Trump Has Made the Whole World Darker
THOMAS FRIEDMAN
- Oct. 30, 2020
There is no escaping it: America is on
the ballot on Tuesday — the stability and quality of our governing
institutions, our alliances, how we treat one another, our basic commitment to
scientific principles and the minimum decency that we expect from our leaders.
The whole ball of wax is on the ballot.
The good news is that we’ve survived
four years of Donald Trump’s abusive presidency with most of our core values
still intact. To be sure, the damage has been profound, but, I’d argue, the
cancer has not yet metastasized into the bones and lymph nodes of our nation.
The harm is still reversible.
The bad news is that
if we have to endure four more years of Donald Trump, with him unrestrained by
the need to be re-elected, our country will not be the America we grew up with,
whose values, norms and institutions we had come to take for granted.
Four more years of a
president without shame, backed by a party without spine, amplified by a TV
network without integrity, and the cancer will be in the bones of every
institution that has made America America.
And then, who will we be? We can
explain away, and the world can explain away, taking a one-time flier on a
fast-talking, huckster-populist like Trump. It’s happened to many countries in
history. But if we re-elect him, knowing what a norm-destroying, divisive, corrupt liar he
is, then the world will not treat the last four years as an aberration. It will
treat them as an affirmation that we’ve changed.
The world will not just look at America
differently, but at Americans differently. And with good reason.
Re-electing Trump would mean that a
significant number of Americans don’t cherish the norms that give our
Constitution meaning, don’t appreciate the need for an independent,
professional Civil Service, don’t respect scientists, don’t hunger for national
unity, don’t care if a president tells 20,000 lies — in short, don’t care about
what has actually made America great and different from any other great power
in history.
If that happens, what America has lost
these past four years will become permanent.
And the effects will
be felt all over the world. Foreigners love to make fun of America, of our
naïveté, or our silly notion that every problem has a solution and that the
future can bury the past — that the past doesn’t always have to bury the
future. But deep down, they often envy Americans’ optimism.
If America goes dark, if the message
broadcast by the Statue of Liberty shifts from “give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” to “get the hell off my lawn”; if
America becomes just as cynically transactional in all its foreign dealings as
Russia and China; if foreigners stop believing that there is somewhere over the
rainbow where truth is still held sacred in news reporting and where justice is
the norm in most of the courts, then the whole world will get darker. Those who
have looked to us for inspiration will have no widely respected reference point
against which to critique their own governments.
Authoritarian leaders all over the
world — in Turkey, China, Russia, Poland, Hungary, the Philippines, Saudi
Arabia, Brazil and elsewhere — already smell this. They have been emboldened by
the Trump years. They know they’re freer to assassinate, poison, jail, torture
and censor whomever they want, without reproach from America, as long as they
flatter Trump or buy our arms.
I asked Nader Mousavizadeh, a former
senior U.N. official who now runs the London-based consultancy Macro Advisory
Partners, what he thought was at stake in this election. He said: “It’s the
sense that ever since F.D.R., despite all kinds of failures and flaws, America
was a country that wanted a better future — not just for itself but for other
people.”
While that may seem like a banality, he
added, “it is actually unique in history. No other great power in history has
behaved that way. And it provided America with an intangible asset of immense
value: the
benefit of the doubt. People
across the world were willing to give America a second, third and fourth chance
because they believed that, unlike any other great power that had come to
impact their lives, our purpose was different.”
Of course, America has at times behaved
in cruel, nakedly self-interested, reckless and harmful ways toward other
nations and peoples. Vietnam was real. Anti-democratic coups in Iran and Chile
were real. Abu Ghraib was real. Separating children from their parents at our
southern border was real.
But they remain exceptions, not our
modus operandi, which is precisely why people all over the world, not to
mention Americans, are so enraged by them — while shrugging off Russia’s or
China’s abuses.
It’s because they
know, added Mousavizadeh, that historically “America’s intent, if not always
its practice, has been to exhort not extort other nations; to export not
exploit; to collaborate not dominate; and to strengthen a global system of
rules and norms, not overturn it in order to focus exclusively on its own
enrichment.
“Four more years of Trump’s America,
and no one will have cause to give us the benefit of any doubt. The
disillusionment will be shattering to our standing and influence — and only
when we are received around the world as Russians or Chinese will we know what
we have lost, for good.”
Was everything Trump did wrong or
unnecessary? No. He provided a valuable corrective to U.S.-China trade
relations. A useful counterpunch to Iranian excesses in the Middle East. And he
sent the needed message, albeit crudely, that if you want to come into this
country, you can’t just walk in, you have to at least ring the doorbell.
But these initiatives were nowhere near
as impactful as Trump pretends they are, precisely because he did them alone —
without allies abroad or bipartisan support at home. We could have had a much
bigger and sustainable impact on China and Iran if we had acted with our allies;
we could have had a grand bargain on immigration if Trump had been willing to
move to the center. But he wouldn’t.
I fear that this inability of Americans
to do big, hard things together anymore — which predated Trump and the
pandemic, but was exacerbated by them both — has led to another loss. It’s a
loss of confidence in democratic systems generally, and versus China’s
autocratic system in particular.
Over the last pandemic year, the
legendary investor Ray Dalio wrote in The Financial Times last
week, China’s “economy grew at almost 5 percent, without monetizing debt, while
all major economies contracted. China produces more than it consumes and runs a
balance of payments surplus, unlike the U.S. and many Western nations.” Even
Tesla’s best-selling Model 3 car, he wrote, “may soon be made entirely in
China.”
Makes you wonder if the Trump
presidency will be remembered not for making America great but for China’s
great leap past America. If you’re not worried about that, you haven’t been
paying attention these last four years.
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs
Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981, and has won three Pulitzer
Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,”
which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman • Facebook
