Can't put America first without projecting our values
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
The Washington Post
A concern for human rights and democracy has often been seen as an add-on to our country’s foreign policy, an attractive veneer over the usual realpolitik. But President Trump is demonstrating that a supposedly “America First” policy focused entirely on trade and divorced from a commitment to our values is incoherent.
Trump is embarrassing our country — and weakening it, too — by refusing to stand with the people of Hong Kong as they struggle against China’s dictatorship.
We have long wondered when the thoughtless chaos of Trump’s presidency would finally catch up with him and endanger our country. How long could an administration that replaces policy with impulse and thinking with tweeting stay out of crisis? The disarray around Trump’s China policy and the economic turmoil it has unleashed tell us that moment is now.
Somehow, Trump seemed to think that he could be tough on China and still express his admiration for President Xi Jinping’s brutally authoritarian rule.
“He’s now president for life. President for life. And he’s great,” Trump told Republican donors at a fundraising event at his Mar-a-Lago estate in early 2018. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll give that a shot some day.”
So it should not surprise us that as Xi tries to put down pro-democracy forces in Hong Kong, Trump was ready to employ “the language used by Communist Party officials,” as The New York Times put it, in saying on Aug. 1 that Hong Kong has had “riots for a long period of time.”
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