Trump’s pet intellectuals discredit themselves.
By Max Boot Max Boot Columnist covering national security Email Bio Follow Columnist May 15 at 9:47 AM President Trump talks in vacuous generalities — “America first,” “Make America Great Again” — and governs in indecipherable contradictions. He champions democracy in Venezuela but embraces a far more ruthless tyrant in North Korea. He announces a troop withdrawal from Syria and then says, “Never mind.
Enter Kiron Skinner, the State Department’s director of policy planning, who seems to be more on Trump’s wavelength. Speaking at the New America Foundation, she harkened back to Samuel Huntington’s famous essay “The Clash of Civilizations” to describe U.S. relations with China. “The Soviet Union and that competition, in a way it was a fight within the Western family,” Skinner said.
But Skinner’s embrace of the “clash” thesis makes perfect sense as the foreign policy counterpart to Trump’s nativism. Just as Trump assumes that non-Norwegian immigrants are criminals who cannot assimilate into American society, so “The Clash of Civilizations” assumes that the United States cannot peacefully coexist, much less integrate, with non-Western civilizations. Hence the emphasis that Skinner and other Trumpian ideologues place on the “national interest.
Anton’s big idea: “Let’s all put our own countries first, and be candid about it.” Great idea — except when it isn’t. Adolf Hitler was putting his country first by invading Poland, Hideki Tojo by bombing Pearl Harbor, Josef Stalin by occupying Eastern Europe, Kim Il Sung by attacking South Korea, Saddam Hussein by annexing Kuwait, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by developing a nuclear program. How did any of these acts make America safer? They didn’t.
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