America on Retreat
Before a United Nations General Assembly Session on Sept. 25, Donald Trump repeated one of his more asinine talking points—that his Administration “has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” The response? Laughter. Yes, the Assembly of the United Nations quite literally laughed at the President of the United States.
For many of our allies, however, that laugh must have been a rather nervous one, because beneath the ridiculousness of Trump’s Twitter outbursts and blatant lies rests a much more dangerous geopolitical reality. In Trump’s desire to pursue his “America First” policy, he seems to have abandoned a fundamental principle of American foreign policy: that the United States must never shrink from the defense of its allies or its principles. Instead, he appears to be pursuing a “moneyball” policy of seeking to negotiate the “best deal” for the US, often at the cost of the very values that our country has spilled its own blood to defend.
Case in point: NATO. Trump is seemingly fixated on securing a “better deal” for the United States. This, of course, means that he believes our NATO allies should spend more on defense, more than what they had previously pledged. There is nothing wrong with such a desire; pretty much every American President has said as much. But in trying to obtain that goal, he threatened the very foundation of the North Atlantic Treaty by, for the first time in NATO history, failing to reaffirm Article V, which establishes the principle of collective defense, the notion that if one member is attacked, all are, and must respond in kind. That one article is by every measure the most important in the charter, in that it provides the framework for NATO’s very existence, based upon the notion that NATO democracies stick together through any crisis.
In his failure to do what every US president in the NATO-era has done, Trump called into question whether the United States would defend the countries under its own nuclear and military umbrella, a deeply unsettling reality for countries like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, who live under the near constant threat of Russian invasion.
The matter, of course, hardly ends there. Trump has a long history of admiring the world’s worst human rights abusers, dictators and strongmen. He’s publicly praised Muammar Gaddafi, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, and has even retweeted a Mussolini quote. He saves the most praise of all, of course, for Kim Jong-Un, publicly thanking the North Korean autocrat in his UN Speech, despite no real signs of progress being made towards denuclearization. And let us make clear that in the pursuit of a vague treaty, Trump effectively legitimized Pyongyang’s government before the entire world, even saluting a North Korean general (a clip repeatedly played on DPRK state television), and Trump cancelled joint military operations with South Korea before consulting them. These “war games,” as some have called them, ensure that the United States and its South Korean allies remain able to respond to military threats to Korean sovereignty quickly and effectively. So, yes, Trump, in a meeting with an enemy of the United States, agreed to cancel vital preparedness exercises without consulting the involved allies, all in pursuit of a vague promise of “denuclearization.”
America’s allies should be taking a serious look right now at the happenings in the United States, because all signs seem to indicate that the US is willing to abandon its traditional obligations to the security of such countries as Estonia or South Korea. Simply put, America is vital to a secure, safe and just world order and has long been the defender of human liberty in foreign policy. Without that leadership, who’s left to take the leading role in the world? China, a serial abuser of human rights, jailer of dissidents and destroyer of churches? Russia, a nation who literally poisoned British diplomats?
Trump doesn’t seem to wrap his head around that very fundamental concept—that the United States can’t just look out for itself, but must also fight for the higher principles on which it was founded, lest the free world falls into disarray.