This is the first in a weekly series in which we’ll ask someone what they think the president should be reading. This week I spoke with New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2013 and the author of America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder.
During the 2016 election, when asked whom he consults on foreign matters, Donald Trump said: “I’m speaking with myself number one, because I have a very good brain.”
As supporting evidence, consider an incident from 2011, in which Trump rented—and then un-rented—land to Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi.
Qaddafi had been in New York for the U.N. General Assembly. Trump agreed to rent him land during his stay. He took Qaddafi’s money. Then Trump pulled out of the deal. As Trump explained in a Fox News interview soon thereafter, “I dealt with Qaddafi. I rented him a piece of land. He paid me more for one night than the land was worth for two years, and then I didn’t let him use the land. . . . That’s what [the United States] should be doing,” Trump continued. “I don’t want to use the word ‘screwed,’ but I screwed him.” The ordeal, Trump claims, demonstrated his foreign-policy expertise. Certainly his views were long-held; during last year’s campaign, a 1988 Oprah interview resurfaced in which Trump decried U.S. trade policy and involvement abroad.
Bret Stephens—the New York Times columnist who joined the paper in the spring after a long career as the Wall Street Journal’s Global View columnist—disagrees with President Trump’s worldview. In an interview with me to kick off this column, Stephens recommended a book the president should read: Robert Kagan’s The World America Made.
Stephens says that Kagan’s book is “important,” and would be useful for the president because “it makes the essential case against the [his] mercantilistic and isolationist foreign policy instincts.” According to Stephens, Kagan argues that “American commitment to the global system and a world order have yielded vast benefits for the American people.” Foreign policy is “not a zero-sum game,” says Stephens. “We would be fools to exchange or surrender the leadership of the liberal democratic world for the sake of so-called deals.”
On American influence abroad, Kagan writes, “the better idea doesn’t have to win because it is a better idea. It requires great powers to champion it.” With a strong America leading the world—rather than Russia or China—America’s better ideas have better chance of winning out.
