There should be nothing surprising about what Donald Trump has done in his first week—but he has underestimated the resilience of Americans and their institutions.
ELIOT A. COHEN The Atlantic January 29, 2017
I am not surprised by President Donald Trump’s antics this week. Not by the big splashy pronouncements such as announcing a wall that he would force Mexico to pay for, even as the Mexican foreign minister held talks with American officials in Washington. Not by the quiet, but no less dangerous bureaucratic orders, such as kicking the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff out of meetings of the Principals’ Committee, the senior foreign-policy decision-making group below the president, while inserting his chief ideologist, Steve Bannon, into them. Many conservative foreign-policy and national-security experts saw the dangers last spring and summer, which is why we signed letters denouncing not Trump’s policies but his temperament; not his program but his character.
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The question is, what should Americans do about it? To friends still thinking of serving as political appointees in this administration, beware: When you sell your soul to the Devil, he prefers to collect his purchase on the installment plan. Trump’s disregard for either Secretary of Defense Mattis or Secretary-designate Tillerson in his disastrous policy salvos this week, in favor of his White House advisers, tells you all you need to know about who is really in charge. To be associated with these people is going to be, for all but the strongest characters, an exercise in moral self-destruction.
For the community of conservative thinkers and experts, and more importantly, conservative politicians, this is a testing time. Either you stand up for your principles and for what you know is decent behavior, or you go down, if not now, then years from now, as a coward or opportunist. Your reputation will never recover, nor should it.
Some Americans can fight abuses of power and disastrous policies directly—in courts, in congressional offices, in the press. But all can dedicate themselves to restoring the qualities upon which this republic, like all republics depends: on reverence for the truth; on a sober patriotism grounded in duty, moderation, respect for law, commitment to tradition, knowledge of our history, and open-mindedness. These are all the opposites of the qualities exhibited by this president and his advisers. Trump, in one spectacular week, has already shown himself one of the worst of our presidents, who has no regard for the truth (indeed a contempt for it), whose patriotism is a belligerent nationalism, whose prior public service lay in avoiding both the draft and taxes, who does not know the Constitution, does not read and therefore does not understand our history, and who, at his moment of greatest success, obsesses about approval ratings, how many people listened to him on the Mall, and enemies.
In the end, however, he will fail. He will fail because however shrewd his tactics are, his strategy is terrible—The New York Times, the CIA, Mexican Americans, and all the others he has attacked are not going away. With every act he makes new enemies for himself and strengthens their commitment; he has his followers, but he gains no new friends. He will fail because he cannot corrupt the courts, and because even the most timid senator sooner or later will say “enough.” He will fail most of all because at the end of the day most Americans, including most of those who voted for him, are decent people who have no desire to live in an American version of Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, or Viktor Orban’s Hungary, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
There was nothing unanticipated in this first disturbing week of the Trump administration. It will not get better. Americans should therefore steel themselves, and hold their representatives to account. Those in a position to take a stand should do so, and those who are not should lay the groundwork for a better day. There is nothing great about the America that Trump thinks he is going to make; but in the end, it is the greatness of America that will stop him.
Eliot Asher Cohen is a leading scholar of international affairs. He was a counselor in the United States Department of State under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009. Cohen is the Director of the Strategic Studies Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University. He is a specialist in the Middle East, Persian Gulf, Iraq, arms control, and NATO.
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Cohen and his PNAC group of neocon warhawks are not just any “conservatives” and he isn’t just someone with a “shady political past.” Cohen does write eloquently but he was and is one of the top war propagandists in the country. I agree with Todd Pierce’s descripton below:
“With all respect, Cohen is a propagandist and has been since the earliest days of PNAC and he and his fellows task has always been and continues with its principals to conduct a PsyOp operation on the American people to continuously condition them for more war: their part in “gray zone war:” http://www.fpri.org/article/2016/02/paradoxes-gray-zone
Quoting him gives him added legitimacy, in my opinion, so that he and his fellow radical-rightists can be more successful with these types of operations calling for ever more military spending, as these links show:.
They don’t even pretend anymore that this has anything to do with “defense.” Instead, it is “Extending American Power.”
https://s3.amazonaws.com/files.cnas.org/documents/CNASReport-EAP-FINAL-1.pdf
And promoted by this organization, the direct lineal descendant of PNAC:
http://www.foreignpolicyi.org/content/fpis-robert-kagan-and-eric-edelman-sign-cnas-report-extending-american-power
That requires the US to “choose to lead,” so they have that covered as well:
http://www.choosingtolead.net/about-jhi/
The theory of PsyOPs is that you constantly work to enhance the credibility of the propagandist and Cohen is reaping a windfall with Trump even though they’re both pursuing the same goal; extreme militarism.”
To say someone has a shady past is a way of saying someone has a criminal past, or a past skirting criminal activity for which he has not been actually convicted of a crime. In this case a crime of propaganda for war, which is, a course, a matter of interpretation, but that’s why I used shady instead of criminal The articles linked in Coleen’s comment are worth looking at. Posting Cohen’s article has created a good and educational dialog, which I like on Rise Up Times.
There are those who have responded to me that think this article is a sham, an attempt to manipulate people on the left. I do not interpret it that way. I think the author, in spite of his shady political past, believes what he says. And it is a warning to other conservatives that being in line with Trump is not a principled or politically wise move. It is not directed to the radical left, who are not about to change their beliefs or their resistance to Trump, but to his fellow conservatives and perhaps to neoliberals, Democrats who want to jump on the Trump bandwagon.
Cohen’s article also shows that not all Republicans and conservatives, or even neocons, support Trump because they recognize what is outlined in the next article published on Rise Up Times outlining a coup, turning what Cohen calls a republic and others call a democracy (a complex topic in itself) into a totalitarian government. This article is about power and who has power, And what they do with that power.
As an antiwar activist for 33-odd years I can hardly agree with Cohen’s militarism and neo-con values. Nor are my readers likely to. Is Cohen a sociopath? Probably not. Trump is.
Sue Ann Martinson, Editor, Rise Up Times