253 - Plunging Downhill: Making the U.S. Less Competitive, Less Powerful, While Trashing Soft Power

We know that Trump and his administration are flooding the sluiceways and cisterns with flotillas of ill-conceived and ill-implemented directives meant to recapture the U.S. from "the left" and to rescue us from wokeness, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Among other initiatives, that flushing of American institutional life includes slandering free thinking intellectuals in universities, generals and other military personnel who may be "woke" or believers in diversity, and -- for fun - deporting asylum seekers, visa-holding foreigners with anti-administration views, and even legitimate green card holders. The late Joseph S. Nye showed a much more positive path — a path much more productive for us and the world.

There is method to all of Trump’s pronounced madness, but what Trump says that he wants to achieve by up-ending so many lives and institutions is unachievable. Indeed, many of his initiatives will have exactly the opposite result from the one that Trump (and his acolytes) profess to want.

The latest folly is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's plan to retire fully 20 to 30 percent of all existing army, National Guard, and navy generals and admirals, thus catatonically crippling military morale and ceding to China and Russia our ability to achieve victory in combat, say over Taiwan. Hegseth said the eliminations were “a reflection of the president wanting the right people around him to execute the national security approach we want to take.” In other words, Hegseth wants only officers who toe the Trump line.

This foolish action is fully consonant with the axing of auditors and other key personnel in the IRS; how are we going to collect the taxes that we require to fund our wars, much less our social services? Why cut off the very funding sources that we require to stay strong in a dangerously competitive world?

Trump and Musk want to shrink government. But by cutting employment in Veterans Affairs they decrease mental health treatments that save money overall and reduce random violence. By closing the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, a plethora of small organizations across America will have to curtail their work and/or lay off employees. In this manner, unemployment rises not only in Washington, D.C., but across the nation. There is no virtue in destroying a well-oiled economy that has been the envy of the world.

I have written about how the collapsing of USAID will make millions in Africa and Asia less healthy, leading directly to countable fatalities in their hundreds of thousands. Losing USAID's efforts at conflict resolution and peace making will also contribute, if less directly, to unnecessary deaths. But I had no idea that peace and prosperity in a country like Colombia has also now been forfeited. We have been heavily involved in a lengthy and involved process to convert Colombia from a cocaine-exporting place with many dangerous civil conflicts into a prosperous nation where citizens would remain at home rather than attempting to breach our immigration defenses. But that initiative -- worthy for enhancing Colombian lives and reducing campesino deaths as well as for reducing emigration to the U. S. -- has been scuttled thanks to the shutting of both USAID and the humanitarian bureaus in the State Department.

The easiest of Trump's projects to critique is his big tariff catastrophe. As Jason Furman demonstrated conclusively in the New York Times earlier this week, it is clear that the new tariff regime will not and cannot bring labor-intensive manufacturing back into the U.S. in the near or medium term. Building factories takes too many years and, as Taiwan's now Arizona-based TSMC semi-conductor operation shows, the U.S. lacks and will lack for years both the employee skill base and the wage levels to encourage much reshoring. Messing with our hitherto well- functioning auto industry by taxing Canadian and Mexican exports also creates the kinds of disparities that damage rather than enhance our existing products and productivity. Moreover, to quote Furman, "at the same moment...Trump is upending the global economy in a feckless attempt to eliminate America’s trade deficit, he’s essentially pressuring Congress to increase it."

By throwing a spanner (as the British say) into the global trading system, Trump makes us all poorer, not just our trading partners. We are better off with a trading system that rises all boats, not one that sinks us all together into as slough of trading despond. Furman demonstrated that Trump, by weakening the dollar and taxing consumers, could drive not only the U.S. but the world into recession. Our imports would cost us more; China might well benefit very much instead of the U.S. Trump shoots not only himself, but the rest of us in the feet.

Trump's behavior (along with Musk's) has also lost us customers overseas. Revulsion has led to a shunning of U.S. products (Nike sneakers, Netflix movies, you name it)-- even Coca Cola, not to mention Tesla.

We can call what is happening the big backfire. And it extends to Canadian tourists not wanting to be harassed at border controls or simply not wanting to visit a neighbor who treats people badly. Not honoring due process for visa holders and sending unfortunate aliens to a notorious prison in a notorious country like El Salvador without so much as a hearing besmirches everything the U.S. has long stood for; it hardly makes prospective tourists feel like taking their chances.

Now, too, it appears that Trump's minions will fly persons grabbed off the street to notably shady holding pens in a place like eastern Libya (run by a notorious UAE-backed warlord) or even to authoritarian-controlled Rwanda. When asked, Trump could not quite say that he understood what due process meant. Nor did he believe in it. Congress should throw spikes in so many of these maneuvers but has not. Pusillanimousity prevails.

The nutty idea to re-open Alcatraz prison only discloses a mind that comes up with "bright" ideas without thinking them through or examining the likely consequences. Was Trump even aware that Alcatraz has been a prime tourist excursion site for fifty years? Or was he looking for a special refuge for himself?

All of these destructive and diabolical initiatives, driven as they are by retribution, revenge, and a heavily antagonistic assumption that the enemy of Trumpism is a liberalism that can be pilloried as too woke -- too favorable to minorities (especially African Americans) and to diversity -- ultimately antagonizes Americans who want stability more than contestation, decency and humanity more than willful inhumanity.

On top of this unbridled hatred and anger, Trump initiatives are not (as Furman shows in one arena) capable of accomplishing what he claims he wants. Rather than making America great again, he has systematically weakened our economy, our military readiness, our fighting capacity and morale, our ability to fund a coming two-front war, a whole range of social services, our medical and public health readiness, and our universities. And this eviscerating of our productivity and innovativeness will only get worse. Trump is simply ignorant and surrounded by narrow ideologues.

Moreover, Trumpism is destroying our national soul. My esteemed and insightful long-time friend and colleague Joseph S. Nye died tragically and suddenly over the weekend. He coined the wise phrase "soft power" to epitomize how we took pride in and the rest of the world appreciated our instinct to do good -- to try to live up to the revolutionary ideals of our founding fathers, to rush to the aid of freedom fighters in World War I and against tyranny and persecution in World War II. Our great strength in a competitive world was our reputation for abiding by the rule of law, adhering rather strictly to first amendment free expression openness, welcoming refugees fleeing oppression, and finding ways to expose Americans to the world and the world to Americans through the Peace Corps, the Fulbright fellowships, and, yes, our helping others everywhere through USAID, PEPFAR, GAVI, and a host of other expressions of concern for the betterment of humanity.

Joe Nye, as a talented high government official in several administrations, as an antagonist of nuclear proliferation, as Dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, as a noted and influential political scientist and international relations theorist, as a much traveled and much lauded advisor of other governments, and as a consummate advocate of careful and consequential diplomacy, lived as well as invented soft power. If Trump only had someone sensible like Joe Nye to curb his follies and bring his administration back to first and honest principles, we and the rest of the world would be better off.

As Trump disgraces his presidency and erases our reputation for soft power, we would do well to remember that Joe Nye's intellectual and humanistic leadership is exactly what this nation must now, sadly, do without.