Whatever happens to Ukraine and Gaza, to markets, to Canada and the Atlantic alliance, global trust in the Trump-ruled US is irrecoverable even if fear persists indefinitely. In 1969, Richard Nixon failed to frighten the North Vietnamese into making a quick peace through propagation of his “madman theory” — that he was capable of anything if they failed to yield — because they didn’t believe he was mad.
Today, America’s putative allies are uncertain whether the president is clinically unstable. But they are surely absolutely convinced that his word can’t be believed for more than a day; that his courses of action are irrational; and that he and his associates, JD Vance and Elon Musk, are strangers to truth and every convention of diplomacy, decency and courtesy.
A letter was recently dispatched to Trump from an almost-forgotten giant: Lech Walesa, one of the most celebrated and courageous leaders of resistance against the 1970s Soviet oppressors of Eastern Europe, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and eventually president of Poland. Now, he has written to express his disgust about American conduct toward Ukraine:
“We find it insulting that you expect Ukraine to show respect and gratitude for the material assistance provided by the United States in its fight against Russia,” he wrote. “We do not understand how the leader of a country that symbolizes the free world cannot recognize [that Ukraine’s struggle is the struggle of us all].”
Walesa wrote that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s treatment in the Oval Office “reminded us of the interrogations we endured at the hands of the Security Services and the debates in communist courts. Prosecutors and judges, acting on behalf of the powerful Communist political police, would explain to us that they held all the power, while we held none.”
The history of the 20th century showed, said the writer, that whenever the US sought to distance itself from democratic values and its European allies, it ultimately became a threat to itself. Walesa was a towering contributor to the collapse of the Soviet empire. In the cause of freedom, he endured persecution, show trials and jail sentences.Those of us who recall his crusade find his letter to Trump almost intolerably moving. He is a moral titan. Yet his words received little coverage in American media. I doubt that the president has even been shown his letter. Morality is absent from the Trumpworld dictionary.No democracy has maintained impeccable standards throughout history. As a reporter, I myself witnessed some of the least admirable actions of the US in Indochina and elsewhere. Despite all our respective national sins, however, as a historian I recoil from the we-are-all-guilty view of the past. Few of us ever doubted that, in the grand sweep of human affairs, Americans were the good guys — as Lech Walesa put it, theirs has been the “country that symbolizes the free world.”
Meanwhile, the Russians were the bad ones. Today, without shame, they have reverted to this role. The invasion of Ukraine, the pummeling of its cities and killing of tens of thousands of civilians; the multiple murders of Vladimir Putin’s critics, especially journalists, and, above all, that of Alexei Navalny, sublimely courageous opposition leader, in a Siberian prison; the satanic alliances with Assad’s Syria, Iran and North Korea. Putin’s nuclear threats against the West confirmed the transition of Russia from a briefly neutral post-Cold War state into a new citadel of evil.
Now we are confronted with an almost literally incredible America whose leader, to borrow from Star Wars, appears to embrace the Dark Side. Trump has resumed — for now, anyway — the flow to military aid and intelligence to Ukraine, which he’d cruelly halted. He threatens consequences for Russia if it fails to agree to a ceasefire.
Nobody, though, forgets his insults heaped on Zelenskiy and warm words for Putin. The president repeatedly emphasizes his belief that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was justified; that Russian victory is inevitable; that Zelenskiy must expect to bow the knee not merely to himself, but also to Putin, because the Russian holds all the cards. What wonder, that all Europe is traumatized ?
By its behavior toward Ukraine, Gaza, Canada and Europe, the US has abandoned the moral high ground, which — even at the height of foreign criticisms of its past behavior, for instance, toward Cuba and Vietnam — few reasonable Westerners doubted that it held.
There are discordant views in Europe about how the Ukraine war will end. But almost nobody on this side of the Atlantic doubts the status of Russia’s Putin as a standard-bearer for wickedness. Any hint of serviceable words from Moscow will almost certainly cause the White House again to turn against Kyiv, to indulge the Russians.
No European leader dares to say publicly what they all think privately, excepting Hungary’s autocratic Viktor Orban: that the US has fallen into the hands of a leader with whom it is impossible to parley rationally, and who threatens to precipitate geostrategic disaster not only in Ukraine, but also by empowering Israel’s extreme right, by destroying the Atlantic alliance and possibly even by sustaining the confrontation with Canada. Along the way, he seems willing to trash the world economy.
Almost all of us who deplore Trump’s conduct are nonetheless baffled about how to respond. He is the only US president on offer. The Republicans in Congress and much of the country continue mindlessly to acquiesce in his misconduct of office.
I have yet to read of a Democrat making the case with the high rhetoric that is needed for a virtuous America — a return to the pursuit of justice, freedom and ethics, a rejection of the manipulation of regulation and law, the corruption by which Trump appears eager to enrich himself and his friends, both at home and abroad.
There are still many good Americans out there, and I read their despairing messages daily. Those of us unburdened by public office need not hold back from saying that the US, which throughout long lives we have respected and even revered, now appears eager to make common cause with terrible people, rejecting law, order and stability, at home and abroad.
Trump and his White House gallery of grotesques will discover the hard way that, while the US remains the richest nation on earth, it no longer has the power to impose its will, least of all through bluster, petulance and bullying. It can precipitate chaos, and indeed has done so. But it can’t make the waves bow, or the sun perform obeisance, as the president seeks.
Those who cling to a moral compass — the sort of people to whom Trump’s Polish correspondent remains a hero — absolutely reject this perversion of the America which we yearn one day to respect again.