Trump praises Western civilization
WARSAW — President Donald Trump’s speech in Warsaw cast the fight against terrorism as a clash of civilizations, adopting a framework that his two predecessors had determinedly avoided and linking it to his controversial policies on immigration.
The speech on Thursday centered on extended praise for what Trump described as the unique virtues of Western civilization, which he said faced “dire threats to our security and to our way of life.”
Those threats, he said, emanate from the “south or the east” — a thinly veiled reference to the Islamic world — and could “erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are.”
“The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” he said, one of nearly a dozen times that he invoked the idea of “will” during the course of the approximately 40-minute speech.
Trump had expressed similar ethnocentric ideas during his presidential campaign, but had never before described them at such length.
“If we are looking for a Trump doctrine, this is as close as we are going to get,” said Michal Baranowski, the director of the German Marshall Fund office in Warsaw and an expert on Polish and European politics. “It is not a foreign policy doctrine — it is almost a manifesto.”
That doctrine reflects the strong influence of the two strongest advocates of populist nationalism among Trump’s advisers, his strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, and his policy adviser, Stephen Miller, who wrote much of the speech. And it contrasts sharply with the approach taken by Trump’s predecessors.
Since the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama repeatedly rejected the idea that the fight against terrorism should be seen as a fight between the West and Islam or any other culture.