A great unravelling is underway

NEW YORK: If you are confused by President Donald Trump’s zigzagging strategies on Ukraine, tariffs, microchips or a host of other issues, it is not your fault. It’s his. What you are seeing is a president who ran for reelection to avoid criminal prosecution and to get revenge on people he falsely accused of stealing the 2020 election. He never had a coherent theory of the biggest trends in the world today and how to best align America with them to thrive in the 21st century. That is not why he ran.

And once he won, Trump brought back his old obsessions and grievances — with tariffs and Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Canada — and staffed his administration with an extraordinary number of fringe ideologues who met one overriding criterion: loyalty first and always to Trump and his whims over and above the Constitution, traditional values of American foreign policy or basic laws of economics.

The result is what you are seeing today: a crazy cocktail of on-again-off-again tariffs, on-again-off-again assistance for Ukraine, on-again-off-again cuts in government departments and programs both domestic and foreign — conflicting edicts all carried out by Cabinet secretaries and staff members who are united by a fear of being tweeted about by Elon Musk or Trump should they deviate from whatever policy line emerged unfiltered in the last five minutes from our Dear Leader’s social media feed.

Four years of this will not work, folks.

Our markets will have a nervous breakdown from uncertainty, our entrepreneurs will have a nervous breakdown, our manufacturers will have a nervous breakdown, our investors — foreign and domestic — will have a nervous breakdown, our allies will have a nervous breakdown and we’re going to give the rest of the world a nervous breakdown.

You cannot run a country, you cannot be an American ally, you cannot run a business and you cannot be a long-term American trading partner when, in a short period, the US president threatens Ukraine, threatens Russia, withdraws his threat to Russia, threatens huge tariffs on Mexico and Canada and postpones them — again — doubles tariffs on China and threatens to impose even more on Europe and Canada.

Top officials of our oldest allies say privately they fear that we are becoming not just unstable, but their enemy. The only person who gets treated with kid gloves is Putin, and America’s traditional friends are in shock.

But here is Trump’s biggest lie of all his big lies: He claims that he inherited an economy in ruins and that’s why he has to do all of these things. Nonsense. Joe Biden got a lot of things wrong, but by the end of his term, with the help of a wise Federal Reserve, the Biden economy was actually in pretty good shape and trending in the right direction. America certainly did not need global tariff shock therapy.

Corporate and household balance sheets were relatively healthy, oil prices were low, unemployment was around only 4%, consumer spending was rising and GDP growth was around 2%. We needed to address the trade imbalance with China — Trump has been right about that all along — but that was the only urgent agenda item, and we could have done that with targeted tariff increases on Beijing, coordinated with our allies doing the same, which is how you get Beijing to move.

Now economists fear that the profound uncertainty Trump is injecting into the economy could drive down interest rates for all the wrong reasons — because of so much investor uncertainty driving down growth, both here and abroad. Or we could get an even worse combination: stagnant growth and inflation (from so many tariffs), known as stagflation.

The world has enjoyed an extraordinary period of economic growth and the absence of great-power wars since 1945. Of course, it was not perfect, and there have been many troubled years and countries that lagged. But in the broad sweep of world history, these 80 years have been remarkably peaceful and prosperous for a lot of people, in a lot of places.

And the No. 1 reason that the world was the way it was, was because America was the way it was.

That America was summed up by two lines in John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address on Jan. 20, 1961: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

And: “So, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”

Trump and his vacuous vice president, JD Vance, have completely turned Kennedy’s call on its head.

When a country as central as America — one that has played the critical stabilizing role since 1945, acting through institutions like NATO, the World Health Organization, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, and, yes, paying a bigger share than others to make the pie much bigger, which benefited us most because we had the biggest slice — when a country like ours suddenly departs from that role and becomes a predator on this system, watch out.

If Trump wants to take America on a 180-degree turn, he owes it to the country to have a coherent plan, based on sound economics and a team that represents the best and the brightest, not the most sycophantic and right-wing woke.

And most of all he owes every American, irrespective of party, some basic human decency. The only way any president can remotely succeed in any such radical turn, or even a lesser one, is if he reaches out to his opponents and at least tries to bring them along as much as possible.

Alas, though, that is not Trump. What Leon Wieseltier once said of Benjamin Netanyahu is doubly true of Trump: He is such a small man, in such a big time.

(Friedman, awarded Pulitzer Prize in 1983, 1988, and 2002, is the author of 'From Beirut to Jerusalem')

The New York Times