Make America Weak
David R. Lurie
Trump during his press event at Mar-a-Lago (Tasos
Katopodis/Getty) where he announced his plan for a "Golden Fleet" of giant, high-tech battleships at a time when drones are rendering large warships obsolete
The new White House “National Security Strategy” announced
that the Trump regime will treat the democratically elected governments of most
Western European nations as adversaries of the United States, and unveiled a
plan to join longtime adversaries in seeking to undermine NATO and the European
Union.
While such a course of action would gravely damage the US,
it is of a piece with Trump’s assaults on the nation he was elected to lead.
As the first year of Trump’s would-be dictatorship
concludes, it’s clear that the president considers the rules-based democratic
and economic order a barrier to his goal of establishing an autocracy. Given
his dictatorial ambitions, it makes perfect sense for his regime to cozy up to
strongmen while treating America’s principal democratic allies as enemies.
The future of the United States, and likely of many of our
allies, will depend on whether Trump’s systematic assaults on democratic
nations and institutions here and abroad are successful.
Weakening allies, strengthening adversaries
Trump’s “National Security Strategy” declares that the US
will focus on “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within
European nations.” That amounts to a declaration that America will promote
regime change in countries that remain governed by pro-democracy parties that
support the existence of the EU and NATO.
In attempting to justify this bizarre remaking of US foreign
policy, the “Strategy” complains that the leading democracies of Europe — which
collectively represent one of the largest and most prosperous economic zones in
the world — are in a state of crisis. It even declares they are at risk of
“civilizational erasure,” purportedly because they — perish the thought —
continue to permit immigration.
In place of our longstanding and prosperous European allies,
the “Strategy” indicates Trump will attempt to build a new core of allies,
comprised largely of those European nations that have elected highly
nationalist (and in many cases, pro-Russian) governments, such as Hungary. It
also implies Trumpers will try to use their newly reconstituted core of
pro-Russian European allies as a mechanism for weakening both the EU and NATO,
despite the fact that the US is the leader of the latter alliance and has long
promoted the former.
In fact, the plan set forth in the “Strategy” document is
already being implemented.
For example, Vice President JD Vance and then-Trump acolyte
Elon Musk openly meddled in German politics earlier this year by encouraging
citizens of that country to vote for the neo-fascist (and pro-Russian) AfD
party.
And Trumpers not only valorize the authoritarian regime of
Hungarian prime minister (and Trump stooge) Victor Orban, but have used Orban’s
actions as models for their assaults on media, educational, and cultural
institutions within the US.
Furthermore, Trump is now pressuring Ukraine — over the
objections of European democracies — to accept “peace” terms that include
surrendering territory in Donetsk that constitutes that nation’s bulwark
against Russian invasion of the entire country.
A Ukraine vulnerable to a
complete invasion by Russia will, inevitably, also mean a Europe vulnerable to
attack, particularly if Trump withdraws the bulk of US forces from the
continent (which he’s already
started doing).
Consistent with Trump’s now overt plan to effectively switch
sides in Europe, his “peace” envoy Steve Witkoff declared that
Russia — which nightly bombs Ukrainian in relentless terror attacks — “remains
fully committed to achieving peace in Ukraine.” Meanwhile, Trump’s director of
national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told a
Turning Point USA audience over the weekend that the “deep state,” EU, and NATO
are “undermin[ing] President Trump’s efforts towards peace” and scheming to
“pull the US military into a direct conflict with Russia.”
If this increasingly explicit scheme to gut longstanding
alliances with European democracies “succeeds,” it will not only be potentially
catastrophic for Europe, but also for the US — the principal economic and
political beneficiary of the post-war international order that Trump and his
cronies are assaulting. Indeed, the Trump “Strategy” is entirely consistent
with the goals of both Putin’s Russia and China’s authoritarian regime, both of
which have long viewed the weakening of the Western alliance as a key part of
their effort to displace the US as the leading power in the world.
Accordingly, Trump’s “Strategy” for weakening our allies in
Europe is effectively a blueprint for weakening the United States.
The war within
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This is real, not a joke. |
Trump is the first president of any party to make it the US
policy to gravely weaken the country’s standing in the world.
Yet, as the first
year of the his second term comes to a close, it has become clear that his
efforts to sabotage America’s economic, political, and defense relationships
with major democracies abroad are part and parcel of “policies” he’s been
pursuing at home — all calculated to make our nation more susceptible to
autocracy.
For instance, Trump’s scheme to culturally cleanse the US of
the foreign born is succeeding, but at the great expense of the nation.
While he campaigned on a purported plan to “secure the
border,” Trump and his acolytes have since made clear that their actual
ambition was to gut nearly the entire post-war immigration system.
The scheme has been remarkably “successful” in that — for
the first time in decades — Trump has engineered net negative emigration. The
problem is that this comes at a grave cost. For decades, immigrants have been a
crucial economic engine for the US, allowing our economy to grow and be far
more resilient than virtually any peer country.
While Trumpers like Vance celebrate the expulsion of
immigrants, contending it “frees up” homes and jobs for those who remain, the
reality is that an aging US — one with fewer productive workers — will
inevitably become less prosperous. The Trump regime, however, is more concerned
about increasing the white and “native born” population for the sake of
remaking of the nation. As Vance put it at the recent Turning Point gathering,
his movement wants an America in which “you don’t have to apologize for being white
anymore.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s assault on trade has empowered America’s
adversaries and competitors. He sold his unilaterally imposed tariff “policies”
as a means of increasing prosperity at home, and of harming China, the US’s
principal economic rival. But in fact, the direct opposite occurred.
The greatest beneficiary of Trump’s moves to hobble the
participation of American companies in international markets has been China,
which managed to offset many of its declines in exports to the US by increasing
exports to other nations, many of them aggrieved by Trump’s actions. In
addition, as Trump’s tariff scheme has begun to unravel due to growing
inflation and retaliation, he’s rapidly made the US into a supplicant of China
— the very nation he initially claimed he would bring to heel.
Trump and his emissaries have been reduced to begging
President Xi to resume purchases of soybeans and other agricultural goods that
China contracted to buy from other countries at a massive cost to American
farmers. They’ve also been pleading for China to resume selling rare earth
elements to the US, since limiting the availability of them, as China has been
doing, could cripple many industries.
It’s now all but certain that Trump and his cronies will
leave America’s role in the international markets that fueled our nation’s
growth greatly impaired and diminished. But they are entirely willing to do
such damage to our country, apparently because they believe a more inwardly
focused (and less prosperous) America will serve their autocratic goals.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Trump is engaged in a
comprehensive assault on the rule of law, once again to advance his dictatorial
ends.
The rule of law is not merely an abstraction — it’s an asset
that has been critical to America’s status as the center of international
business and finance since the end of World War II. The expectation that
contracts will be honored and that markets will be regulated in a predictable
and largely corruption-free manner has given America a massive competitive
advantage over autocratic nations. It has also made the US the preferred site
for financial transactions and investments of most every kind, with incalculable
economic benefits for the American people.
But Trump views such laws and rules as impediments to his
personal power and has set out to undermine them in increasingly overt ways.
Trump’s Department of Justice has effectively stopped
prosecuting whole categories of financial corruption. The president has also
made a mockery of the nation’s legal system by openly selling pardons,
especially to financial fraudsters with whom he appears to have a particular
affinity. This activity amounts to an advertisement that the Trump regime is
abandoning America’s commitment to adhere to the rule of law.
A glaring example of the administration’s replacement of
ordered and regulated markets with a shadowy world of influence peddling is
Trumpers’ exploitation of cryptocurrency markets, which Trump’s family and
cronies have employed to accumulate what reportedly amounts
to billions of dollars in wealth in just a matter of months.
But for the
president, the appearance that government actions are for sale to the highest
bidders is a feature, not a bug.
Trump has transformed some of the nation’s largest publicly
traded companies into mechanisms for him to extract personal and political
benefits. For instance, he recently announced that he plans to meddle in the
contest for the sale of Warner Brothers in favor of Paramount, a company now
controlled by the Trump-supporting Ellison family, in part to ensure that CNN
is transformed into a clone of Fox News.
This is not the first time Trump has interfered in markets
to extract personal pecuniary and political benefits — he did the same thing in
connection with the acquisition of Paramount by an entity controlled by the
Ellisons.
Trump clearly relishes the prospect of replacing the
infrastructure of regulatory and law enforcement agencies that have long
insulated US financial markets from direct political meddling with an openly
corrupt and authoritarian system in which the interests of Trump himself
determine winners and losers. But when the rule of law in a country is
displaced by arbitrary and unpredictable authoritarian rule, as happened in
Putin’s Russia, the results are predictable: investors and companies flee to
more stable environs as the economy declines.
The president and his cronies are, however, more than
willing to make the US pay a high price for their aggrandizement.
High stakes
A year in to Trump 2.0, it’s clear that Trumpers do, indeed,
have a strategy — one intended to weaken America at home and abroad.
A fully Trumped America will be a diminished nation, having
squandered the assets of democracy, the rule of law, and a dynamic and growing
economy — along with democratic allies — that have actually made America great,
all so Trump can obtain the dictatorial control he craves.
In recent weeks, we have seen indications that the majority
of the American people are beginning to recognize the depth of the threat Trump
poses to the United States, let alone the world. But as his popularity
diminishes and his political power becomes more contested, he’s likely to
become more reckless and more determined to harm the nation he was elected to
lead. Americans, therefore, must be prepared to defend their country with only
greater vigilance and vigor.
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