America is at its weakest since the Civil War
The United States had built the strongest alliances that the world has seen, but now Trump is breaking them.
By Walter H. White Jr.
True strength and leadership are measured by the depth of your relationship with your allies. Since World War II, the United States has built the strongest alliances that the world has seen, including Western Europe, key segments of the Middle East, the Indo Pacific, Australia, New Zealand and the Americas.
The formidable alliances meant that it was generally unwise for any enemies of significance to take on the United States in a symmetrical war. The wars or conflicts involving the United States since the end of WWII have been fought on foreign soil without any major threat of the war expanding to Western Europe or the U.S. mainland.
These alliances were carefully crafted with the exceptional intellectual leadership of people such as George Marshall, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madeleine Albright. Yet, with extraordinary alacrity, the current administration in one month has destroyed or is on the verge of destroying the global alliances that the United States has developed over the past 80 years. The president has managed to threaten Mexico and Canada and has insulted Europe and the NATO countries.
The ambush of President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office was intentional and by design. The attack on Zelensky that he was not sufficiently diplomatic was undermined by the fact that President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance spread misinformation repeatedly.
One of the critical aspects of diplomacy is integrity. Yet Trump and Vance promoted lies about Ukraine having started the war, that the United States has paid more to support Ukraine than Europe, and that Zelensky is a dictator. None of these assertions is true, and the U.S. Department of Defense, intelligence agencies, and the State Department are all very well aware of the truth.
I was fortunate to be in Germany the week that the Berlin wall fell. I was privileged to be in the Kremlin the day that the flag of the Soviet Union was lowered and the flag of the Russian Federation was raised. The collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the most significant events in the history of the world. That collapse was driven by the Russian people who revolted against the communist leadership far more than it was a result of any U.S. policy. Still, the United States and Western Europe were the primary beneficiaries. The result diminished the status of one superpower and raised the global influence of the United States to a level without a peer.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought to raise the reputation and credibility of his country to the same superpower status that it had during the Soviet era, and he has no problem using Stalinist tactics to achieve his ends.
Putin aims to reacquire the states that comprised the Soviet Union on the theory that control of one sixth of the world’s land mass would go a long way toward reestablishing its influence. Russia, with an economy roughly the size of Texas and heavily dependent on commodities as opposed to tech or manufacturing, is barely capable of governing itself, let alone the 14 former Soviet republics. Other than Belarus, the independent countries have shown no interest in supporting Putin’s endeavors, as the recent U.N. vote indicated.
Zelensky has the support of virtually every European leader. Trump and Vance have thrown in with Belarus and Hungary’s Viktor Orban to support Putin, as have North Korea and Sudan.
Europe understands, in the words of the office of the Swedish Prime Minister: “You are not only fighting for your freedom but also for all of Europe’s.”
During the 1980s and 1990s, the West—especially the United States—spent many billions of dollars seeking to develop a fairer market economy and a more democratic Russian Federation. Those efforts, however, have been thoroughly dismantled by Putin, who incarcerates, exiles or assassinates political opposition.
Trump had the audacity to accuse Zelensky of being a catalyst for a World War III, when in fact the greatest threat of a new world war is presented by a combination of Putin’s antics and Trump’s narcissistic incompetence. The Russian military complex is arguably at its weakest point in a century. Desperately seeking support from China and North Korea, Putin has been unable to vanquish Ukraine and the Ukrainian military, which, with the support from Europe and the United States (until now), have not succumbed to Putin’s attacks.
Trump’s pathetic tyrannical efforts to extort Zelensky must fail. Democracy around the world is at stake.
A united democratic West is the greatest driver of economic activity and peace in the world. The European West (along with Canada and Mexico) are looking for new world leadership. Trump has failed in this task, and the world cannot look to Vladimir Putin.
Walter H. White, Jr. is a member of the board of directors of Lawyers Defending American Democracy and practiced law in the former Soviet Union, the Russian Federation and Central Asia for more than 30 years. He is a past chair and founding director of the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights.
One of the Contrarian's earliest posts suggested that Democratic voters need to hear from Kamala Harris. At a time when Congress is in full scattershot mode, we need one leader to give us direction NOW. We need a unified voice, not a couple hundred with 50 different priorities.
Why is the person in whom we voters placed all of our trust and all of our livelihoods not at the forefront right now? If no one else will do it--and Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jefferies are clearly not up to the task of rallying everyone--why doesn't the person who received 75,017,613 votes speak to the 75,017,613 people who are scared out of their minds right now? Why doesn't she rally Congressional Democrats and start a process of selecting priorities for keeping us safe and solvent? Why don't all of them demand it?
The magas had a full force of malevolent planners at work for years, producing Project 2025 and finding a way to shove it down our throats. Now that we are so far behind their lightning moves to dismantle the services that we paid into and pay for now, how are we to protect ourselves?
We 75 million people cannot do this without a leader.
Horrifying as it is to have lived to see the death of my country it's all the more horrifying to see how badly the larger world has been damaged by this handful of vicious old men and petulant oligarchs.
The billionaires have shredded the fragile stability that once allowed us to experience a relative state of peace (often an uneasy peace, true, but peace nonetheless) and relative prosperity that didn't only benefit the rich but also provided rewards to most citizens of democratic societies.
When the Silicon Valley billionaires pushed the Wall Streeters out of the way as majority shareholders in the Republican Party, they brought with them the cult madness that is all the fashion among the tech bros, including accelerationism, transhumanism (not to be confused with the controversy that has been so useful to the Republicans), and a childlike but quite terrifying faith in what they call the Singularity.
The Wall Streeters in turn, rather than resist and miss out on the goodies, have on the whole capitulated to the cult: men like Jamie Dimon and Howard Lutnick and Bill Ackman have become True Believers.
Everything that happens next, the cult asserts, requires smashing up the world's institutions, breaking its democracies, eliminating all restraints on wealth (taxation, regulation and oversight, the rule of law) and sending billions of humans into either starvation or peasantry, whichever comes first.
Meanwhile, as this creative destruction is rolling out, a handful of billionaires who already regard themselves as gods believe they're on the cusp of creating a new society in what they believe to be a dying world (and it will die, if they have their way): a stepping stone on their way to the stars where, they believe, AI-driven human/machine hybrids containing their own consciousnesses will populate the cosmos.
It's mad, bizarre, the worst kind of science fiction: only they believe it, and have the power to bring about the mass destruction they crave, although not the glorious aftermath they envision for themselves, in which they live forever as Earth burns to a cinder.
They really are a combination of Boys' Own magazine, Ayn Rand, and a cabal of subway ranters. They're unhinged and destructive: but they're richer than God's great uncle, and so they're toppling the world's democracies one by one.
Ours is falling faster, and with less resistance, than would have seemed possible before 2016. It remains to be seen whether the Brexit backlash in the UK and the sense of threat and betrayal among the European nations are sufficient to revive something like democracy on the continent: but here, in our homeland, it's more or less gone.