Trump's Inauguration Speech: Dog Eat Dog

His speech revealed a way of looking at America's place in the world that is in radical departure from the post WW2 bipartisan consensus.  

Countries are like businesses.   Competition.   What could go wrong?

An inauguration speech gives close observers plenty to think about.

   ***People noticed how he used the word "carnage" to describe parts of America.

   ***People noticed that it was a repeat of well received campaign stump speech lines.

   ***People noticed that he primarily spoke to his base.

   ***People noticed he said we would unite the civilized world against "radical Islamic terrorism" and eradicate it.

   ***People noticed that he added a word to the prepared transcript, and emphasized it vocally in his speech:   "From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land.  From this day forward, it's going to be only America first, America first."

These were all good, important observations.   This blog will add another one because it reveals a way of looking at America's place in the world that is very different from the post WW2 bipartisan consensus.

Donald Trump, in his inaugeraton speech:

"At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction, that a nation exists to serve its citizens.   We seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world, but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first."

Setting up the postwar world

This is huge.

In the closing year of WW2, when the tide of the war seemed certain Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin began planning in Yalta for the postwar world. They laid the seeds of what many Americans considered a sellout of eastern Europe when they agreed that Germany and all of Europe would be divided with the Soviet Union having domination of the eastern half.  Some Americans thought we should immediately go to war with the USSR to settle the boundaries of influence further to the east, thus containing a smaller USSR.  But they had lost some 11,000,000 soldiers, the US some 250,000 in Europe and there was acknowledgement at the highest levels that the USSR had paid a blood price, that the war with Japan still continued, and that the Soviet army would fight Americans with the same ferocity they fought Nazis.   

Robert Sage on left.  Survived the war

Some 60,000,000 people were killed in the conflict.  Americans were war weary.  So they made a deal for how to bring a cold war peace to Europe and then a greater consensus on setting up the United Nations.

The bipartisan American consensus was that what happened in Europe did not stay in Europe and that what happened in Asia did not stay in Asia.  It was be international in thinking or be at war.

Robert Sage, with surrendered weapons

America decided--"realized", as they saw it--that the pre-WW1 image of the world of a group of individual rival nations, fighting for themselves and forming alliances for themselves, was a tinderbox, a disaster waiting to happen.  Seen from the view of 1945 the world had been at near constant war for 30 years.   It was not just bad for business.  It was bad for nations because empires were lost due to the loss of blood and treasure and influence.  The wars destroyed Russia, the Austrian-Hungarian empire, the Ottoman Empire, the French Empire, and the British empire.  Plus their cities were destroyed and their people killed.

Robert Sage  1947.  Americans chose this.

There has to be a better way, Americans thought.   Therefore:

   The Marshall Plan.  Better and safer a prosperous Europe than a Europe poor and ready to fight again.

   NATO and Warsaw Pact.  Better to create international alliances so that it is clear that border wars are off the table of plausibility.

   The United Nations.  Better to create a body of international standards and influence.

   Nuclear umbrellas and nuclear non-proliferation treaties.  Better to make clear that America will risk mutually assured destruction rather than allow allied countries to be invaded, and to limit the number of nuclear-armed countries.  Their thought was that by cooperating we reduce the chance of war

   Bretton Woods Agreement.  The international agreement in 1944 setting up a negotiated monetary order for industrially developed countries.  Agree on a system for valuing currencies so world trade can proceed.

These have been followed more recently with European Union, the Euro, NAFTA, international companies, and global supply chains.

The basic premise of the postwar consensus was that the very notion of individual countries each taking care of Number One leads to war.  The mental model of various independent businesses, each competing for market share and advantage works somewhat, but imperfectly, in real estate development.    There are endless opportunities for favoritism, cronyism, conflicts of interest, but competition happens and developments get developed.  That was the world Trump succeeded in.

It works less well with industries that tend toward oligopoly and consolidation.  The auto industry competes, Toyota vs. GM vs. Volkswagen, but it is prone to tariffs, bankruptcies, government interventions, bailouts.

The every nation for itself model, the 1914 model of individual countries in a global struggle for colonies and market share, teaming up in convenient alliances, has been a system very prone to disaster among nations with their own ethnic, racial, language, religious, and cultural identity, combined with awkward borders, histories of rivalries, and thousands of points of friction.  Those points of friction lead to war.    How do we know this?  All of human history, most pointedly 1914-1945.  War, as Clausewitz said, "is the continuation of politics by other means."  

But maybe this time is different.  Voters seem to be saying so.  These wars are far in the past now.   I am 67 and know about them from reading and from photographs in a desk drawer of and by my father who fought in Europe in 1944-45 and survived.  Americans have enjoyed peace at the homefront  so they have the luxury of assuming peace and considering improvements to the peace.  The heart of Trump's speech was that voters had agreed to end global thinking and a model of cooperation and instead move to a Country First orientation.   Think national, not global.

Enough voters in the UK thought the same thing, and they are exiting the EU.  The French and German publics are restless. The European Union project may be collapsing. It is certainly in trouble. 

Enough Americans voted for Trump who said that the era of global thinking and international cooperation was a disaster for America, creating carnage.  The election was in part a referendum on globalism.   Nationalism won.

It was time, he said, for a new era.  It is not a new era.  It is a move back toward an older era.  

The UN.  Trump says it hurts the US

This change is not being imposed from above.  It is being imposed from below, by voters making choices for change. 

Americans have chosen this, and decided to go back to some earlier era when America was "great."   Our period of greatest power was the postwar world when the US was setting up global systems, not dismantling them.  But voters have spoken and Trump has announced that things will change.

Trump says that January 20, 2017 will be a day that history will mark, when "the people became the rulers of this nations again" and that it contains the "crucial conviction" that it is every country for itself.  

The view does not presume hostility.  Indeed, it presumes that the natural competition of nations for markets and resources will create not just prosperity but safety.  

"There should be no fear.  We are protected and we will always be protected.  We will be protected by the great men and women of our military and law enforcement.  And most importantly, we will be protected by God."    

That has not been the experience of the 20th Century, but it is the path America seems to have chosen.   Certainly Trump has chosen it.