When newly sworn-in President Trump stood before the Mall in Washington on Jan. 20, 2017, he promised renewal for a country battered and bruised from a divisive election, a country he promised could be made great once again.
“We, the citizens of America, are now joined in a great national effort to rebuild our country and to restore its promise for all of our people,” Trump said. “Together, we will determine the course of America and the world for years to come. We will face challenges. We will confront hardships. But we will get the job done.”
So how is America doing under Trump? As we approach Independence Day, the Washington Examiner magazine takes a look at three aspects of the United States: How its standing in the world has shifted; whether government is performing better or worse; and how the health of the family has changed.
Trump said “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now.” Here’s a look at whether members of the administration have listened, and what they decided to do with what they heard.
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The United States of America is still the world’s envy. Being born, or just living here, sets anyone at the peak of mankind’s pyramid in terms of food, comfort, freedom, and opportunity. Millions try to get here, and billions wish they could.
But America is no longer as respected as it was.
The problem isn’t the past 18 months, but the past 3 generations. The problem isn’t our current president’s intemperate mouth, but our long practice of imprudent intervention.
Film gives us a window. American movies are as pervasive as ever. Once, Gary Cooper and John Wayne projected the redoubtable image America had earned in WWII. Nobody would mess with the likes of them. Today’s Hollywood products project filth, violence, and impotence — an America of pretentious losers. Not long ago, Americans abroad were treated with special courtesy. Today, they are likelier to draw slights.
Respect, not envy, is the true measure of any nation’s standing, and America has lost respect. Our loss of respect is due substantially to changes over the past couple of generations in our own ruling class. How do we stand now, and what might it take to recover what has been lost?
A legacy, squandered
America’s founders knew that respect is difficult to earn, easy to squander, and extraordinarily difficult to regain. To gain and keep respect among nations, their generation thought that America must stay out of others’ affairs while aggressively minding our own.
The Declaration of Independence set the objective: “a separate and equal station among the powers of the earth” — no more, no less — and George Washington’s Farewell Address encapsulated the meaning: “observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all.” America, John Quincy Adams wrote, “enters the lists in no cause but its own.” Theodore Roosevelt re-formulated the essence of the founding generation’s legacy: (“speak softly and carry a big stick”) as, most recently, did Jeanne Kirkpatrick (“no society exists to conduct foreign policy. Rather, foreign policy exists to allow the society to live in peace.”) Adherence to that legacy is what made America great at home and respected abroad. The American people, by and large, continue to share these views and to revere this legacy.
This view of America first, however, is alien to progressives. From Woodrow Wilson’s generation at the turn of the twentieth century to our own time, they have imagined themselves as mankind’s improvers, forcefully preparing mankind for their ministrations. Speaking big words that they hardly understand and wielding power incompetently, they squandered the founders’ legacy. Acting as sorcerers’ apprentices they gave us disdain and war instead of peace and respect.
Wilson promised that undoing Germany’s “autocracy” would make the world safe for democracy. Charles Evans Hughes, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt guaranteed that U.S leadership in disarmament treaties would end war. FDR assured Americans that destroying the Axis in Stalin’s preferred manner would resolve “ancient evils, ancient ills,” into a new world ordered by the U.N. Harry Truman was sure that a no-win war in Korea would cement that order. John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon, following such as Henry Kissinger, waged “limited war” in Vietnam while reshaping its society. Most Cold War attempts to change foreign regimes and societies miscarried and created a “third world” that linked up with the Soviets. They were sure that limiting U.S strategic weapons would domesticate the Soviet Union into joining their world order. George H.W. Bush tied to fine-tune the Middle East by making yet another half-war, on Saddam Hussein. But that ended up marshaling the Muslim world’s jihad against America. 9/11 followed.
Since then, both parties’ progressives have spent thousands of lives and trillions of dollars replicating their failures in Vietnam: endlessly policing bad guys while trying to infuse their societies with their own evolving ideas of liberal democracy, including radical culture-war ideas on sexuality. Meanwhile, they have wrapped American society in barbed wire, security procedures, and political correctness.
That is an awful lot to overcome.
What can be done?
When in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. In the 2016 election, the American people ordered that, and more, by electing Donald Trump. More than any other candidate, Trump had vowed to do what is common sense to ordinary Americans, but incomprehensible to our progressive foreign policy establishment: to stop interfering in other people’s business, while preparing to defeat whoever troubles ours — thoroughly and quickly.
Doing this requires, first of all, wise decisions about what our business is around the globe, and what might interfere with it.
Trump judged that, after our own land borders, the Pacific Ocean is of the greatest importance, and that China’s military-political efforts to expel us from its western rim, and its economic challenge, are our weightiest problem. Hence he ordered major military improvements and economic countermeasures against it. His predecessors had vowed fidelity to our allies in Japan and South Korea. Trump meant to involve them in dealing with our common problem. This seems to have led them to trusting America some more.
America’s oldest allies in Europe, however, trust Trump’s America less. That is because Western Europe’s progressive ruling class is a copy (or an extension) of our own. Its rulers were the firmest of allies so long as we went along as they divested themselves of the capacity to defend themselves from invasion. They resent us as we begin to take care of our own interests. Under them, Europe no longer matters much, for good or ill. The good news for us is that they are being rejected by their own peoples, many of whom look to Trump’s America as a model.
Americans demand disentangling from the Middle East’s poisonous mess. Trump has responded with unprecedented support for Israel, and by ordering the physical destruction of ISIS. But indigenous changes in the region, e.g. Turkey’s devolution into Islamism, the recrudescent Sunni-Shia war, Islamism in general, are beyond our capacity to influence. The legacy of the past two generations’ misjudgments is difficult to escape. The beginning of wisdom is a laser-like focus parrying the region’s troubles from harming America and Americans.
A military still big but still unprepared
Minding our business, and minding it well can be the first step to regaining respect. It’s not enough, though.
As ever, military power is the foundation of respect among nations. The U.S military establishment is plenty large. It has increasingly resembled a police force that tries (and fails) to police the world while neglecting its most basic tasks. Simply, our ruling class has not been serious regarding strategic weapons, especially missile defense. The American people notwithstanding, our ruling class long since decided to put no barrier to Russian or Chinese missiles striking America, that America’s intercontinental missiles must remain immobile and vulnerable, and that tactical nuclear weapons are things of the past.
The reason why no one takes seriously U.S complaints about Russia is that the U.S. has neither the equipment nor the plans that would allow for a confrontation on the European landmass with a Russia that integrates nuclear weapons into its armed forces, whose strategic missiles are mobile and invulnerable, and whose missile defense is tailored to its geography and strategy.
The same goes for China. U.S. policy is to avoid a military confrontation with it, but without plans for winning one. This is not a formula for respect, or for peace.
China’s strategy to control nearby seas from the land is designed to push U.S influence out of the Western Pacific. Its artificial islands extend its air and missile forces more than a thousand miles into the ocean. Guam is in range. Its coast bristles with medium range missiles, covered by intercontinental ones that are mobile or otherwise invulnerable because they are based in deep tunnels. U.S. missile defense is an expensive pretense, which North Korea has just exposed.
In sum, the prerequisite for being respected, for being taken seriously is the military capacity to fulfill basic functions, the first of which is self-protection. To be meaningful with regard to Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and anybody else concerned with them, Trump’s military buildup will have to provide Americans with meaningful missile defense. That is not now in the cards.
More generally, respect requires strict adherence to the founding generation’s common sense: making sure that ends and means match, indeed making sure that our words are smaller than our sticks.
Angelo M. Codevilla is professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University and a member of the Hoover Institution’s working group on military history.
