Bret Stephens—The New York Times:
America First is America Feared. But it is also America hated, and hated with justification. Where’s the upside in that? For Trump, the upside is the substitution of a liberal order with an illiberal one, based on conceits about sovereignty, nationality, religion and ethnicity. These are the same conceits that Vladimir Putin has long made his own
…
This will suit Americans for whom the idea of a free world always seemed like a distant abstraction. It will suit Europeans whose anti-Americanism predates Trump’s arrival by decades. And it will especially suit Putin, who knows that an America that stands for its own interests first also stands, and falls, alone. Surely the dead at Colleville-sur-Mer fought for something greater than that.
The sad fact is that our president does not know, nor does he care about political or even moral norms of behavior. Whatever Donald Trump is or represents, it sure as hell isn’t decency, American leadership, or the Christianity his evangelical followers profess.
#Trump #AmericaAdrift #worldPolitics
A Random Stroll 