Trump rejects the path to peace – international cooperation

Even C and D students of history are aware that the past is a mixed bag of blessings and curses, too often the latter. Which is to say that one hoary maxim – “those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it” – is at best only half-right. Some history is worth repeating, some to be strenuously avoided.

In that regard, consider Donald Trump’s muddled remarks at the United Nations. The tone was fitfully conciliatory but the gist, in keeping with his now familiar outlook, menacing – not merely to “rocket man,” his adolescent designation of the impulsive Kim of North Korea – and to North Korea itself – but to all the rest of us. Does he grasp, for instance, that the South Korean capital, with its multitudes, to say nothing of 35,000 American GIs in the demilitarized zone at the 32nd parallel, are within artillery range of the rocket man? Or that the threat of nuclear war, however veiled or indirect, is impermissible in a world bristling with nuclear devices – at least among responsible statesmen?

Whatever Trump’s intent, there is little doubt that he is steadily undermining the hard-earned foundations of U.S. foreign policy as it has evolved since 1945 and the world order it ordained.

A touch of history is useful here. As the clouds of WWII gathered in the late 1930s, American sentiment was overwhelmingly “isolationist” – a crippling impediment to President Roosevelt’s vital measures of aid to the beleaguered British. Without FDR’s willingness to swap “overaged” destroyers for British bases in the Western Hemisphere and, later, the opening of U.S. armaments industry under Lend-Lease, strategic disaster lurked.

American sentiment began slowly to change as it dawned on the complacent that Nazi conquest of Britain and the European continent would leave the U.S. itself in jeopardy. The issue became academic, though isolationist sentiment merely slumbered, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and Hitler declared war on the United States two weeks later. The sense of American invulnerability behind its ocean barriers vanished for good.

As victory on both fronts approached in 1945, the thinking varied. One daffy idea, originating in the U.S. Treasury Department, was to “pastoralize” postwar Germany by destroying its industrial areas. But sense prevailed – it was widely understood that the vindictive peace settlements following the First World War had left Europe and Asia ripe for demagogues, their poisonous nationalism militarism, and a second European civil war in a quarter century.

Moreover, the ocean barrier had sprung dangerous leaks and would soon be a thing of the past. Willy-nilly, the United States must join the world.

FDR, whose vision included the United Nations, died in April 1945, and Stalin seized upon the Red Army’s conquest of central Europe to suppress government by consent in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. But even in a world divided by the Cold War, the risks of ultra-nationalism (“America first”) were well understood.

President Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who succeeded him, continued to vindicate the legacy of international cooperation and collective security as alternatives to the political and economic anarchy that had marked the interwar period. Eisenhower’s victory over Sen. Robert Taft in the Republican preliminaries of the 1952 election was a crucial turning point for “internationalism.” The defects of that outlook were obvious; but in the light of the conditions that produced the second European civil war, comparatively trivial.

When Trump speaks with amateurish ignorance in today’s interlinked world of “sovereignty” and “America first,” and urges the same militant nationalism on his UN listeners, he speaks the language of a discredited past. That he should choose the UN, a monument to the Roosevelt-Churchill vision, for simple-minded bellicosity displays his unfitness for the titular office of “leader of the free world.” Trump’s sentiments confused our friends and heartened the world’s anarchists, including Kim of North Korea. His language and sentiment demonstrate, not for the first time, his unfitness for the responsibilities he inherited in a freakish election.

Meanwhile, one sound maxim remains in all historical weathers: “Experience keeps a hard school, but fools will learn in no other.” – Benjamin Franklin.

Contributing columnist Edwin M. Yoder Jr. of Chapel Hill is a former editor and columnist in Washington.

This story was originally published September 21, 2017 at 12:48 PM with the headline "Trump rejects the path to peace – international cooperation."