President Trump and the World Turned Upside Down
We are living through a profoundly historic moment.
We are living through a profoundly historic moment.
The last few weeks of constant change at home and abroad have culminated in the American-Israeli assault on the Iranian religious dictatorship (with various Arab countries joining the coalition in response to Iranian attacks on their countries).
Remember that the Iranian dictatorship declared war on the United States in 1979 when then-Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called America “the Great Satan” with Israel as the “Little Satan.” The Iranian dictatorship seized the American embassy and illegally held American diplomats captive for 444 days. You would think, with a 47-year consistent record of active hostility, American and European elites would have long ago realized the Iranian dictatorship is serious when its parliament chants “death to America.”
Finally, we now have a president who is taking seriously the openly stated goals of his opponent, which the US Department of State has labeled the world’s largest funder of terrorism since 1984. It is an astonishing break with the half-century of Western elites hiding from the frightening reality that Iran really is our enemy.
President Donald J. Trump has almost completely broken with the elite assumptions about the supposed norms of government at home and abroad. He is operating in a unique self-designed system — and is an increasingly important figure of disruption.
As I wrote to my Inner Circle readers over the weekend, I was flying from Tokyo, Japan to Bern, Switzerland just an hour or two before the war broke. We learned about the first assault while we were flying over part of the Middle East.
In flight, I had a lot of time to think about the totality of what’s happening. I thought about the power and breadth of President Trump’s State of the Union address (maybe the most consequential speech of his career). Then I considered the liberation of Venezuela from Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship, the oil and gas blockade which may end more than six decades of communist dictatorship in Cuba, and the constant pressure on the Mexican government to defeat the drug cartels. The breadth of change in the western hemisphere is overwhelming.
From watching President Trump and the reaction to him at the World Economic Forum in Davos, I knew that things had changed. The Europeans still resented being lectured by the Americans — but they have come to accept that President Trump is a fact and not a problem. He really believes what he says about the need to change Europe, and the European leaders may not like it — but they now understand he is serious.
Since I had just been in Tokyo, I knew what an enormous change Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi represents. She’s the first woman prime minister and won the largest majority in the Diet in the history of the LDP, which has mostly governed Japan since 1955. She is intensely concerned about Communist China and clearly simpatico with President Trump. Again, she represents a significant change toward the world President Trump is trying to create — and away from the appeasement and avoidance mentality which has characterized so many world leaders.
Faced with all this change, I was reminded of a possibly apocryphal story. When Lord Charles Cornwallis surrendered the British Army at Yorktown in 1781, the band played an old English song called “The World Turned Upside Down.” Gen. George Washington’s victory over the British Army had reshaped the world. Britain began to negotiate the loss of its 13 colonies — and accept the reality that a new nation based on rights from God was now going to offer humanity a drastically different model of government from the British monarchical system.
With the total scale of domestic and foreign change, it is helpful to see President Trump in the same light as the decisive change brought about by Gen. Washington. This is a moment of decisive transformation. It is true that the final outcomes are not settled, but the directions are clear.
It helpful to realize that with the extraordinary range of things he is changing and challenging, President Trump is in fact turning the old world upside down.
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