Guest Post: Trump Realigns the Western World

Amidst all the political noise, something very big is happening.  

Trump is changing the post World War Two world order.

He doesn't need a formal strategy. He has something better: goals and the power to implement them.

The old reality: NATO

Todays Guest Post by Thad Guyer describes a major turn taking place in American foreign policy. Within circles of diplomatic and foreign policy experts in the world's various departments of state and militaries, the change is gigantic. Trump is re-setting America's place in the world, ending the role of America as self perceived leader and defender of the free world and promoter of western democratic capitalist nationhood. America formed, promoted, and funded NATO, the UN, and alliances around the world, considering itself the indispensable do-gooder. 

There has been scarce public debate on this policy. There was bipartisan consensus from Truman through Reagan through to Obama and Hillary. The 2016 election campaign mentioned foreign policy, but primarily in the hot button areas of immigration from Mexico and trade agreements with China and Mexico. Today's news is all about Mueller, Ruth Bader Ginzburg's health, and the government shutdown.

Amidst the noise, big picture policy change is underway. 

Among nations, old friends are becoming trade opponents and old enemies are becoming friends. Domestically, it is creating strange, new political bedfellows. Trump-friendly Lindsey Graham is apoplectic; the peace-promoting political left is delighted at the challenge to endless, un-winnable wars in far-away places. (Democratic readers should be sure to read the link below from the Atlantic. Trump may be doing in Syria what a Democrat should want to do, but could not.)

Thad Guyer observes that Trump may not have read history, but he is re-writing it. He has the power to do it, and after 16 years in Afghanistan more and more members of the public--of both parties may welcome change--even if is the loathed Trump who does it.

Guyer is an attorney with an international litigation practice focusing on assisting whistleblowing employees. 

Guest Post by Thad Guyer

“Trump Realigns the Western World”

Guyer

Trump’s announced military withdrawal from Syria in a reported agreement with Turkey’s president Recep Erdoğan has a historical significance easily overlooked by our sensationalist media. Defense Secretary James Mattis didn’t resign over a numerically insignificant  2,200 troops in Syria, but over Trump’s “undermining” of American allies. See, The Atlantic, “Much Ado About 2,200 Troops in Syria” (Dec 21, 2018, https://goo.gl/RkAb3z).  

The Syrian and Afghanistan withdrawal is actually Trump implementing the Obama doctrine of troop disengagement in the region in favor of drone and tech power.  Mattis and others Joint Chiefs don’t read Trump’s moves in isolation, but collate them with his disdain of NATO as a U.S. tax dollar parasite for Europe, and his broader distrust of the EU for enabling Germany and France in dramatically growing Muslim populations in Western Europe.  Furthermore, Trump is angry over the EU’s efforts to undermine Brexit’s goal of promoting UK sovereignty and limiting immigration. Trump taunted French president Emmanuel Macron for being under siege by street rebellions against his globalist, pro-mass migration goals.  

Trump has severely weakened the UN in retaliation for its self-indulgent pro-Palestinian and pro-mass migration initiatives.  By contrast, Trump supports the EU’s eastern European members in their fierce resistance to Islamic migration, their inclination for more Russian diplomacy, and their coalescing rejection of the EU’s anti-democratic tendencies.

Ottoman Empire. Peace in the Near East

So look at it dispassionately from 30,000 feet and you’ll see Trump realigning the axis of power in the Western world. If you draw a line on the map from Istanbul through Eastern Europe to Russia, on the west side of that line are governments and institutions Trump dislikes.  But on the east side of the line are governments he likes if not supports. This crudely replicates the dynamics of Constantinople and Ottoman empire (Turkey) that not so long ago controlled large swaths of Central and Eastern Europe, Western Asia, and the Russian Caucasus.  The big picture shows Trump’s weakening of the EU, NATO and the UN, together with his adoption of Obama’s troop demilitarization in the Mideast, all roughly making the old Ottoman Empire ascendant. He is shifting power toward Constantinople and Moscow. 

But why?  We can’t know Trump’s motives for sure, but the de facto realignment we’re seeing is consistent with his core values of: (a) keeping American tax dollars in America rather than in Brussels, UN and NATO coffers, or Mideast warzones; (b) American sovereignty and political nationalism which eschews “border” incursions by illegal and mass migration, especially UN-imposed migration; (c) economic nationalism empowering American-based rather than foreign multi-national corporations; (d) diffusing the centralized political power of corporate media and big tech social media; and (e) limiting the ability of judiciaries to challenge executive power.  

Indeed, Trump openly supports all countries pursing these same goals, and articulated this as his Trump doctrine. See, The Guardian, “A blunt, fearful rant: Trump's UN speech left presidential norms in the dust”, (Sept. 19, 2017, https://goo.gl/Fs5eNs). Is the realignment we are witnessing just the “white nationalist”, “xenophobic”, Trump fumbling around in his bigotry, as our self-honoring media bubble tells us?  Or is this Trump’s implementation of his “core values” as he said to our faces in his “blunt and fearful rant” at the UN?  

I say it’s the latter.  

Trump has stunningly consolidated his Commander in Chief power in the Senate and Supreme Court. The Democratically controlled House is now almost irrelevant. The House allocates tax dollars, but it turns out you can reorder global power by withdrawing American tax dollars and American troops, not spending; and by withdrawing presidential support for the UN and EU. Trump doesn’t need the House, he only needs his Senate to confirm his political operatives, and his Supreme Court to leave him alone.  We have given Trump both as the media, Democrats, Twitter and Trump himself keep us focused on racial invective, border side shows, and a Mueller probe of hush money for illicit sex and pipedreams of impeachment.

So, is Trump trying to bring back the Ottoman Empire?  He doesn’t even know what that is. But he does know better than most of us what nationalism, sovereignty, mass migration and the Trump doctrine are.