Not Necessarily Stoned, But Beautiful

In Ankara, Türkiye, for a two-day summit of the countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), President Donald J. Trump told reporters he was “very disappointed with NATO” because it had not backed its war on Iran. “We weren’t treated well because we did something in Iran,” he said. “We don’t need anybody’s help. I didn’t even want their help. They said they wouldn’t be there. And we’ve invested trillions of dollars in NATO. Why? To protect European countries and others, Canada, et cetera, but to protect people, countries from generally speaking, it used to be the Soviet Union, now it’s Russia, and I say that’s fine, but you would think that they’d be very willing to do something to help us, and they really weren’t.”

Trump went on to claim his beef with NATO began over Greenland, which he wants “because Greenland doesn’t help Denmark…but it’s an important part for the United States. And it’s surrounded by China ships and Russian ships And that’s not going to happen. The ships is, it’s not going to happen. It was Greenland that, in my, and it continues to be, that should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark. And when they wouldn’t go along with it and with all the money we spend to help them with Russia and we don’t have to spend any money, we could remove all of our soldiers out of Europe because as you probably noticed, Europe’s a very different place than it was 20 years ago. A lot different. Much different. It’s a much different and they better be careful with immigration and energy. If they’re not careful with those two things, you’re not going to have a Europe anymore. Okay. Thank you very much everybody.”

NATO is the most effective alliance in human history. It is also a defensive, not an offensive, alliance.

In January, Robert Kagan warned that Trump’s destruction of the order that has underpinned global security for the past 80 years was creating the most dangerous world since World War II. With the end of open access to global resources, markets, and strategic bases and without reliable friends or allies, the U.S. will need more military spending than ever.

“Americans are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future,” Kagan warned. They are accustomed to the “basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world” and have come to think it is “the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely. They can’t imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.”

Everything will be up for grabs, Kagan wrote, with myriad “flash points for potential conflict.” “If Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive,” Kagan wrote, “wait until they start paying for what comes next.”

Kagan published his article just two weeks after Trump had sent troops to Venezuela to seize the nation’s president and his wife and take control of the country’s oil fields. Since then, as Simon Romero of the New York Times reported yesterday, the Trump administration has taken an estimated $8 billion in oil revenue out of the country, although it has refused to say how it is using the funds.

The storm blew the lamp off kilter. Much like life itself I guess.

Public policy scholar Chris Howard noted that the law so dramatically rolls back the modern government constructed during and after the Depression and World War II, from 1933 to 1981, that it amounts to “Robin Hood in reverse.” “It deliberately targets some of the most vulnerable members of society,” he told Pettypiece and Hixenbaugh, “while providing huge windfalls to the richest individuals and to big business.”

After the economic free-for-all of the 1920s led to the Great Crash and the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats began the process of creating a modern state that established a level economic playing field. They created a government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, protected civil rights, and supported a rules-based international order. Then Republican president Dwight Eisenhower built on the foundation the Democrats built. Members of both parties supported such a system, recognizing that without a level economic playing field that made sure everyone had the ability to succeed, a few men would monopolize the nation’s wealth and power.

Their inspiration for creating a government that kept the economic playing field level came from those before them who had seen what happened when a few wealthy men controlled the government. In the early twentieth century, when corporations dominated the economy and their millionaire owners threw their weight into political contests, Republican president Theodore Roosevelt fulminated against that “small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.”

He insisted that America must break up this class in order to return to “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.” He called for government to regulate business, prohibit corporate funding of political campaigns,

and impose income and inheritance taxes. He demanded a “square deal” for the American people.