Is America still a shining city on a hill, in the words of John Winthrop and Ronald Reagan? Will we stand up for democracy and morality in foreign policy? Or do we join with the TRUMP CLUB, of which County Commission Vice Chair ROY ALYRE ALAIMO remains a contributor, post January 6? It was so revealing when TRUMP had one material alteration for the 2016 Republican platform (the last time the Republicans adopted a platform). That material alteration was deleting support for Ukraine. From The New York Times, a column by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas L. Friedman:
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The G.O.P. Bumper Sticker: Trump First. Putin Second. America Third.
Opinion Columnist
Alas, though, while the current dysfunction of the Republican Party can explain why this particular legislation is likely to fail, how we came to this awful moment is a longer, deeper story.
This emerging post-post-Cold War era is a real throwback to the kind of dangerous, traditional great-power competition prevalent in the Cold War and World War II and most of history before that. Unfortunately, we have arrived at this moment with too many elected officials — especially in the senior ranks of the Republican Party — who never experienced such a world and with a defense-industrial base woefully unprepared for this world. Believe it or not, President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has had to spend hours of valuable time each month searching the world for 155-millimeter shells for the Ukrainian Army because we don’t have enough.
That’s crazy. And it is particularly crazy at a time when three revisionist powers (Russia, China and Iran) are each simultaneously probing every day to see if they can push back America and its allies along three different frontiers (Europe, the South China Sea and the Middle East). They probe, individually and through proxies, to see how we react — if we react — and then probe some more. In Putin’s case, when the time seemed right, he launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Because of generational change, most of America’s political elite today grew up in the relatively benign Pax Americana post-Cold War era, 1989 to 2022” (when Putin invaded Ukraine), “and they have lost the habit and the knack of thinking about global politics in military terms,” the U.S. foreign policy historian Michael Mandelbaum told me. “Very few members of the elite today have served in the military.”
This is “very different from the Cold War era, when most of our policymaking elite were people who experienced World War II,” added Mandelbaum, the author of the forthcoming book “The Titans of the Twentieth Century: How They Made History and the History They Made.” “Now, after 30 years of the post-Cold War era, Joe Biden is one of the few remaining leaders who was a policymaker during the Cold War — and issues of grand strategy and the management of great-power competition are no longer a major part of our public discourse.”
Trump, like Biden, grew up in the Cold War, but he spent a lot of it contemplating his wealth rather than contemplating the world. Trump’s instincts, Mandelbaum noted, are really a throwback to the interwar period between World War I and World War II, when a whole segment of the elite felt World War I was a failure and a mistake — the equivalent today of Iraq and Afghanistan — and then approached the dawn of World War II as isolationists and protectionists, seeing our allies as either hopeless or leeches.
As for House Speaker Mike Johnson, I wonder how often he uses his passport. I wonder if he has a passport. He is one of the most powerful people in America, following in the footsteps of both Republican and Democratic speakers who advanced our interests and made us strong in the world for decades. So far, he seems to care only about serving Trump’s interests, even if that means playing extremely risky games with foreign policy.
Meanwhile, many on the left emerged from this post-Cold War era with the view that the biggest problem in the world is not too little American power but too much — the lessons they drew from Iraq and Afghanistan.
And so who will tell the people? Who will tell the people that America is the tent pole that holds up the world? If we let that pole disintegrate, your kids won’t grow up in just a different America; they’ll grow up in a different world, and a much worse one.
After Ukraine inflicted a terrible defeat on the Russian Army — thanks to U.S. and NATO funding and weapons — without costing a single American soldier’s life, Putin now has to be licking his chops at the thought that we will walk away from Ukraine, leaving him surely counting the days until Kyiv’s missile stocks run out and he will own the skies. Then it’s bombs away.
As the Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman reported, the ammunition shortage in Ukraine “has already led to an increase in Ukrainian casualties. … The shortage of weaponry is also having an effect on the willingness of Ukrainians to volunteer for military service. The mounting pressure on the Kyiv government is part of the explanation for the public falling-out between President Volodymyr Zelensky and his commander in chief, Valeriy Zaluzhny.”
If this is the future and our friends from Europe to the Middle East to Asia sense that we are going into hibernation, they will all start to cut deals — European allies with Putin, Arab allies with Iran, Asian allies with China. We won’t feel the change overnight, but, unless we pass this bill or something close to it, we will feel it over time.
America’s ability to assemble alliances against the probes of Russia, China and Iran will gradually be diminished. Our ability to sustain sanctions on pariah nations like North Korea will erode. The rules governing trade, banking and the sanctity of borders being violated by force — rules that America set, enforced and benefited from since World War II — will increasingly be set by others and by their interests.
Yes, America still has considerable power, but that power led to influence because allies and enemies knew we were ready to use it to defend ourselves and help our friends defend themselves and our shared values. All of that will now be in doubt if this bill goes down for good.
Remember this week, folks — because historians surely will.
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Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
1 comment:
Tucker Carlson recently went to Russia and interviewed Putin. Gave him a great opportunity to put out an epic propaganda piece to sway American option in his favor. The far right is a treasonous, seditious cancer in the USA. Most of them with the intelligence less than that of an ape.
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