Surviving a global inflection point
New revelations about former President Donald Trump’s treachery came thick and fast during the January 6th Committee’s final(?) hearing on Thursday. So fast, in fact, that evidence presented by Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) that Trump meant to sabotage the incoming Biden administration’s foreign policy went by too quickly to process properly.
Yes, a presidential directive the Pentagon ultimately ignored further demonstrated that Trump knew he had lost the election and was destined to exit the White House. Trump nonetheless “made the deliberate choice” to ignore all around him and the rule of law to pursue a criminal conspiracy that would keep him in power. But Kinzinger set an order issued to the Pentagon among several examples proving Trump knew he’d lost. The potential impact got lost in his recitation.
“Knowing he was leaving office,” Kinzinger began, Trump “acted immediately and signed this order on November 11th, which would have required the immediate withdrawal of troops from Somalia and Afghanistan, all to be complete before the Biden inauguration on January 20th.”
Besides being neither militarily feasible nor wise, Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley considered the rogue order “nonstandard” and “potentially dangerous.”
Heather Cox Richardson in her newsletter considers the deeper implications of what Trump meant to accomplish with a temper tantrum during his final act. The country dodged catastrophe, she explains. Somalia and Afghanistan were just the start:
Indeed, according to an Axios investigation by Jonathan Swan and Zachary Basu last May, two days before that order, on November 9, 2020, John McEntee, Trump’s hand-picked director of the Presidential Personnel Office, told retired Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor that Trump wanted him to “Get us out of Afghanistan. Get us out of Iraq and Syria. Complete the withdrawal from Germany. Get us out of Africa.” When Macgregor, who was brought on to the administration on November 11, said he didn’t think that was possible, McEntee told him to “do as much as you can.”
Was Trump in a fit of pique simply focused on scorching the earth as he left power? Or was he perhaps executing in his final months latent directives he felt would improve his prospects for a soft landing post-presidency? The world still does not know what he and Vladimir Putin discussed privately in Helsinki.
A global struggle between democracy and rising autocracy
The Biden administration released its annual National Security Strategy (NSS) on Wednesday. It lays out the geopolitical stakes Biden has already voiced in speeches about defending democracy here and abroad:
Just as Trump’s abrupt withdrawal from Syria left a vacuum for Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian president Vladimir Putin, and as Trump’s planned but not executed withdrawal of troops from Germany would have hamstrung the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) so it could not have countered Putin’s Russia, so would the abrupt disengagement of the U.S. around the world have created a giant vacuum for authoritarian countries to fill.
Biden’s National Security Strategy reiterates his belief that we are in a global struggle between democracy and rising autocracy and that the world is at an inflection point that will determine “the security and prosperity of the American people for generations to come.”
The document makes a strong call for American leadership to defend democracy and to reinforce the rules-based international system on which the world has depended since World War II. This system is now under attack as Russia has claimed the right to invade a neighboring country and redraw its boundaries by force, and as authoritarian governments seek to control global trade and power by withholding key resources—like energy—from other nations.
The NSS promises that the U.S. will work to strengthen democracy around the world “because democratic governance consistently outperforms authoritarianism in protecting human dignity, leads to more prosperous and resilient societies, creates stronger and more reliable economic and security partners for the United States, and encourages a peaceful world order.” It also calls for the domestic development of key resources, especially energy, to reduce the ability of other nations to pressure us.
The document notes strategic rivalries and challenges both regional and global, including climate and pandemic diseases.
“The post-Cold War era is definitively over and a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next,” the NSS says. “No nation is better positioned to succeed in this competition than the United States, as long as we work in common cause with those who share our vision of a world that is free, open, secure, and prosperous. This means that the foundational principles of self-determination, territorial integrity, and political independence must be respected, international institutions must be strengthened, countries must be free to determine their own foreign policy choices, information must be allowed to flow freely, universal human rights must be upheld, and the global economy must operate on a level playing field and provide opportunity for all.”
What is at stake in 2022 is whether Americans will embrace such a strategy for strengthening global stability or lean into Trumpist isolationism and domestic extremism aimed at destabilizing the U.S. and the world. That would certainly benefit plutocratic and political actors who prefer authoritarianism to democracy. Republican candidates this fall are a menagerie of conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and rejectors of democratic principles. Indeed, principles of any kind are in short supply among them.
What havoc Trump meant to accomplish on his way out the door, the barbarians mean to wreak once they get their feet inside it.
Prevention may not be the cure but may hold back the spread of the sickness.
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