Now, the self-styled conservative NYT columnist Ross Douthat has penned an upbeat op-ed commentary about Trump's foreign policy titled "Trump and Vance Are Stripping Away Foreign Policy Illusions" (dated March 1, 2025) in The New York Times.
In it, Douthat says, among other things, "Trump doesn't speak diplomatically and never will" - which surely is true. Douthat also says, "And there is value in speaking more openly about uncomfortable realities." In addition, Douthat says that people "need to understand that the armistice that the Trump administration seems to want to negotiate with Russia may not look all that different from the endgame that would have developed under a Democratic president." Perhaps this is true. But a Democratic president would most likely have approached that endgame less bombastically. However, President Trump showed in his long State of the Union address to Congress on Tuesday, March 4, 2025, that he enjoys being bombastic - and, sadly, his many supporters appear to enjoy Trump's crude bombast.
Now, in yet another op-ed commentary in The New York Times, titled "Trump's Foreign Policy May Be Crude, But It's Realist" (dated March 7, 2025, editorial board member Farah Stockman operational defines and explains realism by referring to Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides recounts how ancient Athens "laid siege to the island of Melos" and the famous line "'The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.'" As Stockman recounts, "The men [of Melos] were slaughtered, the women and children were enslaved, and the island was colonized [by Athens]. If you think of them [the people of Melos] as heroes, you are a liberal internationalist, who believes that peace and security depend on just governments that abide by enlightened rules. If you think they were fools [to resist Athens], you are a realist."
OK, certain things that Trump had said and done do fit the model of realism. However, Stockman reports the political scientist Stephen Walt pointed out to her, "No true realist would threaten to annex Canada, Gaza and Greenland" - as the mercurial and idiosyncratic Trump has threatened.
Stockman ends her op-ed commentary about Trump's foreign policy by returning to the Peloponnesian War: "After Athens sacked Melos, word of its brutality spread. Its allies turned against it. Athens lost the war. Nobel ideas, it turns out, do matter."
However that may be, Stockman also says, "Today Russia and China have supersonic missiles that the U.S. military does not yet know how to counter effectively. China already has the ability to knock out U.S. satellites in space, destroying the GPS systems upon which the American military and our economy depend, and Russia is believed to be testing such weapons."
GPS = Global Positioning System. For a news story of related interest about GPS, see BBC science correspondent Pallab Ghosh's article "Planes are having their GPS hacked. Could new clocks keep them safe?" (dated March 3, 2024).
Now, Stockman next says, "Americans are not ready for a war with China. In fact, much of the industrial capacity needed to fight such a war is now in China, thanks to the naivete of liberal internationalists who decided to make China the world's factory. Even so, the United States and its allies are stronger than Team Russia and China IF THEY STAND TOGETHER. But a lot of Americans no longer want to fight with our allies for noble ideas overseas, especially after disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan" (my capitalization here).
Under the circumstances that Stockman here outlines, it strikes me that the United States today under the mercurial and idiosyncratic President Trump is exactly cultivating its allies for a potential war with Team Russia and China.
In still another op-ed-commentary in The New York Times titled "A Great Unraveling Is Underway" (dated March 13, 2025), regular NYT columnist Thomas L. Friedman quotes two passages from President John F. Kennedy's "Inaugural Address" on January 20, 1961: (1) "'Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.'"
(2) "'So, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man [sic].'"
Next, Friedman proceeds to construct two passages that sum up the spirit of Trump and the Trump administration: (1) "'Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that today's America will pay no price, bear no burden. Incur no hardship, and it will abandon any friends and cuddle up to any foes in order to assure the Trump administration's political survival - even if it means the abandonment of liberty wherever that be profitable or convenient for us. (2) "'So my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for President Trump. And my fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, ask how much you are ready to pay for America to defend your freedom from Russia or China.'"
In this way, NYT columnist Thomas L. Friedman sees President Trump, the misogynist confidence-man, today bringing to a close the 80-year period (virtually my entire lifetime) of American history and world history that began in 1945 after President Harry Truman dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - which Friedman, figuratively speaking, refers to as "A Great Unraveling." No doubt the implied "Raveling" or weaving of that American world order took time and effort on the part of many American presidents since President Truman.
Because I see President Trump as a confidence-man, I want to acknowledge here that the confidence-man is part of our American cultural heritage. The famous American novelist Herman Melville (1819-1891 wrote an intriguing novel titled The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). For a relevant scholarly study, see Thomas D. Zlatic's "Faith in Pretext: An Ongian Context for The Confidence-Man" (2012). The fact that the confidence-man is a well-established part of our American cultural heritage contributed to the confidence-man Donald Trump's success in the 2016 and the 2024 presidential elections.
In any event, NYT columnist Thomas L. Friedman bluntly says, "I would call Trump's foreign policy philosophy not 'containment' or 'engagement,' but 'smash and grab.' Trump aspires to be a geopolitical shoplifter. He wants to stuff his pockets with Greenland, Panama, Canada, and Gaza - just grab them off the shelves, without paying - and then run back to his American safe house. Our postwar allies have never seen this America before."
Now, the self-styled conservative NYT columnist David Brooks weighed in with an ominous column about President trump's foreign policy thus far titled "It Isn't Just Trump. America's Whole Reputation Is Shot" (dated March 14, 2025). In it, David Brooks says that there is "the truth that Trump will never understand - that when you turn America into a vast extortion machine, you will get some short-term wins as weaker powers bend to your gangsterism, but you will burn the relationships, at home and abroad, that are actually the source of America's long-term might."
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