When the Leader of the Free World Is an Ugly American
By THOMAS MEANEY and STEPHEN WERTHEIM MARCH 9, 2018
Bad times are often interesting times. So it is with President Trump, whose insults and assaults have caused his critics to rethink what they know about their country. For the past year, American intellectuals have largely risen to the challenge, igniting new debates about race, class, gender and democracy itself. Whether these debates will translate into electoral victory remains unclear, but at least Mr. Trump’s foes are grappling with the forces behind his rise. The president’s critics realize that long-festering social divisions must be confronted. But one area of debate has remained strikingly stagnant. On foreign policy, Trumpism’s critics wax nostalgic for an imagined golden age before the president took office. The foreign policy establishment — from media pundits to think-tank wonks to government veterans — has reached near-perfect harmony in insisting that he radically departs from American foreign policy since World War II. The news this week that he intends to introduce tariffs on steel and aluminum is seen as just one more dramatic deviation.
These critics exaggerate Mr. Trump’s abnormality, allowing him to outperform prognostications of doom. This line of thinking offers nothing better than the status quo ante that voters found uninspiring at best and repellent at worst. In effect, our finest minds are using this president to avoid addressing the problems of American foreign policy.
How did Mr. Trump manage to confound America’s foreign policy mandarins? The trouble began during the campaign, when he pitted the United States against the world. On one level, this bluster promised the same thing candidates always do: Win wars decisively or don’t wage them; get more benefits for fewer burdens. But after Mr. Trump chanted “America First,” a string of experts concluded he’d resurrected the so-called isolationism of the 1930s, rather than believing him when he explained he was just seeking a good slogan (one not unlike John McCain’s “Country First” from 2008). And what was the harm in piling on? The brute deserved to be barred from office. Branding him an isolationist seemed disqualifying.
This warning — delivered by scores of bipartisan national security experts — failed to dissuade voters. Still, the experts stuck with it. They detected isolationism in everything from his inaugural address to his withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which even Hillary Clinton had pledged to abandon. This misdiagnosis handed Mr. Trump the opportunity to outflank his critics. When he bombed a Syrian airfield, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, wondered whether the president was “something wholly unique in the history of the presidency: an isolationist interventionist,” as though yoking opposites together provided insight rather than revealed confusion. Mr. Trump now says he is willing to meet with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, more proof that catastrophe-mongering leaves his critics flat-footed.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/opinion/sunday/donald-trump-foreign-policy.html
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