What can Americans learn from these opening days of what looks like a very long four years?
Trump speaking in Phoenix in December 2024. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0)
By Patrick Lawrence
ScheerPost
Well, we now have a president who says what he means, and this is an advance beyond the four years Americans spent listening to a lifelong, compulsive liar who more than occasionally said the opposite of what he meant.
It is always best to know someone means what he or she says, even if this is foolish, or impractical, or somewhere on the way to dangerous.
This is the thing with Donald Trump: We can be certain he means what he says, but so much of what he says is foolish, or impractical, or somewhere on the way to dangerous.
“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World,” Trump declared just before Christmas, “the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.” He made this statement as he announced Ken Howery, a venture capitalist turned diplomat, as his ambassador to Copenhagen.
O.K., a case in point. You have to believe Trump means it when he says these kinds of things, even if you cannot for a moment believe they are true or of any worth.
Trump also wants to annex Canada as America’s 51st state. He wants to reclaim sovereignty over the Panama Canal, too. And rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
“The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation,” he said in his Inaugural Address, “one that increases our wealth, expands our territory.” This is a man with plans, truly. We can count on this these next four years.
Before going any further, Trump has done two things meriting approbation since he was inaugurated, and we should note these briefly.
One is his determination, via one of many executive orders, to restore the First Amendment and so defend free speech. We will have to see how this order is interpreted — whether it will extend, for instance, to the rampant censorship of some media and in universities under the disgracefully corrupt charge that opposition to Israel and Zionist terror amounts to “anti–Semitism.” To be determined.
Independent of the executive orders, Trump has also made it clear that he intends to speak soon with Vladimir Putin with a view to bringing the Biden regime’s proxy war in Ukraine to a close. Trump, it is now evident, has no plan to end the war: He has been winging it all along. But opening talks with the Russian president is nonetheless big.
Putin in September 2024. (Kremlin)
Biden and his adjutants, frozen in ideological anachronisms and in consequence incapable of anything to do with statecraft, refused contacts with Moscow for most of the past four years.
Against this background, reopening diplomatic channels is a significant move. The same will be so if — let’s stay with “if” for now — he manages to improve the tone between Washington and Beijing. We ought not miss the potential here just because Donald Trump’s name is on it.
There is something else we ought not miss as Trump puffs out his chest in behalf of some kind of neo-expansionist America. All his plans to improve the republic’s standing and reputation in the world — “America will reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on earth, inspiring awe and admiration,” etc. — are fundamentally hermetic — hatched in an odd state of solitude.
There has been no consultation with the Danes about Greenland, and certainly none with Greenlanders. None of Trump’s people has asked the Canadians about statehood. I know of no contacts with the Panamanians about the status of the Canal. [Since this was written, The Financial Times reported a contentious phone call last week between Trump and the Danish prime minister over Greenland; and the new U.S. secretary of state plans soon to visit Panama.]
Even the promised démarche to Russia betrays this … this what? … this isolation from reality. Here is Trump’s most recent statement on his plans to take up the Ukraine crisis with the Kremlin, as reprinted in The Telegraph:
“I’m going to do Russia, whose economy is failing, and President Putin, a very big FAVOR. Settle now, and STOP this ridiculous War! IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE. If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of taxes, tariffs, and sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.”
Where to begin?
Russia’s economy is not failing. It is Europe’s economies that are failing in consequence of the sanctions regime the United States has imposed on Russia.
Washington has no favors to offer Moscow. Given the progress of the war, it is the United States that is in need of a favor from Russia. U.S. imports from Russia in 2022, the most recent year for which statistics are compiled, were $16 billion — taxi fare in the global trade context.
Apart from these details, telling as they may be, there is Moscow’s desire to develop a new security structure to serve as the basis of an enduring peace that benefits Russia and the Western alliance alike.
Putin and Sergei Lavrov, his foreign minister, have made it clear on numerous occasions that there is no point in negotiations unless this fundamental objective is recognized. Trump, either unaware or simply uninterested in this, appears once again to be operating at that insular distance from reality noted above.
Who among his people, I may as well ask, would be capable of diplomacy of this import and sophistication? Marco Rubio? Please.
As the new U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, second from left, touring the State Department in Washington, D.C., last week. (State Department, Freddie Everett)
Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, a non-plan plan for peace in Ukraine: These are all failures-in-waiting. We can dismiss them as somewhere along the continuum running from foolish to impractical to dangerous.
Let us add, to finish the thought, unserious. No, Donald Trump’s foreign policies, even in outline, show no chance whatsoever of success. The greatest, the most respected, awe and admiration: No, Trump now sets out to lead America in precisely the opposite direction.
But not so fast. It is well worth pausing to conduct a brief but considered anatomy of Trump’s failures to come. What are they made of? How did he hatch these plans and arrive at these positions?
What can Americans learn from these opening days of what looks like a very long four years. There are, indeed, things to learn, and I mean about themselves.
Donald Trump as mirror. Let us look into it and think about what we see. The causality of failure: This is what we are looking for, and I see two things worth our time.
Relationship With ‘Others’
Many of the big-name philosophers of the past 100 years — Husserl, Heidegger, Lévinas, et al. — shared a pronounced preoccupation beginning in the 1920s. I relate this (and the scholars may correct me) to the wreckage of the First World War they found all around them.
These were the explorers and developers of the discipline called phenomenology. Who are we? What has become of us, we who dwell in mass, mechanized societies? What is the nature of human relationships? These were among the questions.
Emmanuel Lévinas, a Lithuanian Jew who lived in France (1906–1995) and wrote in French, elevated these matters to an enduring discourse concerning the Self and the Other. Indifference to others, he argued — and how radically must I simplify — lay at the root of the 20th century’s ills and evils.
The cult of the individual, he posited (among a lot of other things) must be transcended in favor of relationships with all the Others among us. We realize who we are only by way of these relationships; they are primary.
“The Self is possible only through the recognition of the Other,” he wrote, a noted line. So, to continue my simplification: We are social beings first; our individuality derives from our sociality. Lévinas published Totality and Infinity, the book wherein he stated his case most fully and famously, in 1961.
Levinas, undated. (Bracha L. Ettinger, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5)
I touch upon these people and their thinking because, 64 years after Lévinas brought out his masterwork, we can see how very, very right he and his colleagues were about humanity’s destiny.
To see from the perspective of the Other — grasping it, I mean, knowing it with no special need to share it — is among our 21st century imperatives: This is how I have put it in this space and elsewhere.
To develop the capacity in oneself to understand what the world looks like to other people is among the lessons I learned during my years as a correspondent abroad. It is essential, to say this another way, to any people’s constructive participation in the human project as we now have it.
Americans are not well-advantaged in these matters, to put the point mildly. We long ago turned our insistence in our individuality into the “ism” of individualism, an ideology that, however far it has taken America in the past, now proves a ball and chain at our ankles.
Equally, America has had such power since the 1945 victories that its policy cliques long ago lost interest in the perspectives of others — how the world looks to them, their aspirations, their histories, all the rest.
This is why, with admirable but few exceptions, America produces such poor diplomats. It has had no need of them. And the policy cliques in Washington have not yet registered that we have in consequence already begun to fail.
And this is why, to finish off, Donald Trump thought it was perfectly OK to declare his plans for Canada, Greenland and the Canal without so much as a preliminary consultation with a Canadian, a Dane or a Panamanian. These ideas are nonsensical to the point they embarrass.
But, their loopy aspect aside, are they any more nonsensical than — make your own list — Vietnam, Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, the Iraq War, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, indeed? Are they any more out of touch with the perspectives of others?
Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum in October 2024, shortly after her election. (EneasMx, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
In this connection, I loved Claudia Sheinbaum’s reaction to Trump’s proposal to rename the Gulf of Mexico. At a press conference the day after Trump pulled the satin drape off of this one the Mexican president stood before a 1607 map that marked the Gulf just as we know it today.
Pointing to North America, she proposed with an amused smile, “Why don’t we call it Mexican America? It sounds pretty, no?”
#Mexico
President @Claudiashein responded sarcastically on Wednesday to #US President-elect @realDonaldTrump‘s proposal to change the name of the #GulfOfMexico to the “Gulf of America.” Standing before a 17th-century map, #Sheinbaum proposed that North America should be renamed… pic.twitter.com/x80aB20k7u— Mexico Times (@mexicotimes) January 9, 2025
Sheinbaum was goofing on Trump, as we would have said long ago, and good for her. But let’s not miss what she was saying: This is how the world looks to us, we Mexicans. There is even a map depicting our perspective. You are not getting anywhere with us unless you understand this.
No. 2 — Parity Among Nations
The decades after the Second World War were among the most significant of the last century. They were less violent than the war years, although there was plenty of violence of another kind. This was “the independence era,” when scores of different peoples negotiated or fought their ways out of the colonial burden and made new nations of themselves.
The world was full of aspiration then. The idea of a just, ethical world order seemed well within reach. When America forced the Cold War upon all nations — and don’t bother me with alternative versions of history — all became binary. The with-us-or-against-us decades began.
Most new nations, even if they did not succumb to what we now call neoliberal ideology in all its exploitative aspects, failed to realize many or most of their early hopes. This is one reason among many the Cold War decades were so bitter.
But the hopes and aspirations were never extinguished: Submerged or corrupted, placed under house arrest so to say, but never outright assassinated or shot by a firing squad. This is among the fine things about what happened when Germans took down the Berlin Wall in November 1989: As soon as the post–Cold War era announced itself, all the old goals, the ambitions that once soared, came brilliantly back to life. They were there, as if hibernated, all along.
West Berliner with hammer and chisel at the Wall, Nov. 13, 1989. (Joe Lauria)
Among these is one worth noting now. Parity among nations, with its deep roots in the independence era, is another item on my list — a list of two so far — of 21st century imperatives. Any power of any magnitude that proposes to make its way in our new era must accept this.
The only alternatives are decline and violence — one or another kind of failure. To resist historical necessity, I mean to say — and this goes for individuals as well as reactionary elites — is sheer impotence.
Multipolarity is another term for the phenomenon I describe. It is emergent now, with the non–West naturally and inevitably in the lead, and manifests in what we are calling the new world order. It has various principles.
I trace these, in spirit if not in declared fact, to the Five Principles Zhou En-lai formulated in the early 1950s, soon after adopted by the brand new Non–Aligned Movement. Respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in the internal affairs of others, equality and conduct for mutual benefit, peaceful co-existence:
I note that the Chinese Foreign Ministry has now taken to stating these as the new world order’s rules of the road. Interesting. Give them a moment’s thought and you find the only missing word is parity.
I leave it to readers to judge how far, how many galaxies distant, Donald Trump is from any such conception of the world as it is as he takes office again. The point seems too obvious to belabor. But again, is his regime so much farther from reality than its predecessors, notably but not only Joe Biden’s? This is our question because it is the important question.
If Trump is a mirror, think of it as one of those wavy, distorting mirrors famous in the old fun houses. But as I recall so well from the harvest fairs of my childhood, you can still see yourself even if everything looks funny.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.
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The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
This article is an absolute jewel of eloquence and common sense.
Lévinas’s concern for others as opposed to individualism is a foundation concept of Marxism. I am a Marxist. What we need is socialist revolution before it’s too late.
In crony capitalism, a small group of businessmen call all the shots … we see how that works in todays world in many countries including ours (USA).
In marxism/socialism, a small group of bureaucratic insiders call all the shots … we saw how that played out last century in many countries …
The problem is not the system, it’s the scale. Nothing works well at the level of the modern nation states like the US, Russia, or China etc.. The distance between the rulers and the multitudes of the ruled is too far no matter what system you choose to use.
In fact, in a large nation/empire, it may be that a benevolent king/emperor who is at least symbolically known and personified to the people may be the best ruling system possible. Ideally someone born into the job, trained to become the philosopher king and who, not needing to seek power, does his best as a sense of duty to the people. Plato got to it many many years ago …
Emmanuel Lévinas – “The Self is possible only through the recognition of the Other,”
I will speak to what I know, which is Homelessness. The root word of Homelessness, is home, not House. Home is a place where the individual is known by others. It is a place in which the individual is networked into relationships with the “other”.
I spent 23 years delivering front line services to the Homeless. I over that time profiled many of the Homeless, and came to the realization that the only thing they had in common was that their primary relationships had been destroyed. I believe that this is at the root of all of our core problems today. We are fighting wars that could easily be solved by listening to, and recognizing the interests of the people we are at war with.
You make a good point here. Capitalism, however, preaches individualism as a religion. Only under socialism do people establish true relationships with other human beings.
This “Trump means what he says” has been bothering me for several days. It implies this is a good thing, and reflects a straightforward individual, an advance of some sort. (Despite the follow-up ironic qualifications on his stupidity.) Then Trump trashes Bishop Buddie for calling on him to be merciful, and does this hard upon his act of self-righteously upholding freedom of speech. He uses the familiar smear mechanism instead of argument, including insulting Buddie’s presentation style, the weak and cowardly rejoinder to what you cannot rationally speak to in a decent and polite way. I don’t know that a compliment to a screaming bully is helpful or due to this clod now performing as “leader” of the country, although I do see it as a rhetorical ploy to get the article moving.
I suggest we continually call out this man’s ignorance and incompetence, careful not to glorify him as somehow distinct from the last incompetent we had in the office.
He obviously means what he says for at least five minutes. Long-term is another matter.
I read “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible” years ago- Pomerantsev’s experience of Russia in 2014. The title seems apt for USA today. I wonder how much of the degradation in the USA is due to the denial of death? Since the draft was scuttled and the army became more or less mercenary and contracted out (quasi privatized), public shared rituals of death and dying are a thing of the past.
Death is largely privatized too. During the genocide in Gaza by the Israelis, with the exception of those who will inherit the earth, the young, the detachment of the majority of the society from the mass murder in our name has been remarkable to me. As is its passivity in reaction to climate catastrophe induced by the Big Oil Liars, Inc As though our animal instincts are shut off. Those that in the past prompted action to save ourselves and especially to save our young, and doing so in spite of fear.
Not all of us are detached. You just never hear the truth about what people think because of mass censorship of any opinions from the corporate media and the governments who have everything to hide and nothing to offer humanity.
Mr. Lawrence seems to never fail delivering “whole” food for thought. Thank you sir. It was your five principals that triggered me.
Timing is everything. I came across Prof. Gibbs last evening. Seems the democrats cannot avoid responsibility for this current fiasco!
For any one interested I have an offering one might investigate to provide insight into how the U.S. Government was delivered the NEOCON .
First google Henry “Scoop” Jackson and NEOCONs and feast your eyes on fertile history.
One of the patterns of Scoop’s group was their tendency to switch parties to their liking.
Something I see as illegal in that once one is elected a single party that person should they wish to change parties should I believe resign and run for office in the future and the party he wishes to leave can appoint his replacement. I see this as an express route for congress to become a duopoly.
I very strongly recommend anyone the least bit interested watch the program below. You will not be disappointed
Do a YouTube search for The Origins of the Most Deadly Ideology on Earth | Prof. David N Gibbs will be at. Neutrality Studies. 63k. views 9 days ago interviews. runs 38-39 minutes.
“[part 1 of 2] Neoconservatism is an insanely brutal and bloodthirsty ideology. But how did this mad and monstrous mindset take over an entire nation that prides itself on being the pinnacle of humanistic values? Well it wasn’t even difficult. Professor David N. Gibbs tells us the story of the devils that are the neocons.”
You see my friends the ‘truth’ is most often. stranger than fiction, such it the case here. And yes I’m very new to this history, but at 76 I’m still starved for the truth.
Mr. Lauria you might be interested in this yourself if you don’t know this history.
Robert: Excellent. I remember Mercouris also speaking about the history of neoconism beginning with Scoop Jackson. The mindset of neocons, Zionists, fascists and now Banderites represent the nadir of humanity.
Thank you for caring so much.
I have only watched part one. I’m kind of hoping my detractors will understand at this point in my life I have not ONE partisan bone in my body.
I recommend everyone watch this Prof. Gibbs give an impressive account of the events and his take on what was happening during this particular time frame. Very convincing stuff.
I’m the same age as you and I support the overthrow of capitalism in favor of socialism. Capitalism and its main god of private profit over social equality will never change. It cannot be reformed. It is based entirely on exploitation and individualism. We need a system that regards the idea of a good life for everyone to be made the most important thing. All this idea of “switching parties” means nothing if all the parties are capitalist.
The problem is that the western monotheistic view is we must rule the world culture of everyone for our God our gods tell us so. Who wont talk to Putin because he has no soul that that my include non-theistic Asia. For centuries of our empires we have been trying to do it with military force and making fabulous profits doing it. Even the gold and silver that was taken fro the Americas was used to pollute the Asian cultures.
Our NATO is the Empires and Vikings and Romans as militarily, economically and religiously addicted predators.
Another reason that religious superstition must go the way of the dinosaur or we will all become extinct. Humanity has made great advances, but until religion is abolished, humanity will not realize that it is up to us, human beings, to right wrongs and save ourselves and the planet. As long as people still think an afterlife exists, they will continue to fail to fix THIS life, the only one we have.
Re “We will have to see how this order is interpreted — whether it will extend, for instance, to the rampant censorship of some media and in universities under the disgracefully corrupt charge that opposition to Israel and Zionist terror amounts to “anti–Semitism.” To be determined. ”
What control does Trump have over universities’ policies?
Withholding of federal funds?
Make AIPAC register as a foreign agent and get their money out of the equation.
Excellent article, but I would add one corollary: you can be certain that Trump means what he says in that moment. The moment will pass and Trump’s thought will inevitably change.
You are right. It’s on us. Americans voted for him – they didn’t have to — they could have chosen someone else, but they didn’t. They chose Trump.
You make your bed and lie in it.
I am an American and I voted for the Socialist Equality Party, as I have been doing for more than 25 years. Supporting capitalism will not change anything.
Spot on in all regards. The hope of Trump is that he is sand in the gears of the “liberal authoritarianism” machine that was running madly and picking up steam throughout Biden’s term. Harris may have been vacuous but the people behind her were deadly serious and ready to hit the gas. We gained perhaps a brief bit of time for alternatives to appear, which, at least outside the US, the world seems to be acting on. Just a hope vs. the 10,000 foot cliff that Biden/Harris were poised to run us over.
Of course, America’s “democracy” effectively gave us only and exactly these two choices. What more is there to say? At this point, just surviving is a win.
Hope? Change? Just as bad as the JB/KH crowd. You can believe in fairy tales all you want, but the facts are clear. But who needs facts? Did you read the article? Your comments on other articles indicate you don’t bother
Making pathetic excuses is not going to mitigate the hard truth.
Stop supporting capitalism and vote for socialism. Anything else is the same as digging the hole you’re in deeper instead of climbing out of it.
“… isolation from reality …”
In this one short phrase, Lawrence describes THE American problem. It is true of many Americans as individuals, it is true of our nation as a whole. Even while ordinary people struggle to pay their rent or mortgage, they still repeat the endless propaganda that the US is an exceptional nation, the reigning power over the entire world. Donald Trump reflects this America and it is one reason he is popular. As our society collapses, more and more people will sink into the dysfunction of fantasy, the Trumpian fantasy being reasserting US power and aggrandizement. The liberal fantasy consists of a world of empty phrases to hide their essential racism, sexism, and xenophobia behind silly words such as diversity and inclusivity. I used to put it this way: Republicans want to return to a world that never existed and Democrats want a future world that will never exist.
Neither is legitimate or helpful in dealing with a dramatically changing world and its reality. But I have noticed very little inclination for reality in my 70+ years.
This is why I am a socialist. Toxic individualism has been preached as a religion for far too long.
I would say that America has failed the world in many ways. The ‘American way of life’ isn’t suitable to many and yet, America insists on imposing it through unacceptable ways. Blind?
i’d suggest: blindly greedy.
it never ceases to amaze me how popular
“the american way of life” continues to be
even outside the untied states of america,
despite its being so utterly destructive and
unhealthy: proxy wars, crude oil, burgers,
sugary lemonades, huge amounts of plastic
waste and pollution, among other things,
and nothing but democKracy all around …
It continues to amaze me, too. How else to explain the suicidal policies of capitalism? Instead of ending the oil industry and going to clean power sources, US doubles down on pollution. Instead of spending money on free health care, free education, affordable housing, livable wages, and maintaining the planet, money is spent on war, death and waste.