The Tribune

FOR a growing number of Americans, there’s a feeling of wanting their president to just go away.

Even though the American punditry universe is bogged down in the heat and humidity of Washington DC’s notorious ‘dog days’ of latter August, when most families are away at the beach or on last-chance holidays before their kids return to school, president Donald Trump continues to make daily headlines.

“It’s been a while since we have actively wished for a president or other prominent politician to take a longer vacation,” mused one veteran pundit from the fringes of yet another impromptu presidential press availability. “But this guy keeps reaching for a bigger shovel with which to deepen the hole he has already dug for himself. He just cannot keep his big mouth shut.”

Trump also persists in fiddling around with the powerful levers of political, economic, and military power that he continues to manipulate in his evolving role as the ‘interim’ leader of the free world. On Tuesday he made more headlines by first imposing, then temporarily suspending, some new tariffs on America’s great neighbor, Canada, apparently simply to invigorate ongoing trade negotiations.

Earlier this week on Monday, Trump had decided to diminish the scope of American participation in long-scheduled joint military exercises with South Korea, while at the same time appearing to reach out to the brutal dictator Kim Jong Un in North Korea.

Closer to home, Trump’s lawyers appealed once again to the Supreme Court to overturn a multi-million-dollar civil penalty he faces after he was convicted several years ago of sexual assault in the dressing room of a fancy Fifth Avenue New York City store.

“It’s all making me numb. I really cannot stand all these antics anymore,” said one commentator. “Just when you think that Trump might realize that he’s losing the battle for public approval in what seems like almost unprecedented fashion, he blunders on in a different direction. This public figure has been analysed so often that his various diagnoses could fill several volumes on your bookshelf!”

All these moves, magnified dramatically because their perpetrator is the American president, may not individually add up to much significance in the greater scheme of things. But they make up key parts of an evolving narrative that has continued to alarm historians and some of the more serious commentators on American life and the arc of that nation’s history in the world.

One such prominent commentator is Robert Kagan, now affiliated with the prestigious Brookings Institution think tank in Washington and a regular contributor to reliable on-line journal The Atlantic, but previously a well-known ‘in-and-outer’ who flits between high-level government foreign policy jobs and stints at politically-affiliated research institutes. Holder of Yale and Harvard degrees, Kagan has served both Democratic and Republican presidents and is married to another prominent Washington insider, who rose to the highest levels of the US Department of State during an illustrious career.

Kagan is now out on the summer lecture circuit and spoke at a private gathering in New York last week. He bluntly expressed his view that the ‘nearly unprecedented’ 80-year post-World War II peace guaranteed by American liberal internationalism, military, and economic hegemony is fading right before our eyes.

“It’s a hard thing for human beings to recognize rapid change when it’s actually happening, especially when we’ve been living in a period that had been relatively peaceful and relatively prosperous for a very long time,” Kagan said.

Kagan is a former conservative Republican who once embraced the ‘neocon’ label applied to many influential foreign policy thinkers, especially during the first eight years of the 21st Century when George W Bush was the American president. Quickly and publicly decrying the threat to traditional American internationalism posed by incoming president Trump in 2017, Kagan broke with his Republican past and joined the Democratic party. He has criticized Trump regularly since then.

While stopping short of directly blaming Trump for the collapse of the American reign of peace since the end of the Second World War, Kagan nevertheless describes the president as emblematic--and perhaps energizer--of a dangerous isolationist trend in the American political fabric.

Kagan simultaneously dismissed Trump as a thoughtless historical lightweight, but also well noted the president’s ongoing historical significance. It was clear that he believes the damage Trump has inflicted on the US reign of peace cannot be reversed. He declared that Trump’s much better focused second term has enabled the president to so severely damage longstanding institutional bastions like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that the key element of trust that bound together the US, Canada, and Western Europe is now gone.

In the postwar era, Kagan said, “what happened in that period was really historically unprecedented and almost impossible to believe. Because if you think about the settlement of World War II, I would urge you to look at all the great prewar powers, whose conflicts with each other kept the world perpetually at war for centuries if not millennia. Those included, more recently, Britain, France, Germany and Japan.

“Then, after World War II, they all gave up all those great power ambitions that had sustained them for so long and allowed themselves to be encompassed under the American security umbrella.”

Not unaccustomed to the use of passionate hyperbole, Kagan sees us in the midst of the collapse of a durable world order. And Trump is at the center of this disintegration.

“By destroying our alliances, by tariffing our allies, by making it clear that the United States is not interested in protecting others – that we’re really only in it for ourselves and the money that we can make – we are destroying a system which really became a remarkable period in human history.”

During the US reign of peace that Kagan so blissfully recalls, the Americans were, ironically, almost always at war with someone, somewhere in the world. There have been military adventures in Korea, Panama, Vietnam, Libya, the Balkans, the Dominican Republic, Iraq, Grenada, Afghanistan, Iran, and elsewhere.

But Kagan points out that these wars were not between what he calls ‘great power nations’ whose military and economic strength would mean that merely their involvement in a war would trigger a global conflict.

The ‘great power nations’ instead entrusted their security to the US, which would in turn provide protection, establish an international economic order focused on values of free trade, and refuse to abuse its power to bully its allies. The Europeans trusted America, and for eight decades the US earned that trust.

Now, Kagan asserts, the US has basically ruined its reign of peace. He mentioned Article Five of the NATO treaty, under which an attack against any member state compels alliance-wide response and assistance.

“I’m sure that the Europeans don’t think that Article Five means anything anymore, which is why they are rearming. They’re not rearming because Donald Trump has convinced them of the importance of burden sharing (allotting a greater percentage of their budget to defense spending), though that demand has been a cornerstone of American diplomacy for decades, under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

“No,” he continued. “It’s not burden sharing. It’s because the Europeans are rushing to rebuild their militaries because they are scared to death of Russia.”

The scholar is particularly concerned about Germany, whose might and ambition threatened European and world peace for almost a century before World War II finally convinced the Germans that economic peace with their neighbors offered a better future.

Kagan is frankly anxious about Germany, for the past 36 years reunited and standing again as a potential economic, political, and military powerhouse against perpetually overmatched neighbors in Central Europe.

Fear of the horrors of Nazism before and during World War II are never far from the minds of Europeans.

Now, Kagan can only bemoan the losses he sees accumulating under the current American administration. And the idea of trusting the Americans – the lynchpin of the reign of peace – is nothing more than a hopeful glimmer.

“I suppose that right now, the most optimistic scenario I can imagine is that eventually the American people will wake up and realize what is happening and maybe demand a reversal in this current approach to foreign policy,” he concluded. “It’s time for us to turn things around right now.”