“I think the key in this presidential campaign should be a focus on how we prevent war, not how we wage war,” vanden Heuvel said. “There should be new institutions that appear in this period of ferment that speak to a social democratic, demilitarized, deescalating kind of foreign policy…. One thing that has been a throughline in the nation’s history is that you cannot have democracy or sustain freedom at home if the global context is shaped by militarism, racism and corporate power. ....in this age of worldwide disruption and dangers to democracy, any progressive American foreign policy should come down to the three simple words of medicine’s Hippocratic Oath:
Do No Harm."
When it comes to the worldwide destruction of democracy,
Trump is the enabler supreme.
“The global trend is sour.” So says Larry Diamond, senior fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution.
That’s putting it mildly. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Diamond writes, “Democracy faces a global crisis. We have seen 12 consecutive years of erosion in global levels of political rights and civil liberties, with many more countries declining than gaining each year, according to the nonprofit group Freedom House. Over the past decade, one in six democracies has failed. Today only a bare majority of the world’s larger states remain democracies.
“Nor do the numbers capture the full extent of the danger. Behind the statistics is a steady, palpable corrosion of democratic institutions and norms in a range of countries. China, Russia and their admirers are making headway with a new global narrative, hailing strongman rule—not government by the people—as the way forward in difficult times.”
When it comes to hastening this disastrous worldwide decay, Donald Trump, is, of course, an enabler supreme, patting on the back despots like Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, welcoming Hungary’s far right prime minister Viktor Orban to the White House (and calling him successful and “highly respected, respected all over Europe”), singing the praises of the Philippines’ Duterte and Brazil’s Bolsinaro, etc. And all the while yearning to yield that same kind of anti-democratic dictatorial power over his own United States.
That’s why the president’s shambolic foreign policy can be both a curse and a sort of blessing. On the one hand, his inchoate fumbling and lack of coherent doctrine has us upending the planet and could at any moment walk us right off a cliff and down into major fresh hell. On the other, this same haplessness and uncertainty has kept some truly gruesome ideas from being implemented. Inertia often reigns because no one in this administration ever seems to know what the boss wants; his mind changes from moment to moment and he has the attention span of a toddler in the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese.
A few days ago, Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair reported, “The White House’s chaotic policymaking process can best be viewed as a series of collisions between Donald Trump’s I-alone-can-fix-it campaign boasts and reality. So far, damage from these crashes with the real world has been contained to domestic issues. But with Venezuela collapsing, North Korea launching new missiles, an escalating trade war with China, and possible real war with Iran, chances are increasing that Trump could stoke an international crisis that will spiral out of his control.”
