opinion

OPINION: We will be a long time recovering from Trump era

From Stormy Daniels to John Bolton, the United States of America will not recover from the presidency of Donald Trump.

This is a bold statement, and in a literal sense, it is not true. The United States will exist long after President Trump either steps down after two terms, is defeated for re-election, or is otherwise removed from office.

But as a global superpower and the leader of an alliance of free nations, America will not soon — if ever — recover the same position of leadership it has occupied since the end of World War II. Bolton’s arrival is a harbinger not of war but of further chaos. He will be in a job no one wanted and for which he was chosen because of his repeated appearances on the president’s only pipeline to reality, Fox News.

Bolton alone cannot destroy American foreign policy. Neither can Trump, who is hardly the first flawed president. Richard Nixon threatened the Constitution and was driven from office. Bill Clinton subjected us to national moral embarrassment. George W. Bush squandered the international goodwill engendered by the tragedy of 9/11 by expanding a just war in Afghanistan into a fiasco in Iraq. Barack Obama, in a single-minded pursuit of a legacy with Iran, removed the United States from vital positions of power in Europe and the Middle East, and outsourced global security to China and Russia.

And yet, all of these were recoverable errors. Clinton was a passable president, a centrist in domestic affairs and a committed leader of the NATO alliance. Bush reassured a terrified nation, and his errors, in hindsight, seem less nefarious than incompetent. Obama is a decent man who did what his voters asked him to do, even when it was wrong.

Donald Trump is different. The 45th president has shown himself to be utterly unserious about foreign affairs. In just the past few weeks he has lied to the Canadian prime minister (or lied about lying, it is now unclear) and suggested, yet again, that America might abandon allies who don’t ante up their protection money. He has impulsively thrown out offers to meet with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, and sent the market plunging at the prospect of international trade wars.

All of this reveals a great shift in American politics. By electing Trump and tolerating Bolton, we have shown that we are not a nation that can be consistently trusted with the stewardship of the free world. It’s not that Trump, in the end, will collapse NATO, plunge us into a great depression, or start World War III — although with Bolton by his side he is capable of doing all of those things — but rather that the American voters have shown the world that we are capable of astonishing selfishness and petulance. We have abandoned our civic virtue not just at home, but overseas, and once lost, that position cannot be recovered.

The most optimistic outcome is that decades from now the memory of the Trump years fades away, and both we and the world look upon this period as an aberration, a kind of fever or temporary insanity from which we awoke just before we lost any possibility of an American restoration. But the damage is getting deeper by the day. Healing it will take more than just electing a new president: it will require years of painful self-examination, and calling ourselves to account honestly and transparently.

Tom Nichols is a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and author of The Death of Expertise. The views expressed here are solely his own. Follow him on Twitter: @RadioFreeTom.