1801 What “Force” Is America To Be?
[Written in January of 2018 but Unpublished]
President Trump’s inaugural year has been racked with controversy, sometimes justified, most of the time not. At the same time and in spite of it all, he has accomplished an immense and immediate shift counter to President Obama’s domestic democratic socialism and globalist foreign policy.
There is no better illustration of these stark reversals than the new National Security Strategy (NSS) published in mid-December and presented personally by the president (“National Security Strategy – The White House”). Reactions to the document and the president’s speech have fallen predictably along party/ideological lines. In some cases, it is so much so that one wonders if responders had read the same document.
Susan Rice, former National Security Advisor to President Obama, blasted the NSS in a New York Times opinion piece (“When America No Longer Is a Global Force for Good”). If Rice’s analysis is accurate, America could be facing great peril. In her words, President Trump embraces a view of the world that is “dark”, “dystopian” [fearful, dehumanized], “self-serving”, “dangerous”, “isolationist” yet “confrontational”. As Rice continues, it is almost as if she can hardly write her descriptions fast enough. But out of all the despair, the most important accusations are these: “There is no common good, no international community, no universal values, only American values” and a “relinquishing the nation’s moral authority”.
Newt Gingrich sees the NSS in a completely different light (“Trump’s revolution in national security and foreign policy”). Gingrich calls the Strategy “extraordinary” and “a milestone in resetting America’s approach to national security and foreign policy.” In his view, the Trump administration is making a clean break from over 25 years of elite consensus wherein the United States was helping to “develop a New World Order”. He asserts that “This new world order was to come from lawyers and diplomats…reaching agreements that limited sovereignty and had nations reporting and answering to the international bureaucracy.” Mr. Gingrich see’s the NSS as a declaration of a doctrine that has already been revolutionizing U.S. foreign policy, a revolution already marked by a long list of accomplishments.
The most striking thing about President Trump’s National Security Strategy document is not the huge disparities of analysis within the flood of ink it has produced, but the war of assumptions. For the Susan Rice’s of the world, there seems to be no way for a nation to exercise robust sovereignty while simultaneously engaging the so-called “international community”. As Elliott Abrams has pointed out (“The Trump National Security Strategy”), for them, there exists an “ark of history” with a “side” and an “inevitable destination” (new world order). Any ideology or national strategy which falls outside that box is assumed to be destructive and immoral.
Truly striking is the ever so subtle deep conflict of values which the NSS has generated. The rock bottom values of persons and nations are, after all, what drives how they maneuver their “presents” and therefore form their futures.
What, after all, are “common good”, “community”, “moral authority”, or “American values” (Rice)? What makes “extreme poverty”, H.I.V.-AIDS, L.G.B.T. rights, or climate change (Rice) such intensely moral issues? If Americans are tolerating the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of unborn diplomats, national leaders, educators and doctors, what makes the poor, gays, the diseased, or the oppressed any more valuable other than their position on a calendar?
If America’s final value to world is “community”, which one? If her moral authority rests in “American values”, which ones? If battling climate change is the highest value, by what authority is the ideal to be imposed on the rest of humanity? If the oppressed are to be saved, which ones are most important to rescue first? If poverty is to be eradicated, what percentage of others’ livelihoods is ethical to confiscate – 50%, 70%, 90%, 93.5%?
When the leader of the free world rests his (or her) moral compass in the palm of the ingenuity, wisdom or social/political evolution of other men, his vision of the future is anchored in an unseeable world utopia. The security and well-being of those under his charge will be negotiable for some over-the-rainbow greater good.
If on the other hand, the power of the presidency is vested in servant-leadership, in one who recognizes his charge as a work under Heaven (even if he is flawed) with truths and values dictated by his Creator, the well-being of his nation and its people will be non-negotiable. Strangely, in that reality rests the power, justice and guidance the world truly needs