The Felon's America vs. the World

Unfortunately, far too many Americans do not know history they way they need ot in order to make well reasoned decisions both in terms of America's own true history and most certainly when it comes to international affairs.  This failing seems to be on steroids when it comes to the unqualified advisers and sycophants that surround the Felon, an individual who seems hell bent on blowing up the world order that has kept the United States safe and prosperous for literally my entire life time. Insanely, the Felon and the likes of Stephen miller, the Felon's equivalent to Josef Goebbels, seem to believe they can threaten allies, hit them with tariffs and numerous insults and still have them at one's beck and call when needed  A very long piece in The Atlantic looks at the much more dangerous world the Felon is steering us into which will threaten the United States' global security and lead to increases in defense spending even as everyday Americans pay even higher prices for essential consumer goods. It's as if a madman is now dictating policies that we do anything but make "America First" or "make America great again."  Indeed, unless congressional Republicans grow a spine and put restraints on the Felon, they will be complicit in a serious weakening.  Here are article highlights:

The [Felon's] Trump administration’s National Security Strategy made it official: The American-dominated liberal world order is over. This is not because the United States proved materially incapable of sustaining it. Rather, the American order is over because the United States has decided that it no longer wishes to play its historically unprecedented role of providing global security. The American might that upheld the world order of the past 80 years will now be used instead to destroy it.

Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, one that will make the Cold War look like child’s play and the post–Cold War world like paradise. In fact, this new world will look a lot like the world prior to 1945, with multiple great powers and metastasizing competition and conflict. The U.S. will have no reliable friends or allies and will have to depend entirely on its own strength to survive and prosper. This will require more military spending, not less, because the open access to overseas resources, markets, and strategic bases that Americans have enjoyed will no longer come as a benefit of the country’s alliances. Instead, they will have to be contested and defended against other great powers.

Americans are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future. For eight decades, they have inhabited a liberal international order shaped by America’s predominant strength. They have grown accustomed to the world operating in a certain way: Largely agreeable and militarily passive European and Asian allies cooperate with the United States on economic and security issues. Challengers to the order, such as Russia and China, are constrained by the combined wealth and might of the U.S. and its allies. Global trade is generally free and unhampered by geopolitical rivalry, oceans are safe for travel, and nuclear weapons are limited by agreements on their production and use. Americans are so accustomed to this basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world that they tend to think it is the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely. They can’t imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.

Recently, Trump’s boosters among the foreign-­policy elite have even started pointing to the early-19th-century Concert of Europe as a model for the future, suggesting that skillful diplomacy among the great powers can preserve peace more effectively than the U.S.-led system did in the uni­polar world.

As a purely historical matter, this is delusional. Even the most well-managed multi­polar orders were significantly more brutal and prone to war than the world that Americans have known these past 80 years. To take one example, during what some call the “long peace” in Europe, from 1815 to 1914, the great powers (including Russia and the Ottoman empire) fought dozens of wars with one another and with smaller states to defend or acquire strategic advantage, resources, and spheres of interest. These were not skirmishes but full-scale conflicts, usually costing tens—­sometimes hundreds—­of thousands of lives. Roughly half a million people died in the Crimean War (1853–56); the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) resulted in about 180,000 military and up to 250,000 civilian deaths in less than a year of fighting. Almost every decade from 1815 to 1914 included at least one war involving two or more great powers.

Today’s equivalent of 19th-­century multi­polarity would be a world in which China, Russia, the United States, Germany, Japan, and other large states fought a major war in some combination at least once a decade—redrawing national boundaries, displacing populations, disrupting international commerce, and risking global conflict on a devastating scale. That was the world as it existed for centuries prior to 1945. To believe that such a world can never return would seem to be the height of utopianism.

Precisely to escape this cycle of conflict, the generations of Americans who lived through two world wars laid the foundations of the American-led liberal world order. They were the true realists, because they had no illusions about multi­polarity. They had lived their entire lives with its horrific consequences. . . . . They did this not because they wanted to re-­create the world in America’s image, but because they had learned that the modern world was interconnected in ways that would ultimately draw the United States into the great-power conflicts of Eurasia anyway.

No country had ever before played the role that the traditionally aloof United States took on after 1945.  . . . . This combination of geography and reach allowed the United States after World War II to bring peace and security to Europe and East Asia. Nations scarred by war poured their energies into becoming economic powerhouses. That made global prosperity and international cooperation possible.

Perhaps more extraordinary than America’s ability and willingness to play the dominant role was the readiness of most other great powers to embrace and legitimize its dominance—­even at the expense of their own potency. In the decades after 1945, almost all of the countries that had fought in the world wars gave up their territorial ambitions, their spheres of interest, and even, to some extent, power itself. Britain, France, Germany, and Japan not only relinquished centuries of great-power thinking and conduct but placed their security and the well-being of their people in the hands of the distant American superpower.

[F]ar from regarding the United States as a danger to be contained, most of the world’s powers saw it as a partner to be enlisted. America’s allies made two remarkable wagers: that the United States could be trusted to defend them whenever needed, and that it would not exploit its disproportionate might to enrich or strengthen itself at their expense. To the contrary, it would promote and benefit from its allies’ economic prosperity. . . . This was the grand bargain of the American order after 1945. And it was what allowed for the extraordinary peace and stability of the subsequent decades, even during the Cold War.

All of that is now ending.  [The Felon] Trump has openly celebrated the end of the grand bargain. His administration has told Europeans to be ready to take over their own defense by 2027 and suggested that allies and strategic partners, including Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, should pay the United States for protection. Trump has launched aggressive tariff wars against virtually all of America’s allies. He has waged ideological and political warfare against European governments and explicitly threatened territorial aggression against two NATO allies, Canada and Denmark.

[The Felon] Trump and his supporters seem to believe that the rest of the world will simply accommodate this new American approach, and that allies, in particular, will continue to tag along, subservient to a United States that cuts them loose strategically, exacts steep economic tribute from them, and seeks to establish a “concert” with the powers that directly threaten them. But the radical shift in U.S. strategy must force equally radical shifts among erstwhile friends and allies.

What does Europe do, for instance, now that it faces hostile and aggressive great powers on both its eastern and western flanks? Not only Russia, but now the United States, too, threaten the security and territorial integrity of European states and work to undermine their liberal governments. . . . . Will the once-great European nations surrender to this fate?

If history is any guide, they will choose rearmament instead. The task will be monumental. To mount a plausible defense against further Russian territorial aggression while also deterring American aggression will require not just marginal increases in defense spending but a full-scale strategic and economic reorientation toward self-reliance—a restructuring of European industries, economies, and societies. But if Germany, Britain, France, and Poland all armed themselves to the full extent of their capacity, including with nuclear weapons, and decided to forcefully defend their economic independence, they would collectively wield sufficient power to both deter Russia and cause an American president to think twice before bullying them. If the alternative is subjugation, Europeans could well rise to such a challenge.

Asian partners of the United States will face a similar choice. . . . Japan may need to choose between accepting subservience to China and building up the military capacity necessary for independent deterrence. . . . . South Korea and Australia, too, are reconsidering their defense and economic policies as they wake up to challenges from both East and West.

The consequence of a newly unreliable and even hostile United States, therefore, will likely be significant military buildups by former allies. This will not mean sharing the burden of collective security, because these rearmed nations will no longer be American allies. They will be independent great powers pursuing their own strategic interests in a multi­polar world. They will owe nothing to the United States; on the contrary, they will view it with the same antagonism and fear that they direct toward Russia and China. Indeed, having been strategically abandoned by the U.S. while suffering from American economic predation and possibly territorial aggression, they are likely to become hotbeds of anti-­Americanism. At the very least, they will not be the same countries Americans know today.

Whether or not it succumbs to the far right, a rearmed Germany without an American security guarantee will necessarily take a more nationalist view of its interests. All of its neighbors will too. Poland, squeezed between a powerful Germany on one border and a powerful Russia on the other, has over the centuries been repeatedly partitioned, occupied, and at times eliminated as a sovereign entity. With no distant superpower to protect them, the Poles are likely to decide to build up their own military capability, including nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, France is but one election away from a nationalist victory that will hit Europe like an earthquake. French leaders have already told the country to prepare for war against Russia. But imagine a rearming, nationalist France facing a rearmed, nationalist Germany. The two nations might find common ground against mounting threats from the United States and Russia, but they also have a complex history, having fought three major wars against each other in the 70 years before the United States helped establish a durable peace between them.

In a multi­polar world, everything is up for grabs, and the flash points for potential conflict proliferate. The American order for eight decades provided not only security commitments to allies and partners but also common access to vital resources, military bases, waterways, and airspace—what theorists call “public goods.” In the absence of the United States playing that role, all of these once again become targets of a multi­sided competition.

Beijing and Moscow have neither the desire nor the need for any restraining accord with the United States. On the contrary, they have every reason to believe that this is the moment to press on. Xi Jinping has spoken of “great changes unseen in a century,” which offer China a “period of strategic opportunity.” For Putin, Trump’s destruction of the trans­atlantic alliance is such a “great change.” Why shouldn’t he seize this opportunity? He can’t know how long the Trump phase will last in the United States, and if the Europeans rearm, the Kremlin’s window of opportunity may close. Until now, Putin has moved slowly, waiting six years between invading Georgia and annexing Crimea, and then another eight years before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which was severely hampered by America and its allies. The Americans have now shattered that solidarity, and Putin could well believe that this is the moment to speed up his plans for conquest. . . . The world will look more like the brutal multi­polar era of the early 20th century than like the more orderly, if still brutal, world of the 19th.

This is the new world that America is entering, voluntarily shorn of its greatest assets. The influential Chinese strategic thinker Yan Xuetong once observed that the most important gap between the United States and China was not military or economic power, both of which China could amass. It was America’s global system of alliances and partnerships.

Trump officials seem to expect European and Asian countries to join the United States whenever Washington needs or wants them—to put pressure on China, for instance—even as the U.S. offers them nothing in return. But can you ditch your allies and have them too? . . . . among the most remarkable things about this administration’s foreign policy is that, for all the talk of “America First,” Trump evinces seemingly unlimited global ambition. He enjoys wielding American power even as he depletes it.

Trump’s megalomania is transforming the United States from inter­national leader into international pariah, and the American people will suffer the consequences for years to come. Germany’s chancellor in 1916, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, worried that his nation’s behavior risked making it “the mad dog among nations” and would provoke “the condemnation of the entire civilized world.” He was right.

So much of America’s influence in the world has derived from treating others as part of a community of democratic nations or of strategic partners.

Others see this, even if many Americans don’t. Yan, the Chinese thinker, observed that one of the elements holding the American order together was America’s reputation for morality and respect for inter­national norms. . . . . For decades, much of the world supported a United States that acted on these principles and accepted America’s power, despite its flaws and errors, precisely because it did not act solely out of narrow self-interest—much less in the narrow, selfish interest of a single ruler.

That era is over. Trump has managed in just one year to destroy the American order that was, and he has weakened America’s ability to protect its interests in the world that will be. If Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive, wait until they start paying for what comes next.