\n<\/p>\n
If you are confused by President Donald Trump\u2019s zigzagging strategies on Ukraine, tariffs, microchips or a host of other issues, it is not your fault. It\u2019s his. What you are seeing is a president who ran for reelection to avoid criminal prosecution and to get revenge on people he falsely accused of stealing the 2020 election. He never had a coherent theory of the biggest trends in the world today and how to best align America with them to thrive in the 21st century. That is not why he ran.<\/p>\n
And once he won, Trump brought back his old obsessions and grievances \u2013 with tariffs and Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Canada \u2013 and staffed his administration with an extraordinary number of fringe ideologues who met one overriding criterion: loyalty first and always to Trump and his whims over and above the Constitution, traditional values of American foreign policy or basic laws of economics.<\/p>\n
The result is what you are seeing today: a crazy cocktail of on-again-off-again tariffs, on-again-off-again assistance for Ukraine, on-again-off-again cuts in government departments and programs both domestic and foreign \u2013 conflicting edicts all carried out by Cabinet secretaries and staff members who are united by a fear of being tweeted about by Elon Musk or Trump should they deviate from whatever policy line emerged unfiltered in the last five minutes from our Dear Leader\u2019s social media feed.<\/p>\n
Four years of this will not work, folks.<\/p>\n
Our markets will have a nervous breakdown from uncertainty, our entrepreneurs will have a nervous breakdown, our manufacturers will have a nervous breakdown, our investors \u2013 foreign and domestic \u2013 will have a nervous breakdown, our allies will have a nervous breakdown and we\u2019re going to give the rest of the world a nervous breakdown.<\/p>\n
You cannot run a country, you cannot be an American ally, you cannot run a business and you cannot be a long-term American trading partner when, in a short period, the U.S. president threatens Ukraine, threatens Russia, withdraws his threat to Russia, threatens huge tariffs on Mexico and Canada and postpones them \u2013 again \u2013 doubles tariffs on China and threatens to impose even more on Europe and Canada.<\/p>\n
Top officials of our oldest allies say privately they fear that we are becoming not just unstable, but actually their enemy. The only person who gets treated with kid gloves is Putin, and America\u2019s traditional friends are in shock.<\/p>\n
But here is Trump\u2019s biggest lie of all his big lies: He claims that he inherited an economy in ruins and that\u2019s why he has to do all of these things. Nonsense. Joe Biden got a lot of things wrong, but by the end of his term, with the help of a wise Federal Reserve, the Biden economy was actually in pretty good shape and trending in the right direction. America certainly did not need global tariff shock therapy.<\/p>\n
Corporate and household balance sheets were relatively healthy, oil prices were on the low side, unemployment was around only 4%, consumer spending was rising and GDP growth was around 2%. We definitely needed to address the trade imbalance with China \u2013 Trump has been right about that all along \u2013 but that was really the only urgent agenda item, and we could have done that with targeted tariff increases on Beijing, coordinated with our allies doing the same, which is how you get Beijing to move.<\/p>\n
Now economists fear that the profound uncertainty Trump is injecting into the economy could drive down interest rates for all the wrong reasons \u2013 because of so much investor uncertainty driving down growth, both here and abroad. Or we could get an even worse combination: stagnant growth and inflation (from so many tariffs), known as stagflation.<\/p>\n
But this is not just your grandfather\u2019s cyclical economic uncertainty Trump has triggered. This is the uncertainty that cuts to the bone, the uncertainty that comes from seeing a world that you knew for 80 years being unraveled by the most powerful player \u2013 who doesn\u2019t know what he is doing and is surrounded by bobbleheads.<\/p>\n
The world has enjoyed an extraordinary period of economic growth and absence of great-power wars since 1945. Of course, it was not perfect, and there have been many troubled years and countries that lagged. But in the broad sweep of world history, these 80 years have been remarkably peaceful and prosperous for a lot of people, in a lot of places.<\/p>\n
And the No. 1 reason that the world was the way it was, was because America was the way it was.<\/p>\n
That America was summed up by two lines in John F. Kennedy\u2019s Inaugural Address on Jan. 20, 1961: \u201cLet every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.\u201d<\/p>\n
And: \u201cSo, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump and his vacuous vice president, JD Vance, have completely turned Kennedy\u2019s call on its head. The Trump-Vance version is:<\/p>\n
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that today\u2019s America will pay no price, bear no burden, incur no hardship, and it will abandon any friends and cuddle up to any foes in order to assure the Trump administration\u2019s political survival \u2013 even if it means the abandonment of liberty wherever that be profitable or convenient for us.<\/em><\/p>\n So, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for President Trump. And my fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, ask how much you are ready to pay for America to defend your freedom from Russia or China.<\/em><\/p>\n When a country as central as America \u2013 one that has played the critical stabilizing role since 1945, acting through institutions like NATO, the World Health Organization, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, and, yes, paying a bigger share than others to make the pie much bigger, which benefited us most because we had the biggest slice \u2013 when a country like ours suddenly departs from that role and becomes a predator on this system, watch out.<\/p>\n To the extent Trump has manifested any discernible, consistent foreign policy philosophy, it is one that he never campaigned on and has no parallel in history.<\/p>\n \u201cTrump is an isolationist-imperialist,\u201d Nahum Barnea, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, remarked to me the other day. He wants all the benefits of imperialism, including your territory and your minerals, without sending any U.S. troops or paying any compensation.<\/p>\n I would call Trump\u2019s foreign policy philosophy not \u201ccontainment\u201d or \u201cengagement,\u201d but \u201csmash and grab.\u201d Trump aspires to be a geopolitical shoplifter. He wants to stuff his pockets with Greenland, Panama, Canada and the Gaza Strip \u2013 just grab them off the shelves, without paying \u2013 and then run back to his American safe house. Our postwar allies have never seen this America before.<\/p>\n If Trump wants to take America on a 180-degree turn, he owes it to the country to have a coherent plan, based on sound economics and a team that represents the best and the brightest, not the most sycophantic and right-wing woke. And he owes us an explanation of exactly how purging professional staff from key bureaucracies that keep the nation running from administration to administration, whether at the Justice Department or the IRS, and appointing fringe ideologues to key positions is good for the country and not just him.<\/p>\n And most of all \u2013 most of all \u2013 he owes every American, irrespective of party, some basic human decency. The only way any president can remotely succeed in any such radical turn, or even a lesser one, is if he reaches out to his opponents and at least tries to bring them along as much as possible. I get it, they are angry. But Trump is president. He should be bigger than them.<\/p>\n Alas, though, that is not Trump. What Leon Wieseltier once said of Benjamin Netanyahu is doubly true of Trump: He is such a small man, in such a big time.<\/p>\n If it is the contrast with Kennedy\u2019s inaugural speech that depresses me most today, it is Lincoln\u2019s January 1838 speech to the Young Men\u2019s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, that haunts me most \u2013 particularly his warning that the only power that can destroy us is ourselves, by our abuse of our most cherished institutions, and by our abuse of one another.<\/p>\n \u201cAt what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?\u201d Lincoln asked. \u201cI answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.\u201d<\/p>\n If those words don\u2019t haunt you too, you\u2019re not paying attention.<\/p>\n This article originally appeared in The New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n