Present at the Destruction

Trump is undermining the foundations of the free world

Over the past three weeks, President Donald Trump has launched a massive attack on both the Atlantic alliance and the international system of free trade. The harmfulness of these moves cannot be overstated. To understand why, some background is necessary.

The United States has a pretty good track record at winning wars, but there is only one important conflict in recent memory where we also won the peace. Fortunately, this singular victory occurred in conjunction with the largest of them all, World War II.

The postwar peace was the result of an extraordinary work of American statecraft. It occurred because a very serious and smart group of men realized that, if the fruits of the hard won victory were not to turn rotten again, the flaws in the world system that had led to the global conflagration needed to be corrected. So they created two critical institutions. The first was the Western alliance, later formalized as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to provide for collective security of the democratic world, and thereby decisively deter any future totalitarian aggression. The second was a system of international free trade, formalized as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, later renamed the World Trade Organization), to enable global economic recovery and prosperity, thereby ensuring the continued stability and growing strength of the democracies themselves.

These two pillars of the postwar order – NATO and GATT – lay the foundation of a world so much more peaceful and prosperous than the prior chaos that one its leading architects, Truman Administration Secretary of State Dean Acheson, entitled his memoir Present at the Creation.

The creators of the postwar order built on the basis of hard won knowledge. Free trade is necessary for economic prosperity for the same reason that long distance transport is. Everyone understands that advances like the Erie Canal and the transcontinental railroad greatly accelerated American economic development by cheapening internal transportation costs. But imagine that the government put a tax on movement via such systems so that they cost more to deliver goods than previous methods of transportation. In that case, the great canals and railroads would be rendered as useless as if they had been physically destroyed, and US economic development would have been crippled. Similarly, international tariffs do as much harm to the world economy as would be done by sinking all the most advanced merchant ships. Thus it was the trade war, initiated by the US Smoot-Hawley tariff bill and similar measures taken by foreign governments that made the Great Depression great.

The creators learned from this. Similarly, they also learned from the debacle of the 1930s what happens when democracies abandon their collective security arrangements and allow tyrants to start picking off their weaker members one at a time. So they put in place something that was called the Free World, within which enterprise and trade could prosper, without fear of either excessive intergovernmental interference or external attack. The result was the greatest period of economic growth that the world has ever seen. America was transformed from poverty-riddled depression America to suburbia America, with a vast middle class owning homes, cars, and televisions and sending their children to college. Europe and Japan were completely rebuilt, with South Korea, Taiwan, and numerous other previously undeveloped countries lifting themselves out of hunger and desperation as well. Furthermore, despite the continued existence of two very dangerous totalitarian potential adversaries, the general peace was preserved.

As a result of this profound success, whatever the differences between the two major parties may have been on other issues, these two fundamental bedrock principles underlying the creation and continuation of the post-1945 world order have remained uncontroversial among serious political leaders for the eight decades ever since.

Unfortunately, Trump has now completely abandoned this policy. He is moving to impose massive tariffs against all our trading partners, including not only our geopolitical adversaries but our closest and most economically interdependent allies. Furthermore, in the past week, he and his spokesmen, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice President J.D. Vance have made a series of statements indicating that not only are they prepared to abandon support for the defense of Ukraine and pull all US troops out of Europe, but to break the economic sanctions that are limiting the growth of Russian military might. Even worse, Vance went so far as to offer support for the Moscow-aligned German Alternative fur Deutschland Alt-Right party, and to condemn the Europeans for trying to prevent the takeover of their countries by such Quisling organizations.

Going even beyond this, the administration has gone out of its way to announce its divorce from the broad set of values that bind the civilized West together. Disgracing America, it has proclaimed its desire to implement a program of ethnic cleansing of Gaza, threatened Canada and Denmark with annexations, tried to blackmail Ukraine into surrendering its rare Earth mineral reserves, and offered to invite mass murdering war criminal Vladimir Putin to visit America as a special guest of the president the United States.

These moves have been so alarming that as I write these lines, European leaders are moving to hold an emergency summits to try to arrange for their common defense in the face of American betrayal.

Americans need to understand. The reason why the United States is a superpower, and not just another big power, is because of our alliances, and in particular our alliance with Europe. Together with Europe we can overmatch the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea Axis. Without it, we cannot. It is for this reason that the central thrust of Soviet foreign policy from 1945 onwards was to break the Atlantic alliance. It is for this reason that the Kremlin now proclaims its goal to be the establishment of a “multi-polar world” in which each of the three major powers gets to dominate its own sphere of influence. Under this plan, the United States would get North America, Russia gets Eurasia “from Lisbon to Vladivostok,” China gets East and South Asia, and the rest can be up for grabs.

This is a formula for economic depression and world war.

Is the Pax Americana worth preserving? Do we prefer the world as it has been since 1945 to the world as it was before 1945? Will anyone in the Republican Party still fight to help preserve and improve that world? Or will their epitaph be Present at the Destruction?

Dr. Robert Zubrin @robert_zubrin is an aerospace engineer and author. His most recent book. The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet https://www.amazon.com/New-World-Mars-Create-Planet/dp/1635768802/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.7CO4pdRvL8H17LVNWUDSYa0KKnyJ_MfnhzkY4QSKkbRSOu2SyePr4Q9tjEhq2rw7ns1I7UqAn8e0Ok2iolwuil9DilwIyEMrY6Iomxdz5pQI1DMWAA_ECM3DM9Gx8vLpGzOvGCTAZTlGv6YBWWBFHkXsxf0AkVZnhxqeLqwa2B9aF1ngeShGrYvBBKiwJOD773Y4VoYSXM_pWDZ3Du1DqHDzwoy8h5mwXnAxzdyyClc.b4Kc23jvkxFxdvEyH657niKeg07Ew0m7-TVo1Axvs0A&qid=1730311816&sr=8-1 , was published by Diversion Books in 2024.

This article was published February 18 in the Kyiv Post