We Switched Sides

Authoritarianism has come to the United States. Is it too late to turn toward democracy?

On November 5, 1942, Dwight Eisenhower arrived in Gibraltar, the strategic British outpost on the far southern tip of Spain. Just eleven months earlier Eisenhower had been a little known, newly minted brigadier general with a desk job as a planner at the War Department in Washington, D.C.

He had never held a large command and never been in combat.

Now, with three stars on his shoulders and from a command post on “the Rock,” Eisenhower had overall command of what a few days later would be the largest amphibious operation in the history of warfare to that point - Operation Torch, the U.S. landings in Morocco and Tunisia in north Africa. The North African operation was a critical turning point in World War II and the first time U.S. troops directly confronted the fascist armies of Germany and Italy.

Eisenhower in 1942 at Gibraltar

Dwight Eisenhower, his leadership, his career and his role in defeating Nazi Germany in World War II, is a fitting place to begin to understand the depth and breadth of American retreat from world leadership under Donald Trump.

The scope of the retreat, and the effective switching of sides by the country from America’s post-war allies to right wing nationalist and authoritarian regimes in Russia, Hungry and Turkey, was on stark and unmistakable display this week. ¹

As a historian I try not to assign contemporary opinions to historic figures, but in Eisenhower’s case I feel confident that the general/president would be appalled by the state of American “leadership” under a fellow Republican.

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The ahistorical presidency

I doubt very much Donald Trump spends much time thinking about the history of the American presidency, or the men who held the position he now inhabits and sullies. By all accounts Trump doesn’t read anything except that which is curated for him by his enabling minions. He watches television and posts on social media.

You won’t see Trump inviting historians to the White House for dinner and conversation about the presidency and what he might learn from history. Not his thing.

I’d bet a small fortune he’s never read a biography of Eisenhower or Truman or Franklin Roosevelt. Does he know any of the history of World War I and II? Doubtful. Does he understand how NATO came about and why that historic alliance has been so important for decades to both Europe and the United States?

Could Trump name more than one or two significant actors in the post-war world, and more importantly would he know why they were important?

Could the president pick George Marshall, the great general and later secretary of state and defense, out of a photo lineup? Personal opinion, but Marshall - mostly forgotten today - is the greatest American most Americans have never heard of, so in that sense Trump may not be alone.

Trump should know what Marshall did to win the war and build the peace, but I’m confident he doesn’t. Same goes for Henry Stimson and Omar Bradley and Winston Churchill and, yes, Dwight Eisenhower.

This lack of curiosity, this lack of self reflection cast against the history of the job he holds isn’t Trump’s greatest failing, but it almost certainly contributes to his greatest failings.

Amid the boundless chaos, the dreadful incompetence, the venality, the unprecedented corruption, indeed the human depravity of his first year in office, it seems impossible to pick just one or even a handful of the most outrageous and damaging things this incurious and evil man has done to the country.

But this week’s formal Trump announcement of a historically profound and deeply unsettling change in American foreign policy should be very high on anyone’s list of the worst thing Trump has done.

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What switching sides looks like

The Trump National Security Strategy features the usual Trumpian bluster and boasting, half truths and out and out fables, but it’s more than the typical Trump stump speech. It’s a abject rejection of the world America inhabited since at least 1945, but now no longer does.

Read some of the reactions: here, here and here.

A roadmap for more chaos and American retreat

Three takeaways that seem to me most important:

1. Trump has clearly aligned the United States with Putin’s Russia. Few reasonable people looking at Trump’s actions during his first term and since can deny his consistent interest in moving the U.S. steadily toward Russia and its thuggish leader. This document removed any remaining doubt about what side Trump has chosen.

2. Trump really hates Europe. He hopes and acts to destabilize the European Union, weaken and ultimately destroy NATO and embrace and emulate the illiberal regimes in places like Hungry and Turkey. ²

3. Trump is profoundly committed to far right nationalist movements in the U.K., France, Germany and elsewhere. These racist, white Christian, often neo-fascist movements have been, in many ways, the model for the far right of the MAGA movement.

Polly Toynbee, a columnist for The Guardian, underscores this third point in Trump’s security document:

The whole section on Europe is steeped in decades of European far-right ideology and propaganda. The EU and migration policies are held responsible for “transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence”. According to the document, if “present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognisable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies”. Indeed, the Trump administration believes that “within a few decades at the latest, certain Nato members will become majority non-European”.

Cas Mudde, an international relations professor at the University of Georgia, puts it even more bluntly, as he hopes this time European leaders finally take Trump seriously:

… if the document is too long or vague for [European leaders], let me summarise it in terms that are clear and concise: the current US government believes that its national security is best served by the destruction of liberal democracy in Europe. In other words, the US is not (just) an unwilling ally, it is a willing adversary. Time to act accordingly.

Kim Darroch, the former British ambassador to Washington, writes in The Observer:

Trump’s words also remind us of a fundamental truth about him: he simply does not buy the judgment that has guided post-second world war US foreign policy – that the US has a strategic national interest in maintaining a secure, prosperous and democratic Europe. For Trump, the world revolves around the Big Three of America, China and Russia. Europe just doesn’t cut it.

The Trump security strategy is also, like much else from the administration, profoundly racist, particularly in its Islamophobia. ³

As the European-born historian Adam Tooze recently told Paul Krugman, the American economist:

Europe is the woke America that MAGA hates worst; it is the secret ally, an extension of coastal America, certainly the East Coast. So in a sense, the culture war agenda that the Trump folks are running in the US can be run in Europe. In some ways, the Islamophobia can even be more explicit in relation to Europe than it is at home. Because you could accuse the Europeans of sacrificing their culture, a great replacement theory—essentially, you can carry on, you can send violence to the Munich Security Conference, and he will already announce this agenda earlier in the year. So that’s what we’re seeing in a strange way, Europe isn’t really distinct from the American political space. It’s the same political space. The conflict is therefore, really uninhibited and overtly partisan. Basically they’re asking for European politics to open the gates to the right.

It is no longer possible to excuse or seperate Trump policy and rhetoric - immigration, “shithole countries,” attacks on political leaders of color - as anything less than straight up xenophobic hate.

Let’s call it what it is: the language of 1930’s Germany. ⁴

In a recent rambling interview with Politico Trump said:

Europe, they’re coming in from all parts of the world. Not just the Middle East, they’re coming in from the Congo, tremendous numbers of people coming from the Congo. And even worse, they’re coming from prisons of the Congo and many other countries. And for some reason, they want to be politically correct, which actually, I think is the opposite of politically correct. But they want to be politically correct, and they don’t want to send ’em back to where they came from.

And Europe is ... uh, if you take a look at Paris, it’s a much different place. I loved Paris. Uh, it’s a much different place than it was. If you take a look at London, you have a mayor named Khan. He’s a horrible mayor. He’s an incompetent mayor, but he’s a horrible, vicious, disgusting mayor. I think he’s done a terrible job. London’s a different place. I love London. I love London. And I hate to see it happen. You know, my roots are in Europe, as you know.

Make that “white” European.

The white nationalism runs very deep

The new Trump National Security Strategy is based on dangerous and profoundly racist magical thinking. In many ways it is the essence of Trumpism.

I was struck by a statement issued recently by the self described leading think tank in extremely conservative Idaho, a state you could argue has become the most Trump friendly in the entire country.

Under the headline “The Invasion of Idaho” the Idaho Freedom Foundation, with considerable sway in the state’s politics, alleges:

The United States of America is in a crisis. For nearly five decades our nation has been under invasion from hordes of foreign nationals who have introduced crime, suppressed domestic wages, driven up the cost of living, overwhelmed our public services, and undermined our culture.

This “blood and soil” craziness is offered, of course, as absolute fact without a sentence of factual basis to back it up.

It’s worth mentioned that Idaho is one of the whitest states in the country - more than 83% - with less than 6% of the population foreign born. The state, until recently, had both a generally welcoming attitude toward refugees and a history of neo-Nazi white supremacy. The John Birch Society, prominent in the 1960’s in Idaho even while widely repudiated by many Republicans, is making a spirited comeback. Immigrants and refugees are under attack.

This Idaho example serves to illustrate how broadly and deeply the “America is in a crisis” line of propaganda has infected the American right, with a chief proponent of the conservative movements hateful message, Stephen Miller, sitting at the right hand of the president.

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As one who has labored to understand the geopolitical, economic and cultural lessons of the global war of 1939-1945 it is frankly mind boggling to see the naked reality of these lessons perverted by so much of the American conservative movement.

The continued rise of neo-Nazi groups, the open adulation in some dark corners of the far right for Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, the fascist rhetoric and action from the White House makes me truly wonder if it is too late to reclaim something like a pluralistic American democracy.

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A lesson from the Eisenhower experience

George Marshall, who I mentioned earlier, was Dwight Eisenhower’s immediate superior during World War II.

By most accounts Marshall initially selected the largely untested Eisenhower for a command position in Europe because he felt Eisenhower had the leadership, organizational and diplomatic skills that would be essential to work with a broad and diverse coalition of other military and political leaders.

Eisenhower and Marshall

Eisenhower understood that America, largely unprepared for war when Pearl Harbor was attacked in December 1941, must have allies if it were to prevail against world-wide militaristic and fascist opponents.

Eisenhower went on, of course, to serve as supreme Allied commander in Europe and after the war became the first NATO commander.

Eisenhower’s ability to work with and harmonize the diverse opinions among the big egos of British politicians and generals, not to mention Charles de Gaulle, the Free French leader, became absolutely critical to winning the war in Europe.

Eisenhower made mistakes to be sure. But ignoring the importance of allies and cooperation and engagement with Europe were not among them.

Those lessons, occasionally frayed and sometimes momentarily ignored over the last 80 years, have never been under such a relentless siege as they are right now.

There is a particular brand of American arrogance, it seems to me, that too often infects our foreign policy, and Trump’s security strategy reeks of this arrogance. The conceit holds that our country is so big, so powerful, so wealthy that we should be able to dictate with impunity to the rest of the world - morals, common sense, international law and history notwithstanding.

This attitude, potentially with tragic and long-term consequences, continues to unfold with Trump’s attitude toward Ukraine’s existential fight to stop Russian aggression. It has long been clear that Trump will eventually abandon U.S. support for Ukraine, leaving our one-time European allies to shoulder support for a democracy that stands between Putin and his further designs on Poland, the Baltic states and more.

Meanwhile, with vague explanations and likely war crimes, Trump is mindlessly stumbling into a regional war in Venezuela, and across the board is enabling Chinese military and economic dominance in Asia and beyond.

Trump will continue to find that the rest of the world will have something to say about his blinkered, authoritarian national security strategy and its contention that Latin America is little more than an American colony and Europe a collection of failing states being destroyed by immigrants and refugees.

Europe, broadly speaking, will not give in to Putin or surrender easily to the far right. The brutal history of the 20th Century is still to raw for that.

Trump may pervert the American military into sinking a few small boats in the Caribbean, while setting off a larger war, but American adventures in the region have never - ever - been simple or effective.

The question for us is whether our political leadership, particularly from the conservative right, will wake up in time to save the country from the blunders, ignorance and arrogance of a failed real estate developer with no concept of our own history, or the world’s.

The Trump National Security Strategy is the roadmap for American retreat and vastly diminished influence across the globe. Trump’s “strategy” will make the United States less secure. History will record the full effects. Unfortunately, we will all experience Trump’s folly in real time, and all too soon.

Thanks for reading.

1. There is an excellent piece currently in Foreign Affairs that describes in some detail the rapid collapse of American democracy into what the authors call “competitive authoritarianism.” The piece is factual and substantive and argues against despair or assuming that it is too late to turn this tide. I’d like to believe it.

2. A report issued by the Danish Intelligence Agency - you read that right - warned this week that the United States is no longer a reliable ally. “The United States uses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies,” the report said.

3. See Trump’s recent rants directed at Somali refugees who have settled in Minnesota. This same approach is carried over and applied to Europe.

4. Some scholars have noted the reappearance among the MAGA right of the ideas and writing of Nazi-era jurist Carl Schmitt. As David Lewis, a scholar at Exeter University, wrote in 2016: “Schmitt’s brilliance lay in his unflinching, unsentimental analysis of the baser notions of politics. He knew only too well the power of xenophobia and hatred to mobilise mass support. He saw at first hand the attraction of a leader who could cut through political or constitutional quagmires to “save” the nation. Even as a jurist, he felt the rush of emotion in a crowd when a leader articulates their deepest fears and desires.”