Did We Take Trump Too Seriously?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/opinion/did-we-take-trump-too-seriously.html

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An article in this week’s Sunday Review, “Donald Trump’s Plan to Save Western Civilization” by Stephen Wertheim, a historian at King’s College at the University of Cambridge, argued that in his first six months in office, President Trump has put forward the outlines of a foreign policy doctrine, one focused on the “defense” of “Western civilization.” Professor Wertheim’s article attracted hundreds of comments on nytimes.com and hundreds more on social media. Max Strasser, a staff editor in The New York Times Opinion section, and Professor Wertheim discussed the article and how readers responded to it.

Max Strasser: So your article got a lot of criticism in the comments and on social media, huh?

Stephen Wertheim: It did. Lots of positive reactions, but lots of critical ones, too.

Max: It seems like the No. 1 problem that people had was that you took Trump too seriously. Angie B. summarized a lot of readers’ objections when she wrote that your piece ”presupposes that there is some coherent foreign policy, however misconceived, animating his administration. But there really isn’t.” Why do you think so many people raised this concern?

Stephen: Yes, that was the big objection. And because I took Trump seriously, a lot of people (though not Angie B.) read the piece as a defense of Trump — a reaction I didn’t expect.

I think that people — at least in the center and on the left — want Trump to be outside of history. They want him cast outside of public life as soon as possible. It’s a continuation from the campaign, a desperate attempt to preserve pre-Trump “normality.” You see it in the “This is not normal” slogan. And yes, much is new and weird and shocking about Trump. I noted in the piece that he may be pathbreaking in retreating from even the rhetoric of promoting democracy and human rights.

But we need to take him seriously — especially his administration and supporters. He wouldn’t be president today if he hadn’t tapped into a powerful politics, what I called the “politics of civilization.” In fact, he is dangerous precisely because he makes it hard to take his politics seriously. He inspires a Pavlovian ridicule. But that reflex to ridicule is allowing some people to avoid trying to understand his policies and to avoid developing a real critique of them. It makes them read a sober analysis of Trump as an endorsement! That really concerns me.

Max: What about it is so concerning? He’s pretty easy to ridicule!

Stephen: He is. But if we talk only about how bizarre he is or his spelling mistakes or whatever, we’ll repeat the same strategy that failed during the campaign. We can’t get too obsessed with him as a person and with his inner circle. Hey, I follow those things, too! I plead guilty to sarcastic tweets, and I do a terrible Trump impression that drives my wife nuts. But we have to go beyond that.

Now, whatever is going on in Trump’s mind is somewhat beside the point here. Whether we like it or not, he’s the president. He’s making policy. Regardless of whether he personally cared about what he read off the teleprompter during his speech in Warsaw earlier this month, it’s still an official statement that reveals, at the least, how the administration has decided to pitch its foreign policy.

Max: Lakshmi Kurosawa, a commenter on The Times’ Facebook page, spoke to something similar. She wrote that your essay “leaves out the crux of the matter,” which is that “Trump takes orders from others. Trump is a frenzied puppet.”

Stephen: First, Lakshmi probably sells Trump short. It’s been reported, for instance, that he personally intervened to remove an endorsement of NATO’s collective defense guarantee from a speech in May — a position he reversed, of course, in the speech in Warsaw.

But in any case, whatever his personal role in it, there is a Trump administration. Presidents always have advisers who are better informed on foreign policy than the boss. I wanted to explain how the Trump administration has conducted foreign policy so far. Maybe I shouldn’t have referred so often to “Mr. Trump” when talking about the administration.

Max: In your defense, it’s a pretty common rhetorical device.

Stephen: It is. Now, some readers point to the administration and see nothing more than bureaucratic turf wars. Certainly this White House, and the way it makes policy, looks chaotic. But let’s not stop there! Trump and his advisers do have worldviews. It’s better to analyze those worldviews, even or maybe especially if they clash, than to pretend there are none at all.

Max: Several commenters took issue with the idea of identifying a “Trump doctrine.” A reader who identifies as Genii from Baltimore wrote, “Please do not be ridiculous in giving Trump such a high intellectual attribute of being able to promulgate a foreign doctrine.”

In part, people who are saying this don’t want to think there’s anything cohesive about Trump’s foreign policy, as we discussed earlier. But they also seemed to think that because he hasn’t described anything as a “doctrine” then it doesn’t count as one. What’s the precedent here?

Stephen: Remember in 2008 when the media pounced on Sarah Palin for not knowing what the “Bush doctrine” was?

Max: Sure.

Stephen: Well, actually, George W. Bush never announced a “doctrine” as such. His doctrine was a media creation, and there were several different versions: pre-emption, unilateralism, democracy promotion. And that’s not all. Charles Krauthammer, a columnist, was the one who named the Reagan doctrine in 1985. I sympathize with people who think the media’s too obsessed with searching for presidential doctrines. But if it’s illegitimate for a commentator like me to identify a “doctrine” that hasn’t been announced as such, well, then it’s been illegitimate for a long time.

There was a related criticism I saw among the comments: that Trump is a grubby opportunist; he’s not principled, so he can’t have a doctrine. But presidential doctrines have never been philosophically pure. The Truman doctrine came about in 1947 because the administration wanted to get aid to Greece and Turkey through Congress. Truman’s advisers decided they needed to wrap their aims in universalistic rhetoric in support of “free peoples” anywhere.

Look, Trump’s no idealist. I’m not saying that he wakes up every day and thinks, “What can I do to advance Western civilization today?” We know from his tweets that that’s not what he’s thinking about first thing in the morning! But what’s relevant is that he comes back to this civilizational rhetoric again and again because it resonates with his base and with the establishment. That makes it useful.

Max: Speaking of Western civilization, a lot of the commenters seemed to react to the phrase very protectively. The headline — and I’ll take responsibility for that one! — says that he has a plan to “save” Western civilization. To me, “Western civilization” sounds like something out of date, a concept from another time. But many readers didn’t seem to feel that way. One commenter, Marc from France, wrote: “If Mr. Trump intends to represent ‘Western civilization,’ he will have to cease speaking, reacting, and being Mr. Trump. Everything he does weakens ‘Western values.’ ”

Stephen: The reactions exposed an interesting split in our politics. Like some readers, I see “Western civilization” as a mixed bag, something that can connote wonderful things — like democracy and human rights — but also has historically been invoked to carry out colonial rule and exploit people of color. But many readers took Western civilization to be an unalloyed virtue. To them, the problem was the messenger, not the message. And right-wing commentators make a point of defending Western civilization against liberal criticism. The pundits on Fox News loved Trump’s Warsaw speech — and loved to complain that the media called it racist.

Max: Anything else that surprised you in the reaction to your essay?

Stephen: Two things. First, an objection that I didn’t hear. I don’t think anyone mentioned that I omitted Trump’s worldwide business interests, something that is historically distinctive to this president. I omitted Trump’s conflicts of interest because it’s not easy, at this point, to assess how they have shaped policy. But I wish there was more debate about this issue.

Second, I actually expected to see more comments about Russia, charging that Trump’s whole foreign policy just aims to please Vladimir Putin. I got some of those objections, and let me be clear: I believe that the Trump campaign had an inappropriate relationship with Russia and that that needs to be investigated thoroughly. But Russia isn’t the whole of American foreign policy.

When I wrote this piece, I tried to ask myself what historians like me are going to lecture our students on 20 years from now when we sum up the first six months of the Trump administration. And we’ll have to look at what’s actually happened. As of now, Trump hasn’t been able to adopt a dramatically different policy toward Russia. He still may in the future. But what’s more profound, at this point, are his decisions to uphold America’s global alliances, entangle himself in never-ending war in the Middle East, and detach the idea of “civilization” from liberalism and democracy.

Max: This goes back to what you said earlier, about how Trump’s critics need to develop a real critique of his policies, and not just zero-in on the weirdness, like Russia.

Stephen: Yeah, and they have to stop suspending critical judgment toward any and all who oppose Trump. My friends in the so-called foreign policy establishment have gotten Trump wrong. A year ago they were saying it was 1930s-style America First isolationism all over again. Now they are back to making the same complaint they lodged against Obama: Policy making is too ad hoc and wouldn’t some simpler “grand strategy” be nice. Where is the accountability? The focus on Russia is understandable but unfortunately it blocks out a lot of the other things Trump has done that are pretty conventional — but no less troubling.