By Max Boot, Columnist, June 10, 2018<\/p>\n
Shortly after Donald Trump won<\/a> the South Carolina primary in February 2016, I warned in an article<\/a> co-written with economist Benn Steil that \u201ca Trump presidency threatens the post-World War II liberal international order that American presidents of both parties have so laboriously built up \u2014 an order based on free trade and alliances with other democracies. His policies would not make America \u2018great.\u2019 Just the opposite. A Trump presidency would represent the death knell of America as a great power.\u201d<\/p>\n Such warnings might have sounded hyperbolic at the time. Who, after all, knew whether Trump would make good on his threats? Even in year one of the Trump era, it would have been possible to dismiss our dire prediction. Trump did not, after all, pull U.S. troops out of allied countries, exit NATO or lift sanctions on Russia. He still hasn\u2019t done any of those things, but, hey, he\u2019s only been in office a little more than 500 days. Give him time. In just the past few weeks, he has taken a giant step toward destroying the global system that the United States created after 1945.<\/p>\n Trump has now exited three major treaties \u2014 the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear accord \u2014 and thrown into doubt the future of another \u2014 the North American Free Trade Agreement \u2014 while launching a reckless trade war against our closest allies. At the Group of Seven summit, Trump continued to push his irrational id\u00e9e fixe that the United States \u2014 the richest nation in the world \u2014 has been victimized by its friends. \u201cWe\u2019re like the piggy bank that everybody is robbing,\u201d Trump seethed<\/a>. \u201cAnd that ends.\u201d<\/p>\n The president\u2019s outbursts turned the summit into the G-6 vs. G-1. The mood was captured in an already iconic photograph<\/a> showing Trump sitting, his arms crossed in a defensive posture, while German Chancellor Angela Merkel, surrounded by the other leaders, leans across the table at him. Trump looks like a defendant who has just been found guilty by a jury of his peers.<\/p>\n After the meeting, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did not mince words, calling the U.S. tariffs \u201cinsulting\u201d and saying<\/a>: \u201cCanadians, we\u2019re polite, we\u2019re reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around.\u201d The G-7 ended in unprecedented nastiness with Trump, who had left early, blasting Trudeau as \u201cvery dishonest & weak<\/a>\u201d and instructing his representatives not to sign the joint communique.<\/p>\n On Sunday, Trump\u2019s aides piled on, with Larry Kudlow accusing<\/a>Trudeau of a \u201cbetrayal\u201d and Peter Navarro saying<\/a> there\u2019s a \u201cspecial place in hell\u201d for the Canadian prime minister. No U.S. officials have ever spoken this way about any U.S. ally, ever. These are the kind of words that normally precede military action.<\/p>\n Trump seems amazed to discover that the European Union (gross domestic product: $17.1 trillion<\/a>), Japan ($4.8 trillion<\/a>) and Canada ($1.6 trillion<\/a>) \u2014 which together produce more than the United States ($19.3 trillion<\/a>) \u2014 will not be pushed around as easily as the contractors he has gotten used to stiffing.<\/p>\n Trump may well have been looking for a friendly face at such frosty gatherings when he suggested that the G-7 should add Russia. This was a bizarre suggestion, given that Russia is not only an international outlaw but also an economic pygmy whose GDP does not even rank in the top 10. If the G-7 were to expand, it should include India and Brazil, both democracies that have larger economies<\/a> than Russia\u2019s. Russia was rightly kicked out of the G-8 because of its invasion of Ukraine \u2014 an act of aggression for which Trump perversely blames<\/a> President Barack Obama \u2014 and it has done nothing since 2014 to deserve re-admittance. Instead, its meddling in U.S. elections its and war crimes in Syria demand more punishment.<\/p>\n Trump prefaced his call for Russia\u2019s inclusion by saying<\/a>, \u201cNow, I love our country\u201d \u2014 not something that presidents normally feel compelled to declare. But it is hardly surprising if Trump\u2019s mystifying favoritism toward Vladimir Putin raises questions of where exactly his loyalties lie. By creating such a deep rift between the United States and its NATO allies, Trump is doing precisely what Putin hoped would happen when he helped Trump get elected.<\/p>\n The Russian dictator can barely conceal his glee, and he is moving<\/a>to fill the opening that the president has created. A new poll<\/a> finds that only 14 percent of Germans consider the United States a reliable partner, compared with 36 percent for Russia and 43 percent for China. That the citizens of one of America\u2019s staunchest and most important allies now look more favorably upon our illiberal foes is a testament to Trump\u2019s unrivaled wrecking abilities.<\/p>\n There have been transatlantic spats before, of course, from the Suez Crisis in 1956 to the Vietnam War in the 1960s, the Pershing II missiles in the 1980s and the Iraq War in the 2000s. But none of those disputes called into question the fundamental unity of the West in the way that Trump\u2019s stupid and self-destructive actions do. The Atlantic alliance was born in Canada in 1941<\/a> and may well have died there in 2018.<\/p>\n