Donald Trump's New World Order Is the Old World Order

[Celerity]

The president has shattered America’s commitment to promoting democracy and international norms, replacing it with an erratic transactionalism that favors dominance over stability—and loyalty over law.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/donald-trumps-new-world-order

https://archive.ph/1gKUa



Henry Kissinger once said that every American president since Woodrow Wilson has had to embrace Wilson’s foreign policy idealism. Kissinger said this ruefully, and favored a very unsentimental realism in foreign affairs and a hands-off policy when it came to other countries’ domestic affairs. His view was always that America had no permanent friends or enemies, only interests. I suspect Donald Trump would agree with that. Because to him, the transaction is everything.

Converting Gaza into an oceanfront resort. Turning Canada into the 51st state. Annexing Greenland. “Reclaiming” the Panama Canal. Punishing our closest neighbors with punitive tariffs. Undermining NATO. Siding with Russia, our longtime adversary, while bullying our longtime allies. Holding a Ukraine peace deal hostage to gain access to the war-torn country’s rare earth minerals. Threatening to ignore defense treaties and flouting economic agreements. “My whole life is deals,” said the 47th president after meeting with the leader of France, America’s first ally, to discuss ending the war in Ukraine.

The idea that all exchanges in foreign affairs are merely cold transactions of power—or “deals” untethered from broader moral commitments—has always been known as “realism.” But even arch realists have operated within the framework of the rule of law and the sovereignty of nation states.

That rules-based world order seemed to reach its zenith at the end of 1989, when the Berlin Wall was crumbling. The scholar Francis Fukuyama observed this high-water mark in “The End of History?”—his famous article positing that with the fall of Communism, an international consensus had been reached. It was the belief that, at the end of the Cold War, liberal democracy had triumphed over all of its 20th-century ideological rivals—Communism, fascism, monarchy, theocracy—and so we had come to what philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had prophesied as the end of ideological competition in world affairs. No more wars of imperial conquest, no more quarreling over borders, no more violent competition.

snip

[sinkingfeeling]

1. I might disagree that Kissinger favored ' a hands-off policy when it came to other countries' domestic affairs'.

[Clouds Passing]

5. Agreed. He was no friend to the common man (his words: useless eaters)

[ProudMNDemocrat]

2. Fuck You Donnie

I ain't complying.

[applegrove]

3. Trump worships McKinley as Presidents go. That was

when the USA had no progressive income tax and paid for everything with tariffs which mean the poor starved and lived in squalor, children worked and if you got sick with something simple, you died.

[malaise]

4. Good read

Rec