George Beebe
Like few American politicians, President Trump grasps the precariousness of the nation’s present circumstances. Washington’s post-Cold War ambition to democratize the world yielded a series of futile regional wars that, in turn, eroded civil liberties and brought the country to the brink of a direct armed conflict with Russia. Contrary to expectations, the enthusiasm for a globalized, borderless world hollowed out the US middle class, while catapulting a backward China into manufacturing dominance and peer-military status.
Some $36 trillion in debt underscores the wide gap between America’s expansive international objectives and its limited capacity to attain them — a condition famously described by the New Deal journalist Walter Lippmann as foreign-policy “insolvency.” Continuing the hubristic course we have followed since the Nineties would be disastrous.
Trump gets all this. Which is why he is aiming to lower the temperature across various international theaters, counterbalance the power of rival states, and reset America’s global engagement. His own shorthand, Reagan-borrowed description of the strategy — peace through strength — is apt. His ability to deliver on this vision is still an open question, however. To a large degree, it depends on the people he taps to carry it out.
Richard Nixon faced a somewhat similar situation at the start of his presidency. America was overextended abroad in an unwinnable Vietnam War that bore little connection to the nation’s vital security interests. An increasingly confident Soviet Union was flexing its muscles in Czechoslovakia and Egypt and threatening to race past parity into superiority over the US nuclear arsenal. Economically, an overvalued dollar was crippling exports and rendering the United States highly vulnerable to a foreign-induced financial crisis. At home, the country was riven by violent clashes over Vietnam and racial injustice.
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