What Just Happened? Oval Office Throwdown (part two)

This will be hard, friends. I’m going to ask you to do something really difficult in this installment. To wit, surgically remove your Trumpian lizard brain. You know, the part of your brain that instantly responds to all things Trump. Whether you go “hell, yeah, fight, fight, fight, pwn the libs!!” or “there goes that giant orange, pig-faced Satan of a Putin puppet!” Take it out, just for a few moments.

That’s too hard. It’s too embedded in most people. So just turn it off and let the rest of your brain think. You’ll enjoy the experience, I promise you.

Like him or not, Henry Kissinger was one of the sharpest minds in American foreign policy over the last fifty years. Yes, he made tragic mistakes (foreign policy successes and intelligence failures are the two possible foreign policy outcomes), but also had incredible successes. But most of all, he had keen insight. He could look past Mao’s brutal authoritarianism and see a man who could be wooed away from the Soviet Union, for example. That was both morally obtuse and incredibly prescient.

Of Donald Trump the politician, Kissinger said, “I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences.” Note Kissinger was neither praising Trump nor denigrating him, just positioning him as a character in history. I’m going to argue in this post that the important thing in Kissinger’s insight is NOT about Trump, but about the phrase “the end of an era.”

“Yes,” you’re thinking, it’s the end of civility and decency!” There’s the subliminal Trump brain again. Every time that lizard emerges from its hole, just smack it back under.

What you saw in the Oval Office the other day was a stark reminder that we are officially in a different era. No one can debate that anymore. What era did we leave, and what does the future hold? Let’s see.

“Pat, we know the answers already: America will be Great Again!” SMACK. Positive Trump lizards get no better treatment than negative ones.

At the end of World War II, America literally bestrode the world. We had immensely powerful armed forces backed (briefly) by a nuclear monopoly. We occupied large swaths of the planet, had a roaring economy which was practically unaffected by wartime destruction, and a great generation of leaders who understood that the globe remained on the precipice. Nazism, fascism, and militarism had been defeated; communism stood beside us as the sole, evil competitor.

America abandoned its longstanding principle of non-involvement outside of the Western Hemisphere. We took on alliances, built international institutions, remade defeated foes into fledgling allies, and stood against further Communist advances. We did so partly because the primary lesson of the early 20th century was that if no one stood up for international decency, America would be dragged into yet another global war. We did so mostly because not being dragged into such wars meant Americans could go back to loving life in America, which is as close to the national dream as there is. In pursuit of these goals, America engaged in all forms of behavior: principled stands, political bullying, nation building, overthrowing governments, space races, technology boycotts, local wars, trade embargoes, and much espionage. Some called it the end of America’s naivete.

The implicit deal America struck with its real or potential allies was this: we will provide the security umbrella, you stand with us against Communism. Everything else was of secondary importance. We gave nations favorable trade deals, because everyone wins with free trade, right? We forgave debts and ignored public slights: the sight of a burning American flag became a staple of international protest in friendly countries! We cut deals with dictators. We let countries off of their defense burden so they could build happy, well-financed social systems to ensure their domestic tranquility. America wasn’t an altruistic superpower; it did what it did in order to win the Cold War. It was that important.

As you know, the West won the Cold War. America truly was once again the sole superpower, and there was no clear challenger. Believe me, I worked in the field at the time, and a great search was on for the next “peer competitor.” But try as we might, we could identify no country that was within decades of providing the challenge. The system of international law, alliances, human rights, and free trade that the United States and its allies promoted stood as a testament to its victory. But the system was built to face a serious challenge; how would it function in the absence of any challenge?

Not well, as it turned out. NATO sought a new mission, and the title of an influential foreign policy article in the 90’s was “NATO: Out of Area or Out of Business?” NATO changed from a defensive alliance of like-minded free countries to a halfway house for newly-freed European states, shepherding them into the fold. It even invoked its sacred Article V guarantee when Al Qaida attacked America on 9/11, a generous if entirely unnecessary gesture. Even the advent of Islamic terrorism was insufficient as a global challenge, although it did succeed in two things: first, encouraging American hubris that led to disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and second, a reminder of just who our real friends and enemies were.

What happened over the next thirty years? The stresses on that American international system started to show. In the absence of a common threat, why spend money on defense at all, since America wanted to be the sole superpower? Why not protect your industries with tariffs, since America didn’t care in the past? Vote against them in the United Nations; what’s the difference? Protest and criticize them as you will; after all, there’s plenty of Americans who will agree with you!

Just as the international system frayed, so did the American national consensus. Americans’ legendary mobility (no one moves, or rather moved, as frequently as Americans did) started sorting people into Red or Blue states. In the absence of a reason to pull together, we pulled apart, arguing over every little thing. Think I’m kidding? We currently argue about transsexual women (men who insist they are women) participating in women’s sports. The NCAA (the governing body for college sports) estimates there are . . . wait for it, less than ten such athletes. It is neither the human rights issue of our time nor a generational threat. But we are still arguing. The arguing, protesting, and lawsuits over all things have yielded a nation without the ability to govern itself. We stare down a $36 TRILLION dollar national debt and can’t stop spending. We pay annually more to service that debt than we do on the military or Medicare, and in the not so distant future, it will surpass Social Security spending. And no party or leader has any plans whatsoever to address it.

“But Pat, I want to focus on Trump! He’s the Bad Orange Man, the cause of all things wrong with America today. Did you see how terribly he behaved with Zelensky?”

Or is it:

“DOGE will slice fraud/waste/abuse. Trump will tariff us back into a balanced budget. Why can’t you see that!

Forget about Trump, remember? This is about the new era. What is it?

The grand coalition led by America is over. Don’t tell me how great it was; I know. It succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. But it doesn’t, it can’t, work in this new world. The world doesn’t have to revert to the base aggression that the Greek philosopher and strategist Thucydides described, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” (By the way, Athens was a democracy at the time!). But something new is going to replace what was.

In this new era, nations will have to take greater responsibility for their actions. There will be no global policemen, perhaps a few regional ones. International relationships will be more transactional: contracts, not covenants. To all those people who ever shouted (or wanted to) “Yanqui go home!” you’ll get your wish. I have a little secret for my foreign friends: if you polled all Americans and gave them the choice to live in America free from outside threats, but also free of outside commitments, over ninety percent would take it. Yes, America’s foreign entanglements (George Washington’s phrase) were key to our Cold War success, but now America’s biggest problems are back at home.

This may sound depressing, but it needn’t be. This is a return to history, after a brief (80 year) unusual period of idealism. Nations have strengths and weaknesses. They have interests, allies, and threats. None of that is permanent. We fought two wars against the United Kingdom before deciding they were our most special friends. Even during the Pax Americana, things changed. Iran was once a staunch ally, and initially the US kept Israel at arm’s length. We befriended Communist China long enough to separate them from the Soviet Union, but then kept trying to change them while they became a potential challenge.

Would it have been nice to keep things as they were? It may seem so, but the answer is no, because America does not have the power to play that role any longer, and more importantly, it doesn’t have the will. America is powerful, the most powerful single nation on the planet. But it has found that it cannot endlessly expend its resources everywhere on the planet. America lashed out after 9/11, eliminated al Qaida, and defenestrated the Taliban. Two decades later, we couldn’t even muster the will to prevent the Taliban’s return, despite knowing what would happen. It wasn’t the casualties: more service members were dying in training accidents than in Afghanistan when President Trump wrongly committed to and then President Biden incompetently executed our shameless withdrawal. It wasn’t the cost, most of which was sunk cost at that point. It was a loss of nerve, a loss of will.

Perhaps after healing its domestic wounds and stabilizing its spending, it can resume a global role. And there is no reason a more multi-polar world has to be worse. There are pertinent lessons of history here. After the disastrous upheaval of Napoleon’s wars in Europe, the great powers sat down with smaller countries at the Congress of Vienna, creating a set of rules that enabled a balance of power on the continent, preventing more war. True, the rules were regressive and counter-democratic, because the ruling elites feared the mass armies that French republicanism had unleashed. But the rules worked splendidly to ensure peace (in general) for one hundred years, until another set of changes left them vulnerable to the instability that led to World War I.

In the grand finale (part three), I’ll bring us back to Trump and the moment and perhaps shed some additional light. I’d recommend leaving your Trumpian brain at rest, but you do you!