Opinion
Trump Has Made the Whole World Darker
By THOMAS
L. 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.
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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
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