Essays 7, 8 and 9 comprise a speech delivered by Martin S. Kaplan at the Humanity in Action International Conference in Berlin on June 23, 2017. See the About This Essay page for more information. The annual conference is the concluding program for the 160 HIA Fellows, who are comprised of university students, half from the U.S., and the others from Denmark, Germany, Poland, Netherlands, Bosnia and other European countries. 

Part 1 – Prelude to the American Century
Part 2 – The American Century

Part 3 – Trump and the Future

In spite of the economic issues deeply affecting rust belt regions of the United States voting decisively for Trump in the 2016 election, his winning the presidency  was greeted everywhere in the world with disbelief, including in the United States Throughout his campaign, he had made clear his lack of commitment to traditional American values, and his endorsement of authoritarianism as a model. He stated that only he could solve our nation’s problems, posing as the strong-man he claimed the U.S. needed. He expressed high admiration for Vladimir Putin and urged Russia and WikiLeaks to hack American records, including  those of Hilary Clinton’s campaign.

He raised fear-mongering in politics to a level not seen in America in decades, attacking Mexicans, other Latino-Hispanics, Asians, and Muslims, in the most vile terms.  He quoted Mussolini with approval. He accepted the support of the Ku Klux Klan, saying he didn’t know they were a bad group. He encouraged violence at his rallies against hecklers. He stated that the election was rigged against him and if he lost, there would be violence.

He and his surrogates adopted outrageous slogans and name-calling of other candidates, bringing the election campaign into a sewer of insult. He controlled the Republican primary debates like the Reality Television star he is, describing his rivals as Crooked Ted, Lying Ted, Low Energy Jeb, Little Marco, Crooked Hilary—apparently to the delight of his TV audience. He single-handedly made it safe and common for Americans to openly hate again, resulting in countless acts of aggression, intimidation and scathing insults hurled at people often simply because they looked foreign. This happened even in New York City, where an older white woman snapped “Go back home!”—-to a Chinese American New York Times reporter walking on the Upper East Side of the city; who happened to have been born in the U.S.

He tapped into an underbelly of American people: Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, members of the alt-right movements.  None of those categories of people would have had any reason to vote for prior Republican candidates for president—-not Mitt Romney, John McCain,  Bob Dole, none of whom played the hate card, and most famously, certainly not George W. Bush, who did not hold Islam responsible for the 9/11 attack and reached out to Muslims with respect. I believe many new voters came to the polls to vote for Trump in order to demonstrate their hatred of others—immigrants, descendants of immigrants, and anyone deemed ‘other’. But of course, the haters are all descended from immigrants too. American history would suggest that many of those also qualify as being descendants of ILLEGAL immigrants, an irony lost on them as well as on Trump.

The election was a perfect storm, with many mistakes of Clinton, her husband President Bill Clinton, as well as the Attorney General, the Director of the FBI all contributing to her defeat. The Republican party had also effectively suppressed voting in minority and poor neighborhoods in states they control, from the deep South to Ohio and Wisconsin, limiting polling hours, registration and early voting periods, and reducing the number of polling places in those neighborhoods. This was made possible by a recent-year Supreme Court decision eliminating the Federal government’s oversight of state election standards since that was supposedly  no longer needed to prevent discrimination in voting.

Since his election, and against the expectation of many who hoped for better, Trump has continued his assault on American values and policies, evidenced by the character of his cabinet appointments,  most of them intent on dismantling the departments to which they have been appointed and reversing the progress of recent decades in health care, the  environment, education, social welfare, labor and civil rights, and of course immigration—even transferring national park lands back to states for development.

I doubt that many Americans or people anywhere, however, expected that Trump as President would almost immediately embrace the authoritarian leadership of Turkey’s Erdogan, the Philippines’ Duterte, Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, Egypt’s el-Sisi, and at the same time dismiss and insult long-time democratic allies: Mexico, Canada, Germany and the other democracies of Europe. He has demonstrated his lack of commitment to NATO, and has also made clear his strategically and morally inexplicable admiration for the authoritarian rule of Putin.

In his inaugural address, President Trump announced “From now on, it’s going to be America First”, a major rejection of multilateralism and international collaborative leadership. This dramatic change in American policy has been re-emphasized by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, National Security Advisor General H.R. McMaster, and Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohen. Within the past few weeks, they have  written major op-ed articles in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. I will read you one: “The President embarked on his first foreign trip with a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage. Rather than deny this elemental nature of international affairs, we embrace it.”

They thus made crystal clear that human rights is no longer a fundamental part of international policy of the United States under the Trump administration. That led to a strong response in the Times from Senator John McCain, who emphasized the importance of human rights as a keystone of American values and policy.

The United States has fulfilled the role of leader of the Free World without pause under every president since the Second World War, sometimes very well and sometimes not, but usually with  a strong commitment to human rights and democracy. The alliance with the free nations of Europe and NATO has been a bedrock principle of American policy under every president since then, of both parties—Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama, all with the unanimous support of both Democrats and Republicans in the United States Congress. No American leader has been on Russia’s side. There is almost no time in history that the United States and Russia have shared the same values—–and now? We have never before elected a president who clearly believes in an authoritarian government rather than a democracy.

You have heard the moving words spoken by John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall, making clear their commitment to democratic values and human rights, and their opposition to Soviet tyranny. I don’t believe you will ever hear such words from President Trump.

His power as president is vast. He has already demonstrated that with his impact on all people everywhere by withdrawing from the Paris Accord, perhaps humankind’s most significant effort to address climate change, a singular achievement of the United States, China, India and Europe, as well as the developing nations of the world. He has done that for narrow partisan and political reasons, supposedly to strengthen the economic interests of certain workers and industries in America, with a total disregard of the health and safety of future generations. He allies himself with the large number of Republican leaders and voters who not only deny the importance of climate change, but do not even acknowledge the accepted scientific truth of its existence.

Trump  has also taken action to reverse the U.S. détente with Cuba, and is taking steps to reverse U.S. progress in relations with Iran. He has taken credit for our ally Saudi Arabia’s commercial and diplomatic attack on Qatar, another of our allies. Trump is literally the bull in the china shop of international relations, breaking as many dishes as possible. But pity the bull, for at least he lacks intent.

His belief in alternative facts; his ignorance of so many areas of importance from economics to international and military affairs, from culture to the needs of most people; his propaganda and lies; and his almost uncontrollable practice of making public statements on important matters without thinking about their impact, or not caring about their impact, make him the most dangerous president in American history. He governs with his thought or whim of the moment, communicated daily by Twitter to his followers and the media. His worldview is circumscribed by his own lifetime as dictator of a family business, and even more as a reality television star. I share the belief of many that Trump cannot distinguish between what comes out of his own imagination and reality.

Can this possibly mean the end of the American Century, sadly? I believe so—- because there is the increasing recognition by other nations that they can no longer trust the United States to provide the world with a leader, the president, who will govern  in a manner consistent with the gravitas and responsibilities of historical American leadership in world affairs.

All nations should now be concerned as to whether America in the future will reassert its leadership role in a responsible fashion. Even if the next president is an internationalist in the mold of our recent presidents of both parties, how long will that person serve before being replaced by another in the mold of a Donald Trump?—- an authoritarian, a leader who is all for America First and opposes globalization, a nativist, a racist, and a president who apparently believes that family members, his adult children, should have influence in foreign affairs above the Secretary of State. Do Tillerson, Mattis and McMaster report to Jared Kushner? It is as if we have a Mafia family running the White House and the U.S. government.

I give you no promise of what kind of leader America will bring forth in the future. If American voters could elect Trump when his values and abominable personal history were well-known to all, how can we and you trust them in the future?  After all, most major Republican newspapers, Republican foreign policy elder statesmen, and most of the prominent American historians, warned of the danger in electing him.

In his recent book, The Retreat of Western Liberalism, How Democracy is Defeating Itself, Edward Luce, of The Financial Times, wrote “Western liberal democracy is not yet dead, but is far closer to collapse than we may wish to believe. It is facing its gravest challenge since the Second World War. This time, however, we have conjured up the enemy from within. At home and abroad, America’s best liberal traditions are under assault from its own president. We have put arsonists in charge of the fire brigade.”

Luce points out that Trump’s election is part of larger trends on the world stage, including the failure of two dozen democracies since the turn of the millennium, including three in Europe… Russia, Turkey and Hungary. He places heavy responsibility on the failure of Western political and business elites to foresee or respond to the decline of jobs, income and dignity among many formerly well-paid workers due to the forces of globalization and automation that are fomenting nationalism and populist revolts.

These developments represent a repudiation of the naïve hopes after the fall of the Berlin wall that liberal democracy was on an inevitable march across the planet and pose a challenge to the West’s Enlightenment faith in reason and linear progress. That belief was vividly captured by Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, in which he wrote:  “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such. That is, the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy is the final form of human government.”

But I don’t put all the responsibility for Trump’s election victory on the middle class, people who lost their jobs, income status and dignity in the towns that are dying. Republican voters in many well-to-do suburbs gave the same voting margin to Trump as they did to the centrist Mitt Romney four years ago. Perhaps they believed they were voting for lower taxes, less regulation to help the economy, and because they couldn’t stand Clinton, who failed to pay attention to the key northern states that she lost.

Almost immediately following  the recent meeting of NATO leaders, Chancellor Angela Merkel stated “The times in which we could rely fully on others—-they are somewhat over.” Even more to the point, Canada’s Foreign Minister recently announced to its Parliament: “The fact that our friend and ally has come to question the very worth of its mantle of global leadership puts into sharper focus the need for the rest of us to set our own clear and sovereign course.”

Perhaps on many issues the members of NATO other than the U.S. will now assert their own combined leadership to protect themselves from a dangerous and aggressive Russia, and play an even more assertive role in international affairs. And perhaps an alliance of European nations together with China and India will collaborate to address climate change. The democratic nations of the European Union have combined population and economies far greater than that of Russia, and economies of a scale that can rival those of the United States and China.  Under President Trump, the United States is going from being the indispensable nation to the unreliable. Hopefully other nations will provide the much-needed leadership to counter increasing authoritarianism in Europe and around the world, and to seek peaceful resolution of conflicts.

But, can Europe get its act together? It certainly failed in the breakup of Yugoslavia. And as opposed to the humanitarian and generous Marshall plan provided by the United States, Europe, led by Germany, insisted on more austerity to solve the problems of Greece, which many American economists criticized as counter-productive. Was this done in order that German and French banks could be paid in full?

At home in America, there is great concern at the internal damage done by Trump to the fabric of our society. The nation is literally being ripped apart by polarization of attitudes and the rise of hate. During the entire era following the Second World War, not only was there the unifying fact of an existential rivalry with Soviet and Chinese Communism, but all Americans read and heard the same news and opinions. There was both the unifying and defining impact of the Cold War, but also all news was provided by a small number of television and radio networks, and centrist newspapers and magazines.

This unity has been upended over the past 20 years; with a technological explosion leading to a profusion of cable channels, websites, and myriad other sources of opinions, many based on ideology and narrow viewpoints. Americans are no longer reading from the same playbook. Everyone follows the news source that reflects his or her own viewpoints and biases, with little regard to seeking fact or truth, leading to the deepest polarization among Americans  since the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights conflicts of the 1960s.

Of even greater concern are the attacks by Trump not only on constitutional rights but on the norms of our civil society. He habitually attacks journalists and convinces his followers that he is the only source of fact, contending that the mainstream media delivers “fake news”, except of course for the Fox Network. He regularly attacks judges who rule against his positions; decries Congress for following its own democratic systems; and is now even attacking his own Justice Department, Intelligence Services and the FBI. He seeks all power in his own hands and those blindly loyal to him, like a Mafia Don.

Perhaps you saw the pathetic first 10 minutes of a recent staged Cabinet meeting at which a gloating Trump listened as each of his Cabinet members dutifully stated how honored they were to serve with him (for him) and to follow his vision for the country. We are in the hands of a narcissist, whose ignorance is exceeded only by his arrogance. Having lost the election by almost 3 million votes to Hillary Clinton, and without even counting the several million votes for other candidates, he governs as if he has a vast mandate—solely with regard for his 20 or 30 million most fervent followers, who receive his constant tweets as their only source of  ‘real news’. The core values and structure of our democracy and constitutional protections are being challenged and debased by our duly elected leader.

We all must respond to the unexpected and depressing challenge of the United States forsaking its historical  democratic and human rights leadership, both internationally and within the United States. Much of this burden will fall on your generation, and a major challenge, both in the U.S. and Europe, will be to reverse the disinterest that too many of the millennial generation have shown by their failure to participate in civic life and even to vote. The election of President Macron of France  and of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, both members of a new generation of leaders, should give hope for the future. And both have demonstrated by word and handshakes that they will not be bullied by either Putin or Trump—as has Chancellor Merkel.

But a full century of American greatness – – – interrupted as it was by mistakes and miscalculations – – – must not be undone, but only interrupted. There is hope, one of the better American traits, out of which will rise again a different and better set of American impulses and actions; such as the generosity of the Marshall Plan, the humanitarianism of the Berlin airlift, the promotion of human rights and development in the establishment and generous support of the United Nations and World Bank.

With your generation’s activism, leadership and yes, responsible populism, you and we can all join together to reassert a new and better direction for this century, a human century that can build on our best impulses as citizens of the world as well as of our own countries. Carl von Clausewitz stated “victory is simply the creation of a better political reality”, and I believe that must include our addressing the gross economic inequalities of our time, and a return to American commitment to international collaboration . A better day for all of us and the world is available, and achievable.

We need more than ever the new leaders of society that all of you are capable of becoming. The world needs you. I wish you much success.

Thank you.