Trump and the Big Picture

Trump did not just happen.  He is part of the big picture.

The light from the distant galaxies was emitted 5 billion years ago.

The really really big picture: 

I post the photo of these galaxies to put things into perspective long term and really big time.   It is a view from the Hubble telescope, a view of 10,000 galaxies from a minuscule portion of the sky.  Every galaxy has millions of stars.  Earth is a speck in the solar system around one star in one galaxy and we are looking out beyond our galaxy.  The bit of sky this came from is a telephoto shot the size of a dime held at a distance of 70 feet away, so there are millions more just like these 10,000 galaxies.

There are a lot of take-aways one can reflect on, but mine is that if our planet blows itself up it will be tragic for us humans but not that big a deal in the context of the visible universe.  

Western Europe by nightThen there is the big picture.

The big picture:

The photo of the night sky of Europe demonstrates where the people are and it shows Europe geography not as a political map with boundaries but as a region that supports life.   The Poe valley shows up as bright light.  So does the industrial area of the Ruhr and Rhine in the upper left.  Athens is a bright spot, as is Istanbul.  Also visible are the winding darker area of mountains and then the less populated farm areas east of them.  One sees the broad plain unimpeded by these mountains north of the Alps linking France through Germany into Poland and Russia.  The dark natural boundaries would impede an advancing army, the plains are a highway for Napoleon or Hitler.

Political boundaries are superimposed onto this geography.  It explains something about Switzerland: defensible territory between great industrial areas.   It explains why horsemen armies from central Asia came to a stop in Austria as the grass and flat terrain that brought them thousand of miles of triumph finally came to a western end.    This second photo is from Stratfor, a foreign affairs consultancy, and their article which describes the current state of the world in context of the great forces of history.  I recommend this article.

Click Here: Stratfor on Geographical forces

The election of Donald Trump happened within a context.  We had been through a period in the 1990s of economic expansion that made global trade and economic expansion appear easy and inevitable.  The prosperity covered up growing problems.   The financial crisis of 2008 revealed cracks and weaknesses.  European unity began fracturing.  The problems and dislocations caused by the free movement of labor and capital grew stronger and more apparent to the people disadvantaged by the change.   This took place coincident with uprisings against weak governments in the Middle East.  In the absence of other cultural unifiers Islam became a rallying point.   Scotland nearly separated from the UK.  Greece stays in the Euro zone but cannot afford to do so.  Germany tries to hold things together.  Meanwhile German workers are restless at un-assimilated immigrants from Muslim countries.  And then Brexit.

Immigration backlash

Asia.  China's great expansion is slowing, causing internal strain.  North Korea has nuclear weapons.  Japan is pushing back.

And meanwhile, the United States of America.   Donald Trump was not inevitable, but his rise was possible because he is the focal point for trends and counter-trends that are happening world wide.   Trump voiced the attitudes which brought Brexit in the UK and Marine Le Pen of the French National Front Party.  He echoes the rise of cultural and religious nationalism that has inspiredIslamist parties in the Middle East.  The description of the "End of History" in Francis Fukyama's book of 1992 now looks dreamy eyed and naive.  Humans are not about money and economic interest after all.   When prosperity fails, as it did decisively in the financial crisis, humans become people of blood, soil, and culture as described in Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations.  

National Front Party

Trump is America's Brexit, our La Pen, our Erdogan as he retreats from a century of Turkish secular government to try to re-establish legitimacy.  Trump did not "come out of nowhere."   Trump's biography and personal religious practice are not what make him a champion of the evangelical voters in America.   Evangelicals saw him as a soldier in a world war of religions, a soldier happy to defend Christianity in a battle against secularism at home and Islam from abroad.  In his final battle against Trump candidate Marco Rubio attempted to join this fight in a TV ad saying that we were in nothing less than a cage fight to the end.  Them or us, a war of civilizations.   He described the religious and cultural practices of Saudi Arabia, our ally against ISIS.    Rubio lost to Trump.  Trump was saying the same things, earlier and more clearly.  A great many American voters want a religious and cultural enemy and they wanted it named: Islam.   We aren't fighting a political war; it is a religious war. It was "Islamic terror."

In the next four years America's interests will push up against the interests of everyone else in the world: Russia, China, Turkey, Europe, Iran, Mexico, Japan.  Great forces create the context for America's interests but decisions are made by people, and some decisions turn out to be foolish and devastating.  Germany failed to tell Austria not to go to war over Serbia in 1914. Japan failed to negotiate a reliable source of oil in the 1930s.   The original response to the stock market crash of 1929 was government austerity.  Leaders err.

Turkish President Erdogan

And sometimes they are smart or lucky.   JFK responded to the first rather than the second  Russian response to our announcement of an American an embargo on Cuba blocking Russian ships, and nuclear war was avoided.  

It is very unclear how much knowledge and experience Trump has in world history and statecraft but the common assumption is that he is as unschooled in foreign policy as he is in the Bible.   But he has thrust himself into the arena of butting heads with foreign governments and their own interests.   Conflict is inevitable but how it plays out is not.

Hillary had a fair point--acknowledged by an overwhelming majority of voters--when she said that Trump's temperament was risky and troubling.  Enough voters decided they simply didn't care.  America is at a place in history where enough voters are looking for a different response to world events.  They wanted a nationalist and a populist, not a globalist, so we got one.