Making America a great deal less great

Under the Ming Dynasty in the early fifteenth century, Chinese fleets ventured into the Indian Ocean seven times, going at least once as far as East Africa and returning with a giraffe among various other exotic beasts to grace the imperial court. Some of their ships had compartmentalized hulls, an innovation that might have saved the Titanic five hundred years later. Some were more than six times the length of the Santa Maria, the flagship in which Christopher Columbus would bump into the West Indies later that century. The Chinese were the leading naval power in the world and in a position, had they wanted to, to colonize much of it. But after those seven voyages, the Chinese government made a deliberate decision to focus inward. Long-distance sea voyages were actively discouraged. By 1500 building an ocean-going junk of more than two masts in China was a crime punishable by death. So it fell to the Europeans to dominate the Age of Discovery and colonize the New World along with much of the Old. But for China’s sudden retrenchment almost six hundred years ago, Americans might be speaking Mandarin today.

          Under Donald Trump, the United States seems poised to undergo a comparable turning inward and to relinquish in a comparably abrupt manner its global leadership. Much of what Trump has called for with regard to foreign policy and economic strategy—downplaying our alliances and diplomacy, imposing tariffs and building a wall on the border with Mexico—would push us that way. The emphasis on nationalism, on us versus them, the impulse to isolate ourselves behind a protective physical barrier and dwell in an insular, homogeneous sort of Fortress America, is incompatible with sustaining our international leadership.

That leadership dates from World War II, and our exercise of it has not always been enlightened. But by and large, if you look at the big picture over the last century or so, the short list of our biggest enemies, comprising Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, is one we can be proud of. If you can judge a country by its enemies the way you can a man by his friends, enemies like those make us look pretty good. As hypocritical as our conduct has often been since World War II, the world is vastly better off for our having won it (or helped the Soviets win it—they suffered something like thirty times as many casualties as the United States and Great Britain combined), and for our having proceeded to win the Cold War. We have often betrayed our democratic principles, largely by way of fighting street fights with the Soviets by proxy in Third World back alleys. But the world at large has enjoyed more than seventy years of comparative peace under our tutelage. Totalitarianism has been put down. Democracy has generally flourished. Overall, times have been good.

But now we have an administration that seems hell-bent on shedding the complicated burden of engaging with the world and leading it and imparting our values to it, in favor of circling our wagons and brandishing our guns in sullen isolation. Trump’s plan to make America great again, if he succeeds in implementing it, will in fact lessen us. Our cultural, political and philosophical sway over other nations will dwindle as our engagement with them does. If Trump gets his way, we’ll pay more for goods from abroad, and people there will pay less attention to us. We’ll be stronger militarily and weaker every other way. The American century, proclaimed by Henry Luce in 1941, will have ended somewhat less than a century later.

And whose time will come next? Who will take our place? Someone will. International politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Vladimir Putin, the tough guy Trump seems to have a man crush on, would love to, but economically Russia’s just not up to the challenge. It seems more likely that the Chinese, with their huge population, dynamic economy, strong work ethic, enormous savings (much of it invested in US Treasury notes) and growing military power will take up where they left off six hundred years ago. They’ve already returned in force to East Africa, where Chinese businesses have made major investments. Their space program is accelerating as ours stagnates. They’re making major strides in renewable energy while Trump and the “Drill, baby, drill” Republicans march us backwards into a smog-enshrouded fossil fuel tar pit.

For all its faults, by lots of measures the United States is great and always has been. If they get their way, Donald Trump and his weird little black shirt brain trust—and the Republican Party, so much of which seems so happy about getting hijacked by a race-baiting demagogue—will not restore us to greatness, they will strip us of it and leave us diminished.