bullet to the heroic Hungarian rebels in 1956. Painful, but Ike put America
first, just as Trump pledged to do.
And given the strength of ethnonationalism in Europe, neither
the eurozone nor the EU is likely to survive the decade. We should prepare for
that day, not pretend that what is taking place across Europe, and indeed
worldwide, is some passing fever of nationalism.
Notwithstanding Secretary of State-designate Rex Tillerson’s
diktat, the United States is not going to force China to vacate the fortified
reefs in a South China Sea she claims as her national territory.
Stick to that demand, and we best prepare for war.
As for the Taiwan card, it was played in 1972 by Richard Nixon
as the price of his opening to China. Four decades ago, Jimmy Carter cut
diplomatic ties to Taiwan and terminated our security pact.
For Xi Jinping to accept that Taiwan might be negotiable would
mean an end of him and the overthrow of his Communist Party of China.
The Chinese will fight to prevent a permanent loss of Taiwan.
The imperative of the new era is that the great nuclear powers –
China, Russia, the United States – not do to each other what Britain, France
and Germany did to each other a century ago over a dead archduke.
President Trump should build the wall, secure the border, impose
tariffs, cut taxes, free up the American economy, bring the factories home,
create millions of jobs and keep us out of any new wars.
With rare exceptions, wars tend to be fatal to presidencies.
