We can’t protect the West’s values by abandoning them
At a speech in Poland Thursday, President Donald Trump returned to his apocalyptic mode, describing the struggle against what he calls “radical Islamic terrorism” as an existential one for the West. “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” he said. “Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”
Let’s grant for the moment his premise that radical Islamists not only jeopardize our safety through acts of terrorism but also stand a chance of supplanting and replacing Western values. Is the answer to that threat really the abandonment of our values in their defense?
Do we counter those who posit a religious war between the Islamic world and Western, secular democracies by promising a “complete and total shut-down” of Muslim entry into the United States and then following it up with executive orders barring entry by people from six predominantly Muslim countries?
Do we become, in Trump’s words, an “example for others who seek freedom” by ratcheting up a drug war that has filled our prisons at rates greater than the world’s autocratic regimes, primarily at the expense of minorities? Do we set such an example by literally walling ourselves off from a peaceful neighbor and deporting those who have committed no crime other than seeking that very freedom?
Do we counter “the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people” by instead allowing corporations and industry that have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of the many and brought the globe to the brink of irreversible environmental catastrophe to set the rules by which they operate?
Do we differentiate “our civilization and our way of life” from the repressive regimes of the Islamic world by attacking the free press, denouncing critics of the government as enemies of the state, questioning the notion of an independent judiciary, objectifying women, installing relatives in top government positions, abandoning longstanding norms of transparency, demanding personal loyalty over professional integrity and profiting from the highest office in the land?
The president was correct in saying that the United States and its allies must “stand united against these shared enemies to strip them of their territory, their funding, their networks and any form of ideological support.” But what he fails to understand is that his administration is a wrecking ball aimed right at the values and institutions that provide an ideological counter to not only radical Islamism but to repressive governments of all kinds. He fails to see that inward, “America first” policies are not viewed by those allies to whom he appeals as signs of strength and leadership but weakness and retreat. And he fails to recognize the eagerness of others who do not share the values Trump professes to fill the vacuum his abdication of American-led multilateralism has created.
It’s not radical Islamists who pose the greatest threat to Western values’ place at the center of the global order. Trump is scheduled to meet Friday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose ambitions to world leadership by undermining confidence in Western institutions are plain to see. But the more plausible threat to American leadership comes from the subtler and more patient leaders of China.
While President Trump was busy trading barbs about “fake news” with Polish President Andrejz Duda, whose party sought to restrict journalists from covering Parliament, Chinese President Xi Jinping was in Germany for a state visit with Chancellor Angela Merkel, quietly shoring up relations between two of the world’s strongest export economies around their mutual interest in multi-lateral systems of global trade — the very sorts of arrangements Trump has decried as “bad deals.”
The core of the Western values America has traditionally exemplified is the belief that economic and personal freedom must go hand-in-hand. China offers a proposition in which they don’t. The more Trump weakens the institutions and norms that safeguard American freedoms, the less counterweight the United States offers to such alternatives to global leadership. President Trump can’t protect Western values by abandoning them.