Can the U.S. recover trust after Trump?
We’re not reliable stewards of free world
America will not recover from the presidency of Donald Trump.
In a literal sense, that is not true. The United States will exist long after Trump either steps down after two terms, loses re-election or is otherwise removed. But as a global superpower and the leader of an alliance of free nations, America will not soon — if ever — recover the position of leadership it has occupied since the end of World War II.
John Bolton’s arrival as national security adviser is a harbinger not of war but of further chaos. He will be in a job no one wanted and for which he was chosen because of his appearances on Trump’s only pipeline to reality, Fox News. Our allies are maintaining a polite silence, because Bolton will be personal staff to the president. But it is hard to imagine they think the accession of a man of almost cartoonishly hawkish views is a good sign.
Bolton alone cannot destroy American foreign policy. Neither can Trump, hardly our first flawed president. Richard Nixon threatened the Constitution and was driven from office. Bill Clinton subjected us to national moral embarrassment. George W. Bush expanded a just war in Afghanistan into a fiasco in Iraq. Barack Obama removed the U.S. from vital positions of power in Europe and the Middle East, and outsourced global security to China and Russia.
And yet, all of these were recoverable errors. Clinton was a centrist in domestic affairs and a committed leader of NATO. Bush reassured a terrified nation and his errors, in hindsight, seem less nefarious than incompetent. Obama is a decent man who did what his voters asked, even when it was wrong.
In earlier days, we elected a haberdasher and an actor, and both turned out to be great presidents. A callow playboy from Boston faced down the Soviet Union. Even Nixon’s accomplishments in foreign affairs gave his downfall a certain tragic grandeur.
The rest of the world regarded us with both awe and condescension. We were sneered at by European intellectuals, secretly envied by communist apparatchiks, and hated by less developed nations that resented our wealth. But all accepted that America was a serious nation that always rose to the obligations of global leadership.
Trump is different. He has shown himself to be utterly unserious about foreign affairs. Now, having rid himself of his meddlesome priest, the too-serious national security adviser H.R. McMaster, Trump has brought aboard a man who will insist on speaking his mind at will, much as he does, and this will only make matters worse.
All of this reveals a great shift in American politics. By electing Trump and tolerating Bolton, we have shown that we cannot be consistently trusted with the stewardship of the free world. It’s not that Trump, in the end, will collapse NATO, plunge us into a great depression or start World War III — although with Bolton by his side he is capable of doing all of three — but rather that American voters have shown the world we are capable of astonishing selfishness and petulance. We have abandoned our civic virtue not just at home but also overseas, and once lost, that position cannot be recovered.
Perhaps this is all too pessimistic. We have elected men of weak moral character and shallow political commitment before. But certainly not since the U.S. president — the sole steward of an arsenal that can extinguish civilization itself — became the leader and protector of billions who rely on America as a friend and ally.
The most optimistic outcome is that decades from now, the memory of the Trump years fades, and the world looks upon this period as a temporary insanity from which we awoke just before we lost any possibility of an American restoration. But healing will take more than just electing a new president: It will require years of painful self-examination and calling ourselves to account. Only then will we begin to earn back the presumption of trust and leadership that was once one of our proudest achievements as a free nation.