A big problem with President Donald Trump’s perpetual incitements — an unhinged TV speech, a dinner with a neo-Nazi white supremacist, the demolition of a section of the White House — is that they distract from the more serious actions of his government that are a far greater danger to the country.
A prime example is the administration’s recently published National Security Strategy. Anne Applebaum explores the document in detail in a Dec. 16 article in The Atlantic, but it can be summarized this way: Russia and China are no longer named as adversaries whose cyberattacks, hacking, election interference and other overt aggressions need to be countered or even fended off; America’s real antagonists are the liberal democracies of Europe.
The so-called new strategy, Applebaum writes, amounts to a “suicide note.”
“If the ideas within it are really used to shape policy, then U.S. influence in the world will rapidly disappear, and America’s ability to defend itself and its allies will diminish,” Applebaum says. “The consequences will be economic as well as political, and they will be felt by all Americans.”
The strategy is the work of administration officials who are steeped in the quackery and bizarre beliefs of the ultraright. It reflects an affinity for the regressive cultural views of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and a disdain for Europeans whose tolerant societies and strong welfare programs are too similar to the aspirations of MAGA’s detested liberal adversaries here at home.
“The authors of this document don’t know much about Europe, or don’t care to find out,” Applebaum says. “Living in a fantasy world, they are blind to real dangers. They invent fictional threats. Their information comes from conspiracist websites and random accounts on X, and if they use these fictions to run policy, then all kinds of disasters could await us. Will our military really stop working with allies with whom we have cooperated for decades? Will the FBI stop looking for Russian and Chinese spies?”
Trump’s shenanigans distract us from paying attention to these crucial questions.
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