Patrick Lawrence: Trump’s Failures, America’s Failures
Well, we now have a president who says what he means, and this is an advance beyond the four years Americans spent listening to a lifelong, compulsive liar who more than occasionally said the opposite of what he meant. It is always best to know someone means what he or she says, even if this is foolish, or impractical, or somewhere on the way to dangerous. This is the thing with Donald Trump: We can be certain he means what he says, but so much of what he says is foolish, or impractical, or somewhere on the way to dangerous.
“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World,” Trump declared just before Christmas, “the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.” He made this statement as he announced Ken Howery, a venture capitalist turned diplomat, as his ambassador to Copenhagen.
O.K., a case in point. You have to believe Trump means it when he says these kinds of things, even if you cannot for a moment believe they are true or of any worth.
Trump also wants to annex Canada as America’s 51st state. He wants to reclaim sovereignty over the Panama Canal, too. And rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. “The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation,” he said in his Inaugural Address, “one that increases our wealth, expands our territory.” This is a man with plans, truly. We can count on this these next four years.
Before going any further, Trump has done two things meriting approbation since he was inaugurated, and we should note these briefly. One is his determination, via one of many executive orders, to restore the First Amendment and so defend free speech. We will have to see how this order is interpreted — whether it will extend, for instance, to the rampant censorship of some media and in universities under the disgracefully corrupt charge that opposition to Israel and Zionist terror amounts to “anti–Semitism.” To be determined.
Independent of the executive orders, Trump has also made it clear that he intends to speak soon with Vladimir Putin with a view to bringing the Biden regime’s proxy war in Ukraine to a close. Trump, it is now evident, has no plan to end the war: He has been winging it all along. But opening talks with the Russian president is nonetheless big. Biden and his adjutants, frozen in ideological anachronisms and in consequence incapable of anything to do with statecraft, refused contacts with Moscow for most of the past four years. Against this background, reopening diplomatic channels is a significant move. The same will be so if — let’s stay with “if” for now — he manages to improve the tone between Washington and Beijing. We ought not miss the potential here just because Donald Trump’s name is on it.
There is something else we ought not miss as Trump puffs out his chest in behalf of some kind of neo-expansionist America. All his plans to improve our republic’s standing and reputation in the world — “America will reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on earth, inspiring awe and admiration,” etc. — are fundamentally hermetic — hatched in an odd state of solitude. There has been no consultation with the Danes about Greenland, and certainly none with Greenlanders. None of Trump’s people has asked the Canadians about statehood. I know of no contacts with the Panamanians about the status of the Canal.
Even the promised démarche to Russia betrays this … this what? … this isolation from reality. Here is Trump’s most recent statement on his plans to take up the Ukraine crisis with the Kremlin, as reprinted in The Telegraph:
I’m going to do Russia, whose economy is failing, and President Putin, a very big FAVOR. Settle now, and STOP this ridiculous War! IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE. If we don’t make a “deal,” and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of taxes, tariffs, and sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.
Where to begin?
Russia’s economy is not failing. It is Europe’s economies that are failing in consequence of the sanctions regime the United States has imposed on Russia. Washington has no favors to offer Moscow. Given the progress of the war, it is the United States that is in need of a favor from Russia. U.S. imports from Russia in 2022, the most recent year for which statistics are compiled, were $16 billion — taxi fare in the global trade context.
Apart from these details, telling as they may be, there is Moscow’s desire to develop a new security structure to serve as the basis of an enduring peace that benefits Russia and the Western alliance alike. Putin and Sergei Lavrov, his foreign minister, have made it clear on numerous occasions that there is no point in negotiations unless this fundamental objective is recognized. Trump, either unaware or simply uninterested in this, appears once again to be operating at that insular distance from reality noted above. Who among his people, I may as well ask, would be capable of diplomacy of this import and sophistication? Marco Rubio? Please.
Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, a non-plan plan for peace in Ukraine: These are all failures-in-waiting. We can dismiss them as somewhere along the continuum running from foolish to impractical to dangerous. Let us add, to finish the thought, unserious. No, Donald Trump’s foreign policies, even in outline, show no chance whatsoever of success. The greatest, the most respected, awe and admiration: No, Trump now sets out to lead America in precisely the opposite direction.
But not so fast. It is well worth pausing to conduct a brief but considered anatomy of Trump’s failures to come. What are they made of? How did he hatch these plans and arrive at these positions? What can we learn from these opening days of what looks like a very long four years. There are, indeed, things we stand to learn, and I mean about ourselves.
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Donald Trump as mirror. Let us look into it and think about what we see. The causality of failure: This is what we are looking for, and I see two things worth our time.
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Many of the big-name philosophers of the past 100 years — Husserl, Heidegger, Lévinas, et al. — shared a pronounced preoccupation beginning in the 1920s. I relate this (and the scholars may correct me) to the wreckage of the First World War they found all around them. These were the explorers and developers of the discipline called phenomenology. Who are we? What has become of us, we who dwell in mass, mechanized societies? What is the nature of human relationships? These were among the questions.
Emmanuel Lévinas, a Lithuanian Jew who lived in France (1906–1995) and wrote in French, elevated these matters to an enduring discourse concerning the Self and the Other. Indifference to others, he argued — and how radically must I simplify — lay at the root of the 20th century’s ills and evils. The cult of the individual, he posited (among a lot of other things) must be transcended in favor of relationships with all the Others among us. We realize who we are only by way of these relationships; they are primary. “The Self is possible only through the recognition of the Other,” he wrote, a noted line. So, to continue my simplification: We are social beings first; our individuality derives from our sociality. Lévinas published Totality and Infinity, the book wherein he stated his case most fully and famously, in 1961.
I touch upon these people and their thinking because, 64 years after Lévinas brought out his masterwork, we can see how very, very right he and his colleagues were about humanity’s destiny. To see from the perspective of the Other — grasping it, I mean, knowing it with no special need to share it — is among our 21st century imperatives: This is how I have put it in this space and elsewhere. To develop the capacity in oneself to understand what the world looks like to other people is among the lessons I learned during my years as a correspondent abroad. It is essential, to say this another way, to any people’s constructive participation in the human project as we now have it.
Americans are not well-advantaged in these matters, to put the point mildly. We long ago turned our insistence in our individuality into the “ism” of individualism, an ideology that, however far it has taken America in the past, now proves a ball and chain at our ankles. Equally, America has had such power since the 1945 victories that its policy cliques long ago lost interest in the perspectives of others—how the world looks to them, their aspirations, their histories, all the rest. This is why, with admirable but few exceptions, America produces such poor diplomats. It has had no need of them. And the policy cliques in Washington have not yet registered that we have in consequence already begun to fail.
And this is why, to finish off, Donald Trump thinks it is perfectly OK to declare his plans for Canada, Greenland, and the Canal without so much as a preliminary consultation with a Canadian, a Dane or a Panamanian. These ideas are nonsensical to the point they embarrass. But, their loopy aspect aside, are they any more nonsensical than — make your own list — Vietnam, Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, the Iraq War, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, indeed? Are they any more out of touch with the perspectives of others?
In this connection, I loved Claudia Sheinbaum’s reaction to Trump’s proposal to rename the Gulf of Mexico. At a press conference the day after Trump pulled the satin drape off of this one the Mexican president stood before a 1607 map that marked the Gulf just as we know it today. Pointing to North America, she proposed with an amused smile, “Why don’t we call it Mexican America? It sounds pretty, no?”
Sheinbaum was goofing on Trump, as we would have said long ago, and good for her. But let’s not miss what she was saying: This is how the world looks to us, we Mexicans. There is even a map depicting our perspective. You are not getting anywhere with us unless you understand this.
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The decades after the Second World War were among the most significant of the last century. They were less violent than the war years, although there was plenty of violence of another kind. This was “the independence era,” when scores of different peoples negotiated or fought their ways out of the colonial burden and made new nations of themselves.
The world was full of aspiration then. The idea of a just, ethical world order seemed well within reach. When America forced the Cold War upon all nations — and don’t bother me with alternative versions of history — all became binary. The with-us-or-against-us decades began. Most new nations, even if they did not succumb to what we now call neoliberal ideology in all its exploitative aspects, failed to realize many or most of their early hopes. This is one reason among many the Cold War decades were so bitter.
But the hopes and aspirations were never extinguished: Submerged or corrupted, placed under house arrest so to say, but never outright assassinated or shot by a firing squad. This is among the fine things about what happened when Germans took down the Berlin Wall in November 1989: As soon as the post–Cold War era announced itself, all the old goals, the ambitions that once soared, came brilliantly back to life. They were there, as if hibernated, all along.
Among these is one worth noting now. Parity among nations, with its deep roots in the independence era, is another item on my list — a list of two so far — of 21st century imperatives. Any power of any magnitude that proposes to make its way in our new era must accept this. The only alternatives are decline and violence — one or another kind of failure. To resist historical necessity, I mean to say — and this goes for individuals as well as reactionary elites — is sheer impotence.
Multipolarity is another term for the phenomenon I describe. It is emergent now, with the non–West naturally and inevitably in the lead, and manifests in what we are calling the new world order. It has various principles. I trace these, in spirit if not in declared fact, to the Five Principles Zhou En-lai formulated in the early 1950s, soon after adopted by the brand new Non–Aligned Movement. Respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in the internal affairs of others, equality and conduct for mutual benefit, peaceful co-existence: I note that the Chinese Foreign Ministry has now taken to stating these as the new world order’s rules of the road. Interesting. Give them a moment’s thought and you find the only missing word is parity.
I leave it to readers to judge how far, how many galaxies distant, Donald Trump is from any such conception of the world as it is as he takes office again. The point seems too obvious to belabor. But again, is his regime so much farther from reality than its predecessors, notably but not only Joe Biden’s? This is our question because it is the important question.
If Trump is a mirror, think of it as one of those wavy, distorting mirrors famous in the old fun houses. But as I recall so well from the harvest fairs of my childhood, you can still see yourself even if everything looks funny.
