I don't care much about the notion of American "dominance" or "prestige" but I do care a lot about the prospect of the planet being blown up and destroying the institutions and alliances that make it possible to reverse catastrophic climate change. Such a doomsday scenario is becoming closer to reality as Donald Trump continues to dictate American foreign policy from his gaudy social club in Palm Beach.
One of the best things about the Trump administration was how copiously it leaked to the press. In real time — and later through the many books and articles that were written about that tumultuous term — we had a very detailed understanding of the man's worldview when he went in and now we know that even after four years in the most important job in the world, he didn't learn a thing about world affairs.
According to "A Very Stable Genius" by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, by July 2017, it had become clear to Trump's national security and economic team that he desperately needed some tutoring to understand the importance of America's key alliances. So they prepared a briefing with visual aids to ensure that Trump didn't get bored and assembled the top military brass as well as relevant Cabinet members to instruct Trump about U.S. military and diplomatic alliances. He didn't want to hear it, demanding to know why the U.S. hadn't won the war in Afghanistan, calling it a "loser war," and interrupting the briefing to complain about the Iran nuclear deal and NATO. He yelled, "you’re all losers. You don’t know how to win anymore. I wouldn’t go to war with you people. You’re a bunch of dopes and babies." After Trump stormed out of the meeting, then secretary of state Rex Tillerson famously turned to the room and declared, "He's a f—-ing moron." Tillerson was not wrong.
This was the same meeting at which Trump asked why South Korea isn't more appreciative of America's military alliance and indicated that he wanted to restore the U.S. nuclear arsenal to 1960s levels. (He later denied that he said that, claiming that he only wanted to completely modernize it, a task that had already started under the Obama administration.) Throughout his term, Trump never understood why the country that he led benefited from the alliances that America had made in the nuclear age, apparently failing to grasp that if you have the most nuclear bombs on the planet, you have a special responsibility to keep a lid on the possibility of WWIII.
Despite his insistence that he hated nuclear proliferation (he claimed he knew all about it because his uncle was a nuclear scientist at MIT) Trump was fatalistic about the prospect, telling CNN back in 2016 that he thought that Japan and South Korea might as well develop nuclear weapons for themselves:
It's going to happen anyway. It's going to happen anyway. It's only a question of time. They're going to start having them or we have to get rid of them entirely. But you have so many countries already, China, Pakistan, you have so many countries, Russia, you have so many countries right now that have them. Now, wouldn't you rather in a certain sense have Japan have nuclear weapons when North Korea has nuclear weapons?
This fatalism stems from the ongoing, puerile obsession that America is being cheated and that the rest of the world should just fend for itself or pay big bucks to the U.S. for protection. This is why he continues to threaten to withdraw from NATO and says that he'd encourage Russia to "do whatever the hell they want." He clearly still fails to grasp the existential threat of nuclear proliferation and simply cannot understand that U.S. security guarantees benefit America largely because they prevent the spread of nuclear weapons — and mitigate the risk of a planet-destroying nuclear war. He still doesn't get it, even now, after being president for four years.
And it's scaring the hell out of the world, especially our allies.
In the Atlantic this week, Anne Applebaum offers the view from abroad and it's sobering. America's European allies are taking Trump's threats very seriously, not because they are new but because they are seeing that he controls the Republican Party even out of office and the Republican Party has now adopted his worldview. The unwillingness to allow Ukraine military aid in this dire moment tells them that America is no longer a reliable ally, even if the Democrats are in charge:
For outsiders, this reality is mind-boggling, difficult to comprehend and impossible to understand. In the week that the border compromise failed, I happened to meet a senior European Union official visiting Washington. He asked me if congressional Republicans realized that a Russian victory in Ukraine would discredit the United States, weaken American alliances in Europe and Asia, embolden China, encourage Iran, and increase the likelihood of invasions of South Korea or Taiwan. Don’t they realize? Yes, I told him, they realize....
Since then, I’ve had a version of that conversation with many other Europeans, in Munich and elsewhere, and indeed many Americans. Intellectually, they understand that the Republican minority is blocking this money on behalf of Trump. They watched first McCarthy, then Johnson, fly to Mar-a-Lago to take instructions. They know that Senator Lindsey Graham, a prominent figure at the Munich Security Conference for decades, backed out abruptly this year after talking with Trump. They see that Donald Trump Jr. routinely attacks legislators who vote for aid to Ukraine, suggesting that they be primaried. The ex-president’s son has also said the U.S. should “cut off the money” to Ukrainians, because “it’s the only way to get them to the table.” In other words, it’s the only way to make Ukraine lose.
The Europeans are taking all this very seriously and one has to assume that America's allies elsewhere are as well. This may very well lead to fullscale re-armament — and they are in active discussions to build their own nuclear arsenals. This is a catastrophic consequence of Donald Trump's narcissism and ignorance.
What's most profoundly disturbing about this is that it's not the result of a serious shift in ideology by the Republican Party. The change from the days of Ronald Reagan and John McCain and even George W. Bush on foreign policy and national security has been abrupt and done without any thought or care at all for implications. It's happened because the party has turned into a cult that worships one man and that man has such staggering character flaws and intellectual defects that it could take the whole world down the road to perdition.
