There are sound critiques of Trump’s policies, then judgments marred by ignorance. Laments for the coming collapse of the “liberal international order” belong in the latter category.
Articles on this system’s decay run through what Steven Bannon derides as “elite media”: The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, Washington Post and others. They suggest Trump’s “opposition to free trade” and “support for authoritarianism” clash with U.S. diplomatic practice stretching back 70 years– to the time when, post-World War II, “American statesmen…took the lead in building a network of alliances and institutions to promote…international security and universal human rights,” “to defend democratic ideals.”
A pleasing thought. But to really know the world the U.S. fashioned we must confront history. Washington’s World War II conduct previewed its policies in the Cold War and beyond.
Think of the “strategic”– one geographer preferred “terror”– bombing of Japan, which wrecked over 60 cities before nuclear inferno engulfed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two scholars concluded this campaign amounted to genocide, others argue it presaged similar assaults elsewhere.
Like Korea: 386,037 tons of bombs over three years, killing 2 or 3 million, mostly noncombatants. Pyongyang was 90% obliterated, northern and central Korea ruined. A Hungarian correspondent there felt he was “travelling on the moon, because there was only devastation,” saw…