The Beltway’s sober and judicious
foreign-policy establishment laments Donald Trump’s purported dismantling of
the postwar order. They apparently take the president’s words as deeds and
their own innate dislike of him as disinterested analysis.
But is the
world really imploding after 70 years of supposed “calm”? (Disregarding the
Korean and Vietnam wars; Chinese, Cambodian, Rwandan, and Balkan genocides; at
least six Middle East conflicts; 9/11; a dozen U.S. interventions; a nuclear
Pakistan and North Korea; the Cuban and Berlin nuclear standoffs; 20 years of
Palestinian terrorism followed by 20 years of radical Islamic successors; a
European Union financial and border meltdown; the Russian absorption of eastern
Ukraine and Crimea, to name just a few “hot spots.”)
In other
words, Trump did not inherit an especially stable world. So has any elite
expert over the past two years attempted to make sense of how some positive and
much-needed change abroad was guided by Trump, someone without political and
military experience and with a flawed character—and how and why that sometimes
happens in history?
Correction,
Not Chaos
In truth, after 2016, the United States is increasing its financial commitments to NATO. Several European members of the alliances may finally be addressing their prior unmet obligations and increasing defense spending.
In truth, after 2016, the United States is increasing its financial commitments to NATO. Several European members of the alliances may finally be addressing their prior unmet obligations and increasing defense spending.
The United
Nations at least understands from Ambassador Nikki Haley that the United States
will call out, rather than aid and abet, its occasional anti-Semitic lunacy.
The president did not arbitrarily cancel the North American Free Trade
Agreement. Instead, the agreement is up for renegotiation on terms other than
the expectation that the United States will always accept asymmetrical deals as
part of its required role as the continent’s superpower.
The world
itself is not in chaos as alleged. It seems a far safer place than it was
between 2009 and 2016. ISIS is no longer a viable threat, promising to
establish a new caliphate, in between beheading, burning alive, and drowning
the innocent on video.
Israel is once
again a strong U.S. ally. Saudi Arabia for the first time in its history is
considering real reform. The Palestinians are beginning to understand that they
can still damn, even threaten the United States, but not necessarily with U.S.
aid money.
Iran is no
longer harassing or hijacking U.S. ships. It is not so frequently boasting
about what it will do to the Great Satan and Israel, much less sending missiles
near U.S. carriers. The world did not fall apart when the U.S. moved its
embassy to Jerusalem or withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord. That fact
instead exposed so-called elite predictions of Armageddon as the hysteria.
Syria
expects to be bombed each time it uses chemical weapons that were declared
“nonexistent” by an outgoing Obama Administration. North Korea is not boasting
any longer of incinerating American West Coast cities, but at least feigning
consultation with China about denuclearizing the peninsula.
China
understands that for two decades a naïve West has let it cheat at will on trade
agreements, on the spurious idea it would become more pro-Western and
democratic, the more that the West subsidized its breakneck modernization. Now
it is at least talking about discussing its asymmetrical relationships with all
its trading partners.
America
Remains the Best and Only Option
Europe offers no alternative paradigm to a supposedly renegade United States. The German model of open borders and economic mercantilism no longer works all that well for Germany. The EU is more fearful of dissolution than preening of expansion.
Europe offers no alternative paradigm to a supposedly renegade United States. The German model of open borders and economic mercantilism no longer works all that well for Germany. The EU is more fearful of dissolution than preening of expansion.
Mexico
understands that the era of exporting its human capital to avoid social justice
reform at home is coming to a close. So, too, is the ruse of championing its
poor only when they are long gone. America is tiring of the strange gymnastics
of illegal immigration. Millions are subsidized by the U.S. social services
safety net to send back to Mexico $30 billion in annual remittances, as their
home government gratuitously tars their benefactor as racist and imperialist.
The U.S.
economy did not implode in early 2017 and take down the world with it. The
stock market did not crash. Our labor non-participation rate did not spiral.
Instead, the country may be on its way to achieving its first 12-month period
of 3 percent growth in 12 years. The stock market is at record highs, despite a
few bumps, and unemployment at near-record peacetime lows.
There is
also not so much talk of always increasing electricity rates, destroying the
coal industry, banning more fracking, and subsidizing more Solyndra-like crony
“green” companies. Instead, the United States is now the world’s largest energy
producer. Soon we may be our own largest petroleum producer. U.S. natural gas
production will likely reduce world carbon emissions more than will European windmills
and American solar panels. American companies are more likely to come home than
to keep pulling up and moving abroad. Silicon Valley tech companies have never
done so well under a president they hate so much.
Leading
from the Front—Again
The U.S. military for the first time in eight years is recovering its former strength. One way or another, there will likely be no more Bowe Bergdahl deals, decreased security at U.S. embassies and consulates in the Middle East, Iran Deals, or “strategic patience” and “lead from behind” doctrines. When outnumbered Americans are trapped in a shootout abroad, it is more likely help will be on the way than the requests of the beleaguered would be put on hold.
The U.S. military for the first time in eight years is recovering its former strength. One way or another, there will likely be no more Bowe Bergdahl deals, decreased security at U.S. embassies and consulates in the Middle East, Iran Deals, or “strategic patience” and “lead from behind” doctrines. When outnumbered Americans are trapped in a shootout abroad, it is more likely help will be on the way than the requests of the beleaguered would be put on hold.
The Obama
“reset” doctrine has long been humiliated and buried. Likewise, the Obama
finger shaking of “cut it out” to Putin seems to be recalibrated by expelling
Russian diplomats, hitting back at Russian mercenary attackers in the Middle
East, and arming Ukrainian defense forces, as the U.S. tries to improve its missile
defenses and upgrade its nuclear forces. No one is talking any more about
bargaining with Vladimir Putin to slash the American nuclear umbrella. I don’t
think new Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is aiming for a Nobel Prize. James
Mattis and John Bolton likely disagree on a lot, but probably not on unchanging
human nature and how to react to it.
Japan and
South Korea certainly do not think America has abandoned them. They seem so far
more eager to show the United States that they are strategic partners. They may
well believe that the Trump Administration is more likely to come to their aid
in extremis than were its mellifluous but otherwise inert Obama predecessors.
The
Establishment is Still Willfully Blind
The above is the reality. To the degree it has been achieved in 16 months by a president who shouts, pouts, cajoles, threatens, exaggerates, and proves unpredictable and mercurial is a commentary on the establishmentarians and their own grasp of human nature. Donald Trump’s postwar order did not give us alienated allies in the Middle East, a rubbery NATO, North Korean intercontinental missiles, Iran on an ascendant arc in the Middle East, China’s new Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Putin unbound, and bewildered enemies like Cuba and Iran wondering why they were courted as friends.
The above is the reality. To the degree it has been achieved in 16 months by a president who shouts, pouts, cajoles, threatens, exaggerates, and proves unpredictable and mercurial is a commentary on the establishmentarians and their own grasp of human nature. Donald Trump’s postwar order did not give us alienated allies in the Middle East, a rubbery NATO, North Korean intercontinental missiles, Iran on an ascendant arc in the Middle East, China’s new Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Putin unbound, and bewildered enemies like Cuba and Iran wondering why they were courted as friends.
This same
strange Washington disconnect between fantasy and reality reigns at home. After
nearly two years of hysteria, there has never been proof adduced of
Trump-Russian collusion. Robert Mueller’s legal team—the party affiliations of
its lawyers, their past involvements with players in contemporary scandals, and
their leaking and scurrilous behaviors and communications—is a textbook example
of how to create conflicts of interest and ensure an absence of public support.
The more
Washington journalists scream of collusion, the more they are willfully blind
to one of the most disturbing scandals in American history brewing right under
their noses. Many in the hierarchy of the Obama FBI, Justice Department, and
national security team likely were involved in illegally spying on U.S.
citizens. They were massaging and warping the FISA courts to issue their
warrants, unmasking many of the names of those surveilled, and then leaking
them improperly and illegally to the media. Nearly a dozen top Justice
Department and FBI officials already have been fired, reassigned, or retired.
None, except James Comey, are now gone because of what Donald Trump did to
them. They’re out as a result of their misguided zeal and careerist
miscalculations, for what they tried to do to the duly elected president of the
United States.
The
resistance to getting to the bottom of the Uranium One scandals, the Hillary
Clinton illegal private email server, the trafficking in classified documents,
the Clinton Foundation façade, and the politicization and weaponization of
Obama-era U.S. intelligence services is not because there was no wrongdoing.
Rather, the
silent fear is more that a disinterested investigation would lead to
discoveries of such a magnitude of wrongdoing by some of the most influential
Americans of the present age, that to seek their indictments would undermine
the structures of the Washington establishment.
How, after
all, could the U.S. Department of Justice indict now-retired Hillary Clinton
for giving false testimony, for illegally using a private email server, for
unleashing her husband to do quid pro quo Clinton Foundation deals—or for
hiring a foreign national to compile a hit dossier of gossip and rumor, much of
its gleaned through the active and bought collusion of Russian operatives, and
empowered by the Obama FBI and Justice Department to undermine the credibility
of the Trump 2016 campaign, and later his transition and presidency?
Life in Two
Worlds
It is one thing for several in the FBI and the Justice Department to be relieved of their jobs. But it is quite another to investigate why the likes of John Brennan, James Clapper, Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice, and others were apparently trafficking in the surveillance of American citizens, or to reexamine whether Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, James Comey, or Andrew McCabe misled investigators or perjured themselves or made up things to Congress, or to reexamine what exactly ex-President Bill Clinton was doing with Russian interests to prompts such huge gifts to the Clinton Foundation and such generous largess to himself—lucre that mysteriously has ceased to flow since November 2016.
It is one thing for several in the FBI and the Justice Department to be relieved of their jobs. But it is quite another to investigate why the likes of John Brennan, James Clapper, Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice, and others were apparently trafficking in the surveillance of American citizens, or to reexamine whether Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, James Comey, or Andrew McCabe misled investigators or perjured themselves or made up things to Congress, or to reexamine what exactly ex-President Bill Clinton was doing with Russian interests to prompts such huge gifts to the Clinton Foundation and such generous largess to himself—lucre that mysteriously has ceased to flow since November 2016.
The media
likewise for the last year has joined the stampede. It is apparently unaware
that its shock at Donald Trump’s rhetoric, behavior, and comportment had
nothing to do with the reality of his governance. In all its self-righteous
exclamation that the new journalism meant reporters had to be advocates of
social justice and opponents of the likes of Donald Trump, the American media
almost turned into a propaganda ministry of 90 percent negative coverage of the
president. Yet by any fair standard, he had not as president done things 90
percent wrong.
The longer,
like Captain Ahab, they hunt down the mythical white Trump whale, the more they
are ruining the very reputation of journalism as they once inherited it.
So, we live
in two worlds. One is the material cosmos of concrete action and deeds. The
other reality is little more than the unfiltered fears, anxieties and fantasies
of ill-informed television talking heads, groupthink opinion journalists, and
progressive zealots who have conflated a sometimes-uncouth president with all
their own apprehensions, and called the result Nazism and fascism.
When this
depressing period in American news and commentary is over, the liberal order
will not like the verdict.
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About the Author: Victor Davis
Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is an American
military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient
warfare. He was a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno,
and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford
University’s Hoover Institution. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale
College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by
President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a
family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to
farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The
Second World Wars – How the First Global Conflict was Fought and Won (Basic
Books).