OPINION:
COLLAPSE: A WORLD IN CRISIS AND THE URGENCY OF AMERICAN LEADERSHIP
By Douglas E. Schoen
Encounter Books, $25.99, 255 pages
Douglas E. Schoen, who makes frequent appearances on Fox News and contributes regularly to a variety of publications, among them The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, is a member of an endangered species — a genuinely bipartisan and highly respected Democratic political consultant with some 40 years of valuable political experience. Among his clients have been Bill Clinton and Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York. He also admires Jimmy Carter as a humanitarian, and respects the accomplishments of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
Nor, unlike many of his Democratic colleagues, increasingly infected by the various odd splinter sects growing within their party, does he lay the blame for the world’s ills on the stolen election of 2016. As he pointed out in his last book, “America in the Age of Trump”(2017), the election of Donald Trump was no fluke or the result of collusion with comic-book agents of evil empires, but a genuine expression of outrage and a rejection of an increasingly out-of-touch political establishment.
Moreover, the forces that fed that victory will not be satisfied with a return to establishment politics as usual: “Trump’s win represented the crescendo of half a decade or more of anti-establishment politics around the world, a raucous era of audacious terror attacks, global financial panics and economic recessions, technological disruptions, and political and institutional upheavals that have made the early twenty-first century as unpredictable and unstable as any recent era in at least a century.”
Much of this global discord, Mr. Schoen believes, derives directly from an American failure to play the central role on the world stage that it is meant to play, a role the last administration increasingly rejected, with a consequent lessening of American moral and strategic leadership.
But with the world increasingly chaotic and leaderless, and with authoritarian rivals like Russia and China and with the growing Islamist threat, which Mr. Schoen discusses in detail, it’s imperative that America recover its rightful place in world affairs. That requires what Mr. Schoen calls “assertive democratic idealism.”
In contrast to “the last two presidential administrations, which, respectively, overreached and underachieved,” he has praise for the Nixon administration, about which he wrote a well-received book, “The Nixon Effect” (2016), and for the Nixon/Kissinger concept of “realism” in foreign policy, which he believes “put the United States on stronger footing internationally through the prudential use of American power.” Furthermore, he believes the Nixon foreign policy achievements “set the stage for the more ambitious — and idealistic — goals of Ronald Reagan, who set out not to manage the Cold War, but to win it.”
However, he believes, realism is not enough. America was founded “on aspiration, idealism, and morality: a belief, fundamentally, in individual rights and liberty, and a conviction that democratic government could best protect its people.” He gives credit to Jimmy Carter, “who admirably put human rights at the center of his foreign policy,” albeit without “the requisite strategic intelligence that could make such commitments deliver genuine progress.”
And Ronald Reagan, “in his more muscular way,” honored this humanistic vision. “[O]ne of his principal arguments against the Soviet Union was moral, based on human rights, and on the contrast between Soviet and American visions of the good life.”
And so, the question becomes, is Donald Trump the man to put America back on track? Mr. Schoen is judicious in his evaluation, separating statements of policy and actions from tweets and chit-chat designed to outrage political opponents, of whom there’s no shortage.
He calls the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, promulgated with the president’s approval, as “admirably clear-eyed about the global environment the United States finds itself in,” and in response to which the president pledges four areas of focus: Defending the American homeland; promoting American prosperity; preserving peace through strength and the advancement of American influence around the world — a goal that President Trump emphasizes “’begins with building up our wealth and power at home.”
Will he come through? “The years ahead will reveal how committed President Trump is to the vision he has described,” concludes Mr. Schoen. “But if the United States truly commits, under Trump’s leadership, to the vision that it describes as practical realism and I call assertive democratic idealism, a more stable and promising future may yet be in the offing.”
• John R. Coyne Jr., a former White House speechwriter, is co-author of “Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement” (Wiley).
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