4/5/2018 - Victor Davis Hanson Townhall.com
The proverbial knot of
Gordium was impossible to untie. Anyone clever enough to untie it would
supposedly become the king of Asia. Many princes tried; all failed.
When Alexander the
Great arrived, he was challenged to unravel the impossible knot. Instead, he
pulled out his sword and cut through it. Problem solved.
Donald Trump inherited
an array of perennial crises when he was sworn in as president in 2017. He
certainly did not possess the traditional diplomatic skills and temperament to
deal with any of them.
In the last year of the
Barack Obama administration, a lunatic North Korean regime purportedly had
gained the ability to send nuclear-tipped missiles to the U.S. West Coast.
China had not only been
violating trade agreements, but forcing U.S. companies to hand over their
technological expertise as the price of doing business in China.
NATO may have been born
to protect the European mainland, but a distant U.S. was paying an increasingly
greater percentage of its budget to maintain NATO than were its direct
beneficiaries.
Mexico keeps sending
its impoverished citizens to the U.S., and they usually enter illegally. That
way, Mexico relieves its own social tensions, develops a pro-Mexico expatriate
community in the U.S. and gains an estimated $30 billion a year from
remittances that undocumented immigrants send back home, often on the premise
that American social services can free up cash for them to do so.
In the past,
traditional and accepted methods failed to deal with all of these challenges.
Bill Clinton's "Agreed Framework," George W. Bush's "six-party
talks" and the "strategic patience" of the Obama administration
essentially offered North Korea cash to denuclearize.
American diplomats
whined to China about its unfair trade practices. When rebuffed, they more or
less shut up, convinced either that they could not do anything or that China's
growing economy would sooner or later westernize.
Europeans were used to
American nagging about delinquent NATO contributions. Diplomatic niceties
usually meant that European leaders only talked nonstop about the idea that
they should shoulder more of their own defense.
Mexico ignored U.S.
whining that our neighbor to the south was cynically undermining U.S.
immigration law. If America protested too much, Mexico usually fell back on
boilerplate charges of racism, xenophobia and nativism, despite its own tough
treatment of immigrants arriving into Mexico illegally from Central America.
In other words, before
Trump arrived, the niceties of American diplomacy and statecraft had untied
none of these knots. But like Alexander, the outsider Trump was not invested in
any of the accustomed protocols about untying them. Instead, he pulled out his
proverbial sword and began slashing.
If Kim Jong Un kept
threatening the U.S., then Trump would threaten him back and ridicule him in
the process as "Rocket Man." Meanwhile, the U.S. would beef up its
own nuclear arsenal, press ahead with missile defense, warn China that its
neighbors might have to nuclearize, and generally seem as threatening to Kim as
he traditionally has been to others.
Trump was no more
patient with China. If it continues to cheat and demand technology transfers as
the price of doing business in China, then it will face tariffs on its exports
and a trade war. Trump's position is that Chinese trade duplicity is so complex
and layered that it can never be untied, only cut apart.
Trump seemingly had no
patience with endless rounds of negotiations about NATO defense contributions.
If frontline European nations wished to spend little to defend their own
borders, why should America have to spend so much to protect such distant
nations?
In Trump's mind, if Mexico
was often critical of the U.S., despite effectively open borders and billions
of dollars in remittances, then he might as well give Mexico something real to
be angry about, such as a border wall, enforcement of existing U.S. immigration
laws, and deportations of many of those residing illegally on U.S. soil.
There are common themes
to all these slashed knots. Diplomatic niceties had solved little. American
laxity was seen as naivete to be taken advantage of, not as generous
concessions to be returned in kind.
Second, American
presidents and their diplomatic teams had spent their careers deeply invested
in the so-called postwar rules and protocols of diplomacy. In a nutshell, the
central theme has been that the U.S. is so rich and powerful, its duty is to
take repeated hits for the global order.
In light of American
power, reciprocity supposedly did not matter -- as if getting away with
something would not lead to getting away with something even bigger.
Knot cutters may not
know how to untie knots. But by the same token, those who struggle to untie
knots also do not know how to cut them.
And sometimes knots can
only be cut -- even as we recoil at the brash Alexanders who won't play by
traditional rules and instead dare to pull out their swords.
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