The “Little Americans” finally are getting their way. I hope they get full—and eternal—credit for the results.
You know the Little Americans. They are our version of the Little Englanders, self-proclaimed nationalists who advocate a smaller, less ambitious, less engaged nation, hostile toward international trade and international alliances, hostile toward immigrants (and, often as not, native-born citizens of recent immigrant background), driven by resentment, sneering at our highest national ideals, demanding to know why all the money being spent in Ukraine or Israel or wherever isn’t being used to fill potholes in Sheboygan or to increase grandma’s Social Security benefits, strangely envious of less important countries such as Belgium or Ireland. It would be a lot easier and a lot cheaper, they insist, if the United States would just give up and allow itself to become just “another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe,” in the words of George H. W. Bush, who had bigger things in mind.
There was a kind of sorry consistency to the old-school Little Americans, men such as Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, who advocated a general American withdrawal from international engagements and international institutions. (Paul, to his credit, remained a free-trader while in public life, describing that position as a “policy of peace.”) Today’s Little Americans have a strong scent of Norma Desmond about them: They expect to withdraw and command at the same time, that the United States can give up its international commitments but still expect to get its way more or less on demand, as though the U.S. position as a big and rich consumer-goods market should be enough to ensure that the rest of the world defers to Washington. (In case you hadn’t noticed: It ain’t.) They are the political equivalent of the old guy in the blue blazer complaining about the corkage fee at the country club and threatening to cancel his membership. Their sense of America’s metaphysical destiny is undiminished, and they remain committed, as only a Protestant can, to the notion that the United States of America is at the center of some kind of biblical narrative. (Some of them don’t know they are Protestants.) But they seem to think the nation can maintain that imperial pretense while living out a nickel-and-dime philosophy day to day. […]
Of course, the Little Americans hate the Ivy League—and Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, and the cities where the people and the GDP are, and Hollywood, and Broadway, and the big New York book publishers, and the newspapers, and the philanthropic foundations, and the think tanks, and the big global companies with the cosmopolitan management teams that create most of the profits and the jobs, and most of the churches, and any institution that has not been mau-maued into making an oath of fealty to the idol of the moment—because they love America, or at least a full 18 percent of it. They are nationalists, of a sort, but nationalists whose friends are all in Moscow and Budapest and whose enemies are all in Los Angeles and Boston. Xi Jinping knows what they are: chumps, albeit dangerous chumps—but less of a danger to his interests today than they were a few years ago.
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Take in, if you will, the sorry spectacle of U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.… Beijing, which aims to finish the trade war the dolts in Washington started, has announced new export controls on rare-earth products, including magnets, and has targeted not only the United States but the world at large, empowering Beijing to use selective enforcement of its new licensing regime to make it very expensive to be a friend of the United States. Greer, whining on behalf of the government of these United States of America, protests that that move is “not proportional.” He continued: “It is an exercise in economic coercion on every country in the world.”
I kind of pity the poor silly bootless bastard having to stand out there in the late October wind in nothing but the moral equivalent of his skivvies and pretend that “not proportional” and “an exercise in economic coercion on every country in the world” was not the plainly stated flippin’ policy of the imbecilic and incompetent administration he has chosen to serve for some ineffable reason. Does no one remember the “proportionality” of the so-called Liberation Day tariffs, “proportions” that were simply made up? Does no one remember that the administration targeted every country in the world and a few that were made up?
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Donald Trump is a man with a short attention span, a toddler’s sense of entitlement, a high-school mean girl’s thin skin, and the approximate IQ of today’s lunch special at Joe’s Stone Crab, none of which leaves him very well suited to the kind of long-term administrative and management work that effective policy development requires. The Trump administration does not do implementation. Instead, Trump simply tries to bully his way through every disagreement, assuming—wrongly!—that, as the president of these United States, he’ll always have the biggest stick in the fight. He thinks he is the president of a country club or, as he himself has put it at times, the manager of a department store, a tyrant overseeing a petty domain in which he can rearrange the lives of human beings, nations, and institutions like chessmen. But even within the well-defined borders of a tennis court or a golf course, the real-world math can get pretty hairy pretty quickly, and the world is not a tennis court or a golf course—and Trump does not understand the game he is playing.
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Xi is 100 percent tyrant and 0.00 percent fool—Donald Trump’s proportions are somewhat differently mixed. It is strange to me that so many of my friends take that, even now, as a comfort.