Home Alone

Eight Ways in Which We Are Now Less Safe

I was about 80% of the way through writing a post on the new “might-makes-right, value less, democracy-less, transactional” worldview of Donald Trump (and JD Vance) when last week, the unthinkable Oval Office meeting between President Trump, Vice President Vance and Ukrainian President Zelensky happened and shocked the world. In the time since, I’ve been reworking this post again and again, as more follow up news comes in.

At this writing, the President’s mob-like threat has forced Zelensky to give in to signing the minerals agreement that Trump has extorted from Ukraine, while Trump has not backed away from his false accusation that Russia started the war, has “paused” US military aid (a move that will lead to more Ukrainian deaths) and has quit sharing intel with Ukraine, nor from his unwillingness to offer the security guarantee that Ukraine deserves as part of any end-to-the-war deal. No, a minerals rights deal that is likely to put Americans in harm’s way is not the same as a security guarantee, because in light of Trump’s consistent repetition of Putin talking points, Ukraine has no assurance that were Russia to violate any cease-fire and kill Americans, Trump would lift a finger to do anything about it. Having already falsely blamed Ukraine for starting the war, why should Ukraine believe otherwise, if Russia at some point in the future it violates any cease-fire and then falsely blames Ukraine for inducing them to fire back?

Meanwhile, Trump has also taken the dumb (Wall Street Journal editors’ words) step of imposing tariffs on Canada and Mexico, in violation of the revised NAFTA agreement that Trump negotiated and once was so proud of. Although it took one day, in the face of a stock market selloff for the Administration to sort of back off, the tariffs at this writing remain (and who knows their status later today or tomorrow after this post gores live). And before all this, Trump had already threatened to force, through economic pressure, Canada into becoming our 51rst state, while also threatening to force Denmark to sell or hand over Greenland to the US, and to take back the Panama Canal in violation of our 1978 treaty obligations. Trump repeated his intention to take Greenland “one way or another” in his March 4 address to Congress.

All of this makes four things abundantly clear.

(1) Trump sees the world as, sooner than later, being divided into 3 spheres of influence, the US (expanded to include Greenland, Canada and Panama – but not Mexico!), Russia …er a rebuilt Soviet Union, and China (including Taiwan, which Trump has previously said should pay us a “protection fee,” and whose freedom he seems inclined to trade for some kind of better bilateral trade deal with China). In effect, the world is controlled by three Mob bosses: Trump, Putin and Xi.

(2) The rest of the world (South America and Africa) counts to us only insofar as other countries can provide raw materials to us, or buffer us against terror (Israel).

(3) Promoting democracy – a bipartisan goal of the US since WW II – and using foreign aid as one instrument of “soft power” to achieve that goal and prevent conflict are gone as objectives and tools of foreign policy.

(4) In such a world where the US has no real friends/allies any more, it can trust the other Mob bosses, Putin and Xi, to stay in their spheres of influence and leave us alone, allowing us to avoid foreign entanglements, making us safer.

In this post, I want to address primarily proposition (4): that the Trump worldview will make Americans safer, putting aside the morality of it all, and how it remakes our views of ourselves as Americans, most of whom once really believed that we were that “Shining city on a Hill” (in Ronald Reagan’s words) and were proud of that fact.

Before I critique the “safer” claim, I want to at least acknowledge a case for the Trump worldview – that democracy, morality, idealism should play no role in our foreign policy and that just hard-headed (short-sighted) transactionalism (what can you do for us?) should count. After all, George Washington warned us from getting into “foreign entanglements” -- though he said that in an age long before the rise of totalitarian states of the 20^th and 21rst centuries, and two world wars, more so WW II than WWI, that were fought to prevent totalitarian rule throughout the world. Nonetheless, Trump could easily cite America’s worst post-WW II mistake, our mission to save Vietnam from communism, as the kind of mistake his view of the world would avoid. A more hard-headed approach then would have realized that we never could have won that war through conventional means, in a theatre 7000 miles from America where guerilla war and not tank battles would determine the outcome, against an adversary that was motivated as much by nationalism as by communism, and that a takeover by North Vietnam of the South never threatened US national security (which post-war events have proved in spades). Indeed, I am old enough to remember (and walked door-to-door in support of) a not-so-different theme of George McGovern’s doomed presidential campaign in 1972 -- “Come Home America’ – that then was embraced by much of the Democratic party (but rejected by about 60% of all voters). In a similar vein, Trump (and others) have attacked the neocon notion that we could impose democracy through military force on Arab countries in the Middle East, which was and still is fanciful (though before the second Iraq war Trump grudgingly expressed his support for an attack; https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/29/politics/fact-check-trump-false-claim-opposed-iraq-invasion/index.html). In short, I can understand, why apart from the cult worship of Donald Trump, thoughtful MAGA supporters are attracted to Trump’s isolationist intention to withdraw into our own, expanded shell (protected by a yet to be developed Star Wars-like dome capable of intercepting all incoming ballistic missiles) and leave the rest of the world to others, with the transactional exceptions for Israel and South America/Africa I have noted.

But going to the “Home Alone” extreme today, in a world full of bad actors, where Trump clearly is intended on taking us is not in our interest either. Here is my attempt at listing eight reasons why not. I am sure others can come up with additional reasons.

1. With our former allies no longer trusting us and/or viewing us as at least an economic adversary, expect a decline in cooperation with their intelligence and law enforcement agencies, which will expose the US to greater risks of terrorism and international crime. In particular, look for the demise of, or less information sharing, through the longstanding (up until now) Five Eyes intelligence sharing arrangement the US has had with Canada, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand. Given Trump’s pro-Russia tilt, why would any of our Five Eyes partners now feel comfortable sharing information with us to the same degree that they had shared with us before?

2. Countries like Japan and South Korea that historically have been protected by the UJS nuclear umbrella can no longer assume that is true and so may be driven to acquire nuclear capabilities of their own, especially South Korea (Japan likely to be more reluctant given WW II history). Other countries in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, may come to the same conclusion, even if Trump manages to convince Iran to abandon its nuclear program (under threat of US/Israeli attack on those facilities otherwise). Meanwhile, the disintegration of NATO will mean that Europe will have to come up, quickly, with its own nuclear weapons control system in place of the US-led one that NATO now has. And if Trump walks away from protecting Taiwan as part of any larger deal with China (which ironically is more likely given the announcement on March 3 that Taiwan Semiconductor that it plans to invest $100 billion in advanced chip-making facilities in the US, dramatically lowering the cost to the US of otherwise not having access to advanced chips made by TSMC in Taiwan), Taiwan will be desperate to acquire its own nuclear capabilities, which if it starts to do, would greatly increase the risk that China would move on Taiwan even more quickly than it otherwise would do. In short, more countries with nuclear weapons capability raises the risk of nuclear war, which even if conducted away from the US, would harm US and citizens around the world through the radiation fallout.

3. The closure of US Aid and its many programs not only is already costing lives of sick people around the world who depended on our support (there already is an Ebola outbreak that US AID otherwise could have helped stop), https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/02/116008, but together with the US pullout of the World Health Organization, will reduce or ability to nip future pandemics in bud by stopping them overseas before they come here, as well as the warning time we have to prepare for future pandemics. What’s unbelievable is that Trump and Musk do not realize that infectious diseases know no national boundaries. Moreover, as former Republican Congressman Charlie Dent has written: “Some organizations receiving substantial USAID funding are evangelical Christian and Catholic. They deliver lifesaving support to the most destitute and desperate people on this planet.” https://thehill.com/opinion/5134684-us-agency-foreign-aid-threatened/.

4. The elimination of foreign aid (which had a hiccup, for the Administration, due to the Supreme Court’s slap down on March 5 of the Administration’s freeze of AID funds) also as the critical tool of our “soft power” will increase risks that poor economic conditions abroad will breed more terrorists and other bad actors, as well as instability. As former Trump Defense Security Mattis, Former Trump Secretary of State Tillerson, and 16 retired generals wrote in 2017: “American security is undermined by frail and failing nations where hope is non-existent, and where conditions foster radicalism, produce refugees, spark insurgency, and provide safe havens for terrorists, criminal gangs, and human traffickers. In this light, it is clear to us that strategic development assistance is not charity — it is an essential, modern tool of U.S. national security. U.S. development efforts should be respected — and budgeted — as investments in stability enhancement. The severe cuts to the State Department and USAID that the Administration has proposed will make America less safe, and Congress should reject them.” https://www.one.org/us/stories/foreign-aid-generals-testimony-trump-budget/. Again, this was written in 2017, during Trump 1.0. What was true then is just as true today when US AID has been totally gutted.

5. The notion that the world can be cleanly carved into regional spheres of influence between the US, Russia and China, and that US minerals supplies will be safe as a result, overlooks the fact that China has made deep inroads into securing minerals for itself in South America and Africa through that country’s Belt and Road Initiative. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/china-influence-latin-america-argentina-brazil-venezuela-security-energy-bri; and https://www.stimson.org/2025/competing-for-africas-resources-how-the-us-and-china-invest-in-critical-minerals/. I don’t know what deal, if any, that Trump has in mind to prevent China’s foothold in both continents from growing stronger and/or to induce more American investments in these parts of the world, but China and its growing control over key assets, as well as its growing global influence in the wake of our withdrawal from the global scene, will not be “contained” by just handing it Taiwan. In other words, the contest for natural resources outside the regional spheres of influence of the Big Three, particular, does not spell the end of potential conflict between the big Three, China in particular.

6. Abandoning the promotion of democracy as a core goal of US foreign policy makes the world less safe. A cursory reading of world history underscores one key fact: democratic nations are much less likely to fight each other, or invade their neighbors, than authoritarian countries. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/why-they-dont-fight-doyle. That bit of historical wisdom now lies in the trash heap.

7. It’s amazing that 90 years after experiencing the depressive effect on not just the global economy but the US economy from the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the 1930s, the Administration is now in the process of committing the same mistakes through its erratic tariffs – not just on our adversaries like China, but in violation of regional or global trade deals we have with our former” friends, like Canada, Mexico, and the EU. I am not saying that the on-off-on-off Trump tariffs this time around, if they remain in any form, will cause a global depression – US economic momentum is too strong for that -- but the uncertainty alone that Trump’s tariff chaos has created will dampen growth, while the tariffs that do remain will both hurt growth and increase prices. Trump apologists, including his economic cabinet members, told us before they were nominated Trump would only use tariffs as a “negotiating tactic.” No, they were either sucking up to Trump then, or just flat out lying. These billionaires, they had to know better. Just read about everything Trump has said over his life about tariffs, and what he said during the campaign, and most recently his raving about tariffs in his March 4 Congressional address. Trump has always loved tariffs and isn’t bashful about reminding us. About the only good thing about Trump’s tariff policies is that it is helping to remind Americans (and Democrats in particular, who have made similar anti-trade noises, and some continue to do so) about the virtues of freer trade.

8. The abandonment of our allies abroad is not just roiling leaders of foreign governments. It’s offending citizens of foreign countries. Three months ago, it was inconceivable that Canadians would boo at the singing of our national anthem in Canadian sports venues. But now it’s standard at such events. For those Americans traveling to Europe this summer, good luck. You will find a much colder reception from ordinary Europeans. And I hate to say it, you may be attack targets of some abroad who are outraged about how the US is treating their countries.

I also want to add a word of caution to those of my fellow Jews who are rejoicing about Trump’s embrace of Netanyahu’s (and the Israeli right wing) agenda. Do not kid yourselves: Trump is only pro-Israel now for transactional reasons: because he sees Israel as a bulwark against Islamist terror and a potential enforcer of any threats to demolish Iran’s nuclear capabilities if Iran doesn’t make a deal with Trump to give up its nukes (and support for regional terror) in return for a lifting of sanctions. Trump is not pro-Israel because Israel is the sole democracy (less so if Netanyahu gets his way) in an autocratic neighborhood, the historic reason for the strong support the US historically has given Israel (though not always a blank check: Eisenhower restrained Israel’s joint attack, with Britain and France, in 1956 on Egypt after Egyptian President Nasser nationalized the British-French company that then owned the Suez Canal; Nixon and Kissinger had to persuade Israel not to destroy the Egyptian army after Israel finally was able to turn the tide in the 1973 Yom Kippur War). Also remember this: Trump is laser focused on either having access to natural resources or being in the good graces of those that do. In the middle east, that means one thing: at the end of the day, the Saudis really, really matter to Trump. Consider this: about the only thing Trump can do to offset the inflation-enhancing effects of his tariffs, and thus to able to claim that he has brought inflation down, is to persuade the Saudis to keep the price of oil low. Only the Saudis can make that happen. In short, if push comes to shove at some point on a matter of importance to the right wing, or even the majority of Israelis may want, American Jews and Israel cannot safely assume that Trump will always be in Israel’s corner. Netanyahu, or his successor, are always one decision away from getting the Zelensky treatment. Do not think that thought didn’t cross Bibi’s mind when watching that Oval Office disaster last week. (PS — shortly after I posted the original of this column, there were news reports that the Trump administration is now directly negotiating with Hamas, and Israel only learned this afterward. I didn’t realize how quickly what I had written above looks like it has already come true).

So, where does this leave the US in a post-Trump world – yes, one day, as hard it is to believe now, Donald Trump, or even his chosen successor will not be President of the US (even if US no longer is a democratic country, another subject for another day: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/donald-trump-congress-address/681924/.) The honest answer: I don’t know, and frankly, I don’t think anyone else does or can know with any degree of certainty. As Trump bragged in his March 4 address, he’s only six weeks into his second administration, and he’s just “getting started.” It’s going to be a long four years.

The world is likely to be a dramatically different place in 2028, or even by the end of this year! By analogy, who in March 1941, when FDR was inaugurated for his third term, could have expected not only that the US would be brought into WWII before the end of that year, but that the US would win that global war and have a new President only a month after FDR would be inaugurated again four years later (and dead shortly after that)? And that the end of WWII would mark the beginning of the 80-reign of a quasi-rules based order outside the Soviet Union?

Today, we know for certain that that 80-year reign has come to an end. We are in a new, amoral might-make-right world being carved up by three men, a state of affairs that either will develop into a new quasi-permanence, or the beginning of a transition to something else, which almost surely will be unrecognizable to the world my generation grew up in.

We also know that with old order shattered in pieces, like Humpty Dumpty, even Democratic successors to Trump or his successor (again, assuming democracy will be there to allow it) cannot put the old order back together again. Our former allies won’t trust us, and why should they? It’s ironic, isn’t it? One of the major themes of the Harris campaign was that “We’re not going back.” Little could she know that she was right, but not in the way she envisioned. Given what’s happened in the last six weeks, we can’t go back. But we still don’t know where we’re headed, except that for now, we certainly are not as safe as we were 6 weeks ago.