No Going Back, Part 1
By re-electing Trump, the United States has irreversibly abandoned the post-WWII vision of justice between nations
This essay explores themes in Politics. For essays on other topics such as Philosophy, Art & Culture, Theology, or Plato, please see the topical archive at Plato For The Masses.
We begin with excerpts from speeches given by Dwight D. Eisenhower before, during, and after his presidency. My reason for sharing these excerpts—many of them little known—is that I worry we have forgotten what a President with integrity sounds like. My aim is to make the contrast with our current president as sharp as possible to set the table for my larger argument that the time for half-measures to the threat Donald Trump poses to both the United States and the international rule of law is over.
In January 1946, General Dwight Eisenhower traveled to eastern Canada to express his gratitude for Canadian support during the war effort. He gave a speech in Ottawa on January 10th and another at the University of Toronto on January 12th. In these speeches, Eisenhower was at pains to express his genuine gratitude for the sacrifice made by the Canadian military.
“No man could command a force in which your Canadians were included without feelings of deep humility and lasting pride. Because I had that privilege, those men were, for many months, my Canadians, too, and no one can take from me the place they hold in my affection and admiration.”
Their mutual collaboration in WWII, Ike suggested, reflects an organic friendship between Canada and the United States that should serve as a beacon on a hill for international relations. In 1939, Canada—still recognizing the British throne as its liege—declared war against Germany, and when the tide of war crippled England, Canada turned to the United States for industrial support, weapons replenishment, naval craft, and troop personnel. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Canada did the same for the United States, coming to our aid.
Such history of mutual aid inspired General Eisenhower to offer a remarkable and hopeful prediction for the future,
“Throughout this war, our two nations have been drawn together in planning and producing for a common cause. It has been a cooperation which seemed as natural as it was inevitable. Our nations are such good friends that we take neighborly collaboration as a matter of course. During the two years when you were at war and we were not, some twelve thousand American citizens crossed your border to enter the armed forces of your country. After the [Japanese] attacked us and the European Axis declared war, 26,000 individuals of Canadian birth entered our own armed forces. These reciprocal acts seem to me spontaneous evidence of the friendship that must forever exist between our two people.” (Emphasis added)
It’s somewhat astonishing to recall these words—spoken a mere 80 years ago—in the wake of the deteriorated relationship with Canada that has emerged in the second Trump Presidency. Eisenhower was more than right that the relationship of peace and mutual flourishing between the U.S. and Canada should be preserved in perpetuity. Without justification or provocation, out of nothing more than vanity and spite, Donald Trump has unilaterally poisoned this relationship. Canada has closed its trade borders and now views the United States as a threat to the well-being of its people, evinced in their most recent election results. When compared to the patriotism and universal fellow-feeling exemplified in one of our greatest Presidents and a Republican, Trump’s behavior is manifestly anti-Republican, anti-American, and anti-Canadian.
Compare our current trade war with Canada to Eisenhower’s description of free trade during WWII,
“The allied victory in Europe stands as a monument to teamwork and to the results of practical understanding between nations. Nowhere was that teamwork more effective than here in our two homelands. Even customs duties were relaxed and the freest exchange of personnel, materiel and all types of commodities was permitted across the international border.”
Eisenhower did not dwell on U.S.–Canadian cooperation merely for its own sake. He viewed that relationship as a model for the then nascent United Nations. General Eisenhower had just finished fighting a catastrophic global war, and he was among the most vocal world leaders interested in creating institutions that could make possible the abolition of the two great evils in human life: war and poverty. He saw the United Nations as a first and necessary step towards that dual end. Eisenhower declared,
“[T]he victors [in WWII] have set themselves a new and even greater task – to work out a formula and a practical procedure intended to smooth international frictions to find a way to banish war forever from the world. . . . Nations that joined together to defeat ruthless enemies have even greater reason to remain united for the peaceful settlement of their differences lest new Hitlers rise to throw the world into a chaos more awful than the shattered countries of Europe present today.” (Emphasis added)
Some readers may view such aspirations for world peace as ‘pie-in-the-sky,’ an unrealistic and naive ambition represented in the scriptural icon outside the United Nations headquarters which quotes Isaiah 2.4, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn war any more.”
The brilliance of Eisenhower’s advocacy for the experiment of a United Nations was his insistence that we’ve already accomplished this peace between some nations; namely, between the United States and Canada. It isn’t as if the characteristics that divide humans and cause us to war with each other have somehow been absent from Americans and Canadians! Yet we’ve found a way to construct together a true peace and friendship. Ike put this argument forcefully,
“The peoples of the United States and Canada are imbued, respectively, with the same fierce and justifiable pride in their independence and national pursuits as are other countries of the world. We have many of the same potential causes of serious difference as do others, involving divergent interests in political, economic, and social fields. Yet, such is the relationship between these two truly good neighbors that neither is compelled to provide in its plans and in its expenditures for physical defense against the other. Each of us has an abiding faith that those 3,000 miles of common border measure as secure a boundary as the world has known, defended as it is by mutual friendship, mightier than guns, tanks, airplanes – more powerful even than the atomic bomb.”
Eisenhower believed that the special friendship between the U.S. and Canada demonstrated the possibility of a world without national budgets allocating defense against one’s border neighbors (as is necessary in Ukraine, Pakistan, India, South Korea, Bolivia, Israel, and elsewhere). But he wasn’t naive about the difficulty of achieving such widespread peace, especially not after having just fought a bloody war for three long years on multiple continents.
Eisenhower spoke soberly about the challenge of echoing Canadian–American friendship throughout the nations of the earth,
“Our two nations have lived as peaceful neighbors so long that in our own relationships we have totally forgotten the meaning of fears and lusts for conquest that bred the war from which we have just emerged. The ripeness of our friendship is apparent for all to see in a border which marks separate sovereignty, but binds together rather than divides. The secret is nothing other than mutual understanding and respect. We must not over-simplify the problem.
“We must not delude ourselves into believing that all nations will easily achieve this broad result or that nothing more is demanded than verbal adherence to beautiful generality. But it can be achieved if every nation realizes that its very survival may depend on its earnest cooperation in the peaceful settlement of disputes. All must learn that in cooperation there is giving as well as receiving. The one that eternally gives and does not receive will eventually exhaust itself. In the contrary case the recipient becomes nothing but the object of another's bounty. To cooperate we must give and take in a spirit of mutual, sympathetic understanding. Our two countries have long done it – the United Nations did it in war. The practice must continue and must become universal. When that is done the fortifications that bristle along borders throughout the world will speedily come tumbling down and from the hearts of populations will be lifted age-old burdens of fear.”
Where Eisenhower called for negotiations of give and take to prevent any nation from becoming the hostage or vassal of another, Donald Trump has instigated a trade war with nearly every nation on the globe (everyone except Russia!) precisely for the purpose of strong-arming other nations to become vassals of the United States. Trump wants to force nations with smaller economies and militaries to capitulate to his demand for America-first trade agreements and security pledges. In other words, Trump wants to make America a nation that takes more than it gives.
Trump’s lackey J. D. Vance has been praising Trump’s approach by arguing that we should take more than we give. According to Vance, other nations have been taking advantage of the United States because they rely more on us for reserve currency, favorable trade agreements, and military security. I guess the supposedly Roman Catholic Vance does not follow Jesus’ teaching, “It is better to give than to receive” (Acts 20.35).
Eisenhower closed his message for his Canadian audiences with bold idealism,
“We [veterans of war] have seen the ugliness, the suffering, the terrible cost of war. There is no legitimate road toward the goal of permanent peace that we will not attempt to travel. Our civilization has reached a brink from which the prospect—if we turn not into sure paths of peace—is a thousand times more terrifying than anything yet witnessed. So, applying some of the maxims of the soldier, I urge that we do not delay – that we do not complacently assume the absence of mortal danger – that we marshal our forces into one mighty effort – that we have the patience to endure inevitable setbacks – that we keep our eyes on the final objective and strive unceasingly toward its attainment.”
This is a beautiful commitment to a Platonic idealism from a future head-of-state. Plato laid the groundwork for Ike’s vision of a better future, writing his in Laws, “The greatest good, however, is neither war nor civil war (God forbid we should ever need to resort to either of them), but peace and goodwill among men. . . . [Therefore] a genuine lawgiver designs his legislation about war as a tool for peace, rather than his legislation for peace as an instrument of war” (628de, emphasis in the original). Eisenhower reiterated his commitment to a world without war in his first inaugural address as President in 1953: “Abhorring war as a chosen way to balk the purposes of those who threaten us, we hold it to be the first task of statesmanship to develop the strength that will deter the forces of aggression and promote the conditions of peace.”
General Eisenhower commanded the allied forces in Europe to achieve total surrender from Germany and its European puppet governments. As President, Eisenhower oversaw the armistice between North and South Korea and stood up to Russian totalitarianism in the Soviet Union. He conducted himself with an integrity that recognized that the office of the Presidency is something greater than himself. To be a good President requires taking up an awesome responsibility and conducting it with an abiding humility.
Donald Trump is a draft dodger who used his father’s wealth and social status to fraudulently avoid the draft in 1968. Trump has never served his nation; he spent his career working to enrich himself, though his record of bankrupting businesses and lying about his net worth suggests he was never very good at it. Far from standing up to Russian aggression, Trump has only emboldened Putin. Trump has objectified women, defrauded students, created a reality tv show that valorized an authoritarian ‘boss man’ firing employees, and still has never released his tax returns to the public.
Dwight Eisenhower submitted his candidacy for the Presidency only after years of Democrats and Republicans alike courting him for the highest office. Ike had no personal ambition to become President. He finally accepted the nomination to be the Republican candidate when he felt he had a duty to serve his nation, not himself, by taking up the Presidency to help the U.S. chart a path in the post-war era.
Donald Trump returned to the Presidency for one reason only: to avoid his responsibility in the events of January 6th, 2021 and place himself above the law by weaponizing the Justice Department to dismiss investigations against himself and instead direct their energies against his political enemies.
None of his actions since taking office have been in the service of the nation. He has done little more than alienate our allies, dismantle free trade, crash the stock market, deport people without due process, and gut the entirety of the Executive branch to render it subservient and impotent. It wasn’t enough for him to castrate the agencies that investigate him and Elon Musk for illegal business practices; he has also fired government employees from nearly every department in the executive branch. More than 100,000 federal employees have been or are being targeted for non-cause termination.
Perhaps the best summary of the ignominy of Trump’s second Presidency comes fromThe Office’s Michael Scott, played by Steve Carell. During a bit from the very first season of the American show circa 2005 where Scott agonizes over being required to fire an employee due to downsizing, Scott monologues,
“I think the main difference between me [Michael Scott] and Donald Trump is that I get no pleasure out of saying the words, ‘You're fired!’ He just makes people sad, and an office can't function that way, no way. . . .”
Neither can a government nor a nation function that way. Donald Trump has spent his entire life—in his business ventures, in his reality tv show, and now in his stint as President—reveling in the power to take jobs away from hard-working Americans. It’s disgusting and abhorrent – we should be ashamed that we have allowed this man and his brand to fester in our collective cultural consciousness for more than five decades (here’s looking at you late night hosts who lapped up his vulgar posturing and helped to sell his brand to middle-class America).
Perhaps the greatest difference between Eisenhower and Trump lies in how they approach the responsibility of being a leader. For five-star General Eisenhower, leadership is about empowering those you serve, not about lording authority and domination over them. Edgar F. Puryear Jr., a lawyer and political scientist at Georgetown University, wrote a book on the centrality of integrity and wise leadership in the military. The book was based on research and years of personal interviews with American military commanders. After his presidency, retired General Eisenhower had several sit-down interviews with Puryear. During one of their interviews on 02 May 1963, Eisenhower shared with Puryear what might be my favorite Ike quote,
“Character in many ways is everything in leadership. It is made up of many things, but I would say character is really integrity. When you delegate something to a subordinate, for example, it is absolutely your responsibility, and he must understand this. You as a leader must take complete responsibility for what the subordinate does. I once said, as a sort of wisecrack, that leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.” (Qtd. in Edgar F. Puryear Jr., Nineteen Stars: A study in military character and leadership. Washington DC: Coiner Publications, 1971, p. 289; emphasis added)
You’re a good leader if you give the credit to others and only accept the blame for yourself. It’s more than fair to describe Donald Trump’s whole life as upholding the opposite principle. In his stint as a President, Trump has never once uttered the words, “It’s my fault and I take full responsibility.” Not once! Whenever something goes wrong, he blames someone else. After crashing the United States economy with his tariffs, Trump unsurprisingly received a devastating report that the American economy is shrinking. His assessment? It’s Biden’s fault; we’re still suffering under Biden’s policies. Had the report been positive, Trump would have taken all the credit, as he did in his first term when he took credit for the surging economy before he’d even taken office. Apparently that wasn’t a function of Obama’s policies! Everything with him is ‘heads I win, tails you lose.’
Trump never takes responsibility for anything bad, and he wants his sycophants to adulate and fawn over him for anything good, real or imagined. That is the opposite of Eisenhower’s description of a true leader. Trump is a fraud, a felon, a fool, a philanderer, a feckless administrator, and a fissiparous inveterate liar who has not said one true thing to the nation since re-taking office. It is unconscionable that he remains atop the Executive branch and he must be removed with all haste possible.
I.
In my last essay, I made the argument that it is reasonable for the nations of the world to form a coalition to remove an unjust head-of-state from leadership in a nation. Since we the American people are unwilling to correct our error, they must correct it for us. When a leader becomes odious to the welfare of international neighbors both near and far, nations are under no obligation to respect our process for selecting leaders.
A few readers privately expressed some shock at my suggestion that the nations of the free world should form a coalition against the United States for the purpose of deposing Donald Trump from office. In response, it’s worth taking a moment to have some self-awareness about the history of the United States in doing this very thing: disapproving of other heads-of-state and conspiring to have them removed and replaced with a leader more favorable to our interests. Let’s run through some examples.
My admiration for President Eisenhower is evident, so honesty requires that I start with a conspiracy by Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to overthrow Guatemalan President Juan José Arévalo in 1954. Cold war fears were at a fevered pitch, and Arévalo’s tendency to promote social welfare policies led Eisenhower’s administration to mistakenly suspect Arévalo of being a communist sympathizer and thus vulnerable to takeover by a Soviet Union looking to build a presence in Central and South America. Dulles had business interests in Guatemala in the form of shares in the United Fruit Company which had been using cheap labor in Guatemalan fruit groves. Arévalo had been increasing labor protections, hurting the United Fruit Company’s profit margin. They heavily lobbied Dulles to get Eisenhower to sign off on a CIA plot to overthrow Arévalo that had been originally drafted by the Truman administration in 1952.
Eisenhower did so, and in June 1954 a guerilla force led by Carlos Castillo Armas invaded Guatemala funded, armed, and trained entirely by the CIA. The civil war was bloody, but Armas eventually prevailed and established a military dictatorship in Guatemala that not only rolled back social reforms in the nation but also created instability that would cause the Guatemalan people to suffer frequent civil war for decades afterwards.
I greatly admire Eisenhower and his presidency. There is no question that the Soviet Union distorted nearly all U.S. foreign policy judgments during that time. Even so, the plot to depose Arévalo was entirely about international U.S. strategy and did not appropriately take into consideration what was in the best interests of the Guatemalan peoples.
In 1964, the CIA secretly funded a variety of political organizations with the aim to prop up the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) party in Bolivia, hoping to divide communist factions and to win a pro-U.S. stance from the MNR if they won the election. They did win, but within a few months Vice-President René Barrientos led a military coup against the MNR and established a military dictatorship. What did the United States do? We began funding his government and running propaganda interference in exchange for his support of the U.S. In the Bolivian election of 1966, CIA interference helped Barrientos become President.
President Kennedy loved this kind of stuff. In 1962, he supported a plan to spend millions of dollars to swing the next Brazilian election away from President João Goulart. When Goulart ended up winning the election anyway, the CIA backed a coup in 1964 to topple Goulart that subjected Brazil to a military dictatorship for the next two decades.
When the run up to the 2004 election in El Salvador suggested a likely victory by the far-left Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) party, the Bush administration threatened to end all trade agreements with El Salvador if they won. Bush used the threat of damaged relations with the United States to sway the election in favor of the Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA).
U.S. interventions in the nations of Iraq and Iran are an incredibly sordid affair, with America backing and opposing leaders in both countries throughout the past 70 years. In the early 1970's, Iraq’s then Vice-President Saddam Hussein sought to normalize trade and military relations with the Soviet Union. This led the United States to secretly back Kurdish rebels against the Iraqi government. The Kurds were defeated in 1975, which led to decades of Kurdish oppression.
Meanwhile, the United States had propped up the Imperial State of Iran, financing and arming the Shah for nearly three decades. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 overthrew the Shah in favor of a Muslim religious state led by the Ayatollahs. At nearly the same time, Saddam Hussein would become President of Iraq. He immediately felt threatened by the religious extremism of the Islamic Revolution, having a more secular government in Iraq. The United States found itself suddenly switching sides. With the loss of the U.S.-backed leader in Iran, the Americans decided to heavily fund and arm the Iraqi military in a war against Iran, hopeful that toppling the Ayatollahs would lead to a more Western-friendly regime.
(None of this is to even bring up the Iran-Contra scandal, in which President Reagan tried to illegally swap weapons for American hostages with Iran and Lebanon in order to finance a CIA-backed rebel group attempting to overthrow the Nicaraguan government.)
After Iraq and Iran finally reached a peace agreement in 1988 following years of a high casualty war of attrition, Saddam Hussein still enjoyed strong U.S. support. However, after the war, Iraq had accumulated an enormous war debt, and one of its biggest debt holders was the nation of Kuwait. When the Kuwaiti government refused to forgive Iraq its more than $50 billion of war debt, tensions escalated between the former allies, resulting in the sudden annexation of Kuwait by Hussein in 1991. Once again, the United States switched sides, formed an international coalition, and liberated Kuwait.
Twelve years later, the son of the President who liberated Kuwait would invade Iraq proper and topple Saddam Hussein in a bid to democratize Iraq and install a more pro-American government. This came on the heels of similar actions in Afghanistan, where the Taliban was replaced with a pro-American government. Both nations became U.S. military protectorates: Iraq from 2003 until 2011, and Afghanistan from 2001 until 2021. Both protectorates were supported by multinational coalitions, though infamously the overthrow of the Iraq regime was not supported by the United Nations.
Our most noble example of altering the leadership of another nation was the transformation of Japan from an empire to a democracy under the military dictatorship of General MacArthur in the aftermath of the Japanese surrender in 1945. From 1945-1952, Japan rebuilt under the watchful eye of its American military leaders. Not only did this end Japan’s expansionist ambitions, it also produced one of the most stable nations and allies in the developed world. Since 1945, Japan has never launched military aggression against another nation, although controversially some Japanese forces were sent to help with the rebuilding of Iraq during its U.S. occupation. That was mostly under pressure from the U.S. government, whose own military was under extraordinary strain to maintain necessary troop levels. Japan had forces in Iraq from 2004 to 2006, and they were only permitted to engage in humanitarian and peacekeeping efforts, not military offensives. I was deployed to Iraq during that time and got to met some of them.
There have been other instances of U.S. involvement in regime changes, but the point is that in the post-war global order, the United States (along with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China) has presumed that we can have an influence, even a decisive one, on the regimes of other nations. Yet we seem to think that no nation should be able to interfere with our choices in leaders, however bad. This kind of blatant double standard is unacceptable. Just as we have, rightly or wrongly, been more than willing to alter the leadership of nations when we have opposed their regimes, other nations of the world should be able to oppose our regimes. Ousting Donald Trump is a far more justifiable goal than most of the examples I provided. The status quo in which the United States and one or two other superpowers get to play by a different set of rules must end.
II.
Free nations of the world must unite to form a coalition to block the unjust and unprovoked belligerence of the Trump administration and put maximal pressure on the United States to permanently banish Donald Trump, the Trump family, J. D. Vance, and their associated allies from power.
In my previous essay on the multinational effort to depose Napoleon Bonaparte, the obvious asymmetry between that situation and our contemporary crisis is that despite Bonaparte’s military brilliance and the strength of the French army, there was still a reasonable parity in effectiveness between the British-Euroasian allies versus the French. World empires at that time were comparable in their economic and military strength.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States became the unequaled world military superpower. Although rumors say that the Chinese military buildup of the past five years has brought China to within parity of U.S. military strength, China is not a reasonable ally for free nations to turn to in order to build a multinational coalition to invade the United States landmass and remove Trump by force.
Not only do we still have one of the largest and most well-armed militaries on earth, the United States also has unique geographical advantages that make a land invasion an extremely difficult prospect. Unlike European and African countries, we control everything from our western to our eastern seaboards, requiring long distance sea assaults by anyone who would try to invade the United States. Given that we have the most powerful navy on earth, that's not feasible. We only have two nations that share a border or even the continent with us, and both nations are vastly inferior in military strength. Canada and Mexico would collapse within days if they faced a bombing campaign from the United States. Neither nation has ever had the need to build significant modern defenses, living as they have within our protective shadow.
The nations of the world have been foolish in allowing the United States to persist for more than three decades as a nearly singular military presence in the world. Our goodwill has been a necessary presumption, and assuming it allowed the rest of the free world to put off facing the question of what could be done in the event the United States becomes an outright bad faith actor. Unfortunately, that question can be ignored no longer.
There are at least four existential crises that the United Nations of the world face collectively. All will begin to affect every nations within the next five years.
Environmental collapse due to ongoing planetary devastation and unbridled industrial production and consumption.
The rise of autonomous artificial intelligence. AI presents an entirely new regulatory challenge that, as an online technology, cannot be adequately regulated by one nation alone. AI regulation will require an international clarity and resolve to avoid species-ending uses of the technology.
The collapse of the international rule of law back into a series of balkanized trade and military alliances, thereby ending Eisenhower’s dream of a United Nations capable of abolishing war and poverty.
Wealth inequality. The disparity between the richest Americans and the poorest, between the wealthiest nations and countries like Lesotho (where the majority of its two million inhabitants still subsist by exporting non-industrialized agricultural products), and between those who control land and those who rent it has reached nearly unbridgeable proportions. We are facing a future of permanent class hierarchy, where the technological and material superiority of the ruling classes will be insurmountable by the less fortunate. There will be no pitchforks capable of sustaining a peasant revolt against technofeudalists with nanobot armies.
To elaborate on just one of these existential crises, for several decades our best researchers on the earth’s climate have warned that if the world’s most developed nations do not engage in sustained coordination to mitigate anthropogenic effects on our planet’s weather, water, and ecology, we are in danger of destabilizing our planet irreversibly. The deadline they often give is 2030 – a mere five years away. The time for action was yesterday, and we cannot afford to waste more time while we wait for a presidential election four years away. Even if Trump is replaced in 2029, there simply will not be enough time by then to lead a global effort, especially if over the previous four years the collaborative relationships between nations have all been eroded by Trump’s extortionist and punitive behavior.
Michael Mann, a climate physicist at UPenn, recently commented on Trump’s renewed withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement,
“The real problem here is that this sort of sends a signal to the rest of the world that the United States isn't willing to honor its commitments. We're the world's largest legacy carbon polluter. We've put more carbon pollution into the atmosphere than any other country, and that's all the climate cares about. It cares about the cumulative carbon emissions. Over time, we've contributed more to the warming of the planet than any other country.”
The reality is that ordinary democratic processes of regime change are no longer properly aligned with the urgency of the global problems facing the human species. The problem of democracy is precisely that it leaves the people of a nation free to irrationally reverse course on the nation’s commitments, making sustained, decades-long coordination between nations difficult. It may very well be that it is the inability of democracies to commit to objective ideals that transcend the preferences of the masses that ends up killing us.
So, the world must act. A coalition of nations must be formed to end Trump’s tyrannical rule without delay. Given that a forced removal of Trump by military means is not practically feasible, what can be done?
You can read No Going Back, Part 2 here.