“Goodbye to all that. Now we know that Donald Trump would rip up the post-1945 world order, trash an “obsolete” NATO, lean toward a Japan with nukes rather than the “one-sided agreement” that leaves the United States responsible for Japanese defense, tell Saudi Arabia that it “wouldn’t be around for very long” without American protection, and generally make clear that “we cannot be the policeman of the world.”
So much for Pax Americana; it was a bad deal, you see, and in the Trump universe the deal is everything. American power and far-flung American garrisons may have underwritten global security and averted nuclear war for more than seven decades, but they cannot be sustained by the “poor country” the United States has become. Why? Because, he insists, the whole postwar setup is a scam.
That Trump could be the next president of the United States is no longer a fanciful notion. Americans don’t want business as usual; Trump is not business as usual. He’s ranting and schmoozing his way to the White House as the man who, through some alchemy, will make an anxious America proud again. The world — already more combustible than at any time in recent decades — may be about to become a much more dangerous place.”
Source: Trump’s New World Disorder – The New York Times
This is a good piece by Roger Cohen, followed by some amazing comments. Cohen is absolutely right about the importance of NATO. Trump is a disaster, but part of his underlying critique is sound. The US has more re-balancing, more retreating to do, so that our allies can help pay for the world order we have been funding. I would add to the excellent discussion the point of Andrew Grove of Intel, we need a more job centric ecomomic policy and trade policy. He has a great argument for a new Scaling Bank, from his article in Bussinessweek in 2010 referenced in his piece in the NYTimes last week. Once we come up with a new widget, we need to apply tools and investment to manufacture the item here. We need manufacturing to remain competitive on so many levels. If we do not rebuild the middle class, why bother with the expensive foreign policy that is just for the 1%.
I have recently posted both of these referenced Andy Gove pieces at blog 1, InconvenientNew.wordpress.com.
