America’s Lonely Future

By David Frum

Wednesday, December 04, 2024

 

In his first major address as president, Harry Truman urged Americans to use their enormous power “to serve and not to dominate.”

 

The date was April 16, 1945. Adolf Hitler was still alive in his bunker in Berlin. Americans were readying themselves for a bloody invasion of the Japanese home islands. The atomic bomb remained a secret.

 

Yet Truman’s thoughts were already shifting to the postwar future. “We must now learn to live with other nations for our mutual good. We must learn to trade more with other nations so that there may be, for our mutual advantage, increased production, increased employment, and better standards of living throughout the world.”

 

Truman’s vision inspired American world leadership for the better part of a century. From the Marshall Plan of the 1940s to the Trans-Pacific Partnership of the 2010s, Americans sought to achieve security and prosperity for themselves by sharing security and prosperity with like-minded others. The United States became the center of a network of international cooperation—not only on trade and defense, but on environmental concerns, law enforcement, financial regulation, food and drug safety, and countless other issues.

 

By enriching and empowering fellow democracies, Americans enriched and empowered themselves too. The United States has led and sustained a liberal world order in part because Americans are a generous people—and even more so because the liberal world order is a great deal for Americans.

 

Open international trade is nearly always mutually beneficial. Yet there is more to the case than economics. Trade, mutual-protection pacts, and cooperation against corruption and terrorism also make democracies more secure against authoritarian adversaries. Other great powers—China, India, Russia—face suspicious and even hostile coalitions of powerful enemies. The United States is backed by powerful friends. These friendships reinforce U.S. power. By working with the European Central Bank, for instance, the U.S. was able to freeze hundreds of billions of dollars of Russian assets after the attack on Kyiv in 2022. Russia imagined those assets beyond American reach; they were not domiciled in the United States. Yet when necessary, the U.S. could reach them thanks to its friends.

 

Americans who lived through the great tumult of Truman’s era understood that the isolationist slogan “America First” meant America alone. America alone meant America weakened. That lesson was taught by harsh experience: a depression that was deepened and prolonged by destructive tariff wars, by each afflicted country’s hopeless attempt to rescue itself at the expense of its neighbors; a world war that was enabled because democratic powers would not act together in time against a common threat. The lesson was reinforced by positive postwar experience: the creation of global institutions to expand trade and preserve the peace; the U.S.-led defeat of Soviet Communism and the triumphant end of the Cold War.

 

But in the years since, the harsh experience has faded into half-forgotten history; the positive experience has curdled into regrets and doubts.

 

***

 

Donald Trump is the first U.S. president since 1945 to reject the worldview formed by the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the Cold War.

 

Trump’s vision has no place for “mutual good” or “mutual advantage.” To him, every trade has a winner and a loser. One side’s success is the other side’s defeat. “We don’t beat China in trade,” he complained in the first Republican presidential-primary debate of 2015. “We don’t beat Japan … We can’t beat Mexico.” His deepest policy grievance is against those foreigners who sell desirable goods and services at an attractive price to willing American buyers.

 

Trump regularly disparages U.S. allies, and threatens to abandon them. “We’re being taken advantage of by every country all over the world, including our allies—and in many cases, our allies are worse than our so-called enemies,” he said at a rally this November. But unlike the “America First” movement before World War II, Trump’s “America First” vision is not exactly isolationist. Trump’s version of “America First” is predatory.

 

In a midsummer interview, Trump demanded that Taiwan pay the United States directly for defense. “I don’t think we’re any different from an insurance policy,” he said. When the podcaster Joe Rogan asked Trump in October about protecting Taiwan, Trump answered in a more revealing way: “They want us to protect, and they want protection. They don’t pay us money for the protection, you know? The mob makes you pay money, right?”

 

American allies in fact make large contributions to collective security. Total assistance to Ukraine from the European Union nearly matches that of the United States. South Korea pays for the construction and maintenance of U.S. facilities in Korea—and for the salaries of Koreans who support U.S. forces. But Trump wants direct cash payments. In a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago in October, he called for an annual levy of $10 billion from South Korea as the price of protection against North Korea.

 

Trump seems to have his eye on other payments too; in his first term, he collected benefits for himself and members of his family. Countries that wanted favorable treatment knew to book space at his Washington, D.C., hotel or, it seemed, to dispense business favors to his children. According to a 2024 report by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, Trump’s properties collected at least $7.8 million from foreign sources during his first term.

 

In his second term, the stream of payments may surge into a torrent. Trump owes more than half a billion dollars in civil penalties for defamation and fraud. How will he pay? Who will help him pay? Trump’s need for funds may sway U.S. foreign policy more than any strategy consideration. One of his largest donors in 2024, Elon Musk, stands to benefit hugely from U.S. help with government regulators in China and the EU. Musk is also a major government contractor—and one with strong views about U.S. foreign policy. Over the past few years, he has emerged as one of the fiercest critics of American support for Ukraine. On November 6, Musk joined Trump’s first postelection call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Those who invest in Trump—be they foreign agents or mercurial billionaires—may, over the next four years, annex U.S. power to reshape the world to their liking and their profit.

 

***

 

In 2019, Trump delivered a Fourth of July address on the National Mall. The speech exulted in the fearsome lethality of the U.S. military, but Trump had little to say about American ideals or democratic institutions. Trump has never accepted that the United States is strengthened by its values and principles, by a reputation for trustworthiness and fair dealing. The U.S., to him, should command respect because it is the biggest and strongest bully on the block. When his friend Bill O’Reilly asked him in a 2017 interview about Vladimir Putin, Trump scoffed at the idea that there might be any moral difference between the U.S. and Russia. “You think our country’s so innocent?”

 

Open trade and defensive alliances were already bumping into domestic resistance even before Trump first declared himself a candidate for the presidency. The U.S. has not entered into a new trade-liberalizing agreement since the free-trade agreements with Colombia and Panama negotiated by the George W. Bush administration and signed by President Barack Obama. The Trans-Pacific Partnership was rejected by a Republican Senate during Obama’s last year in office. The Biden administration maintained most of the protectionist measures it inherited from Trump, then added more of its own.

 

But Trump uniquely accelerated America’s retreat from world markets, and will continue to do so. His first-term revision of the North American Free Trade Agreement preserved existing access to U.S. markets for Canada and Mexico in return for raising higher barriers around all three North American economies. He has nominated Jamieson Greer, who he said “played a key role during my First Term in imposing Tariffs on China and others,” as U.S. trade representative. The tariffs Trump desires, the protection money he seeks, and his undisguised affinity for Putin and other global predators will weaken America’s standing with traditional allies and new partners. How will the United States entice Asian and Pacific partners to support U.S. security policy against China if they are themselves treated as threats and rivals by the makers of U.S. trade policy?

 

Trump supporters tell a story about Trump’s leadership. They describe him as a figure of strength who will preserve world peace by force of personality. Potential aggressors will be intimidated by his fierce unpredictability.

 

This story is a fantasy. Trump was no more successful than his predecessors at stopping China from converting atolls and sandbars in the South China Sea into military bases. Chinese warships menaced maritime neighbors on Trump’s watch. In September 2018, one passed within 45 yards of a U.S. destroyer in international waters. In January 2020, Iran fired a missile barrage against U.S. forces in Iraq, inflicting 109 traumatic brain injuries. During Trump’s first presidency, the United States continued to fight two shooting wars, one in Afghanistan and one against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Over those same four years, the Russian forces that invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014 inflicted more than 500 civilian casualties.

 

Every president puts a face on the abstraction that is the American nation, and gives words to the American creed. Few spoke more eloquently than Ronald Reagan, who famously compared the United States to a “shining city on a hill.” In his farewell address, Reagan asked, “And how stands the city on this winter night?” Reagan could answer his own question in a way that made his country proud.

 

The “city on a hill” image ultimately traces back to the New Testament: “A city that is set upon a hill cannot be hid.” The visible hilltop location imposed extra moral responsibility on the city dwellers. Now the hilltop will become a height from which to exercise arrogant control over those who occupy the lower slopes and valleys—the dominance against which Truman warned. Under Trump, America will act more proudly, yet have less to be proud of. Its leaders will pocket corrupt emoluments; the nation will cower behind tariff walls, demanding tribute instead of earning partnership. Some of its citizens will delude themselves that the country has become great again, while in reality it will have become more isolated and less secure.

 

Americans have tried these narrow and selfish methods before. They ended in catastrophe. History does not repeat itself: The same mistakes don’t always carry the same consequences. But the turn from protector nation to predator nation will carry consequences bad enough.