Getty Washington And The World Trump Stuns the Free World The president’s inaugural address will shock and dismay America’s allies.

James P. Rubin is a former assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration and is a contributing editor for Politico Magazine.

LONDON—President Donald Trump has launched his presidency with an “America first” inaugural address that will leave the United States’ European allies stunned and China and Russia for the most part delighted.

It is no exaggeration to consider Trump’s first presidential speech as an announcement that Washington has decided to abdicate its leadership of the Western world, a status the United States proudly accepted for more than seven decades. In other words, at least for the next four years, the phrase “leader of the free world,” or any other similar variant, no longer applies to the American president.


Friday’s speech may constitute the most protectionist presentation of American foreign and economic policy a president has promulgated in the modern era. Even during the period between World War I and World War II, free trade was at least mentioned as a desirable objective. But President Trump never even mentioned the key words “free trade,” let alone its more palatable cousin, “free and fair trade.” Worse yet, the president seems to think international trade is a zero-sum game, always generating a winner and a loser.

“The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world,” Trump said—an hysterical exaggeration that ignores mountains of evidence that technological change is the real villain. Past American presidents from both parties were convinced that free trade promotes prosperity for all, and if done right allows both sides to benefit. If there were exceptions—think George W. Bush’s imposition of steel tariffs—it was almost always tactical and temporary, not strategic.

Trump also alleged that his predecessors “subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military … defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own; and spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.”

This kind of talk not only falsely indicts Democratic and Republican presidents alike, it denigrates and jeopardizes America’s military alliances. When Trump looks across the Atlantic at Europe, he sees only dollars and cents, not friends and allies. His international calculus is a mercantilism from the Middle Ages. In Trump’s world, the risk of conflict is not relevant, the proliferation of dangerous weapons is not discussed, regional hostilities are overlooked. The only thing that matters is who makes more money.

Some of Trump’s rhetoric sounds similar to that of Barack Obama, who campaigned on getting the United States out of “dumb wars” and mostly kept his promise. Both would follow the path laid by President John Quincy Adams, who declared, “America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Indeed, after the failure of Iraq, who can fault Trump’s homage to Ronald Reagan’s vision of America as a “shining city upon a hill” — “We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example for everyone to follow.”

The problem is the America that Trump describes is an unrecognizable land of misery and horror, dominated by urban blight, shuttered factories and an education system that leaves Americans “deprived of all knowledge.” That is an example that won’t shine very much at all.

We can only hope—and pray—that Trump’s new secretary of defense, James Mattis, will explain that America’s leadership of NATO has been one of the most successful enterprises in diplomatic history. It not only protected Western Europe from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, but has more recently been responsible for promoting and protecting a Europe that is whole, free and at peace for the only time in recorded history. And given the re-emergence of Russia as a threat to its neighbors, NATO’s deterrence value is incalculable. Assuming President Trump doesn’t undermine the alliance’s promise of collective defense, NATO is a bargain, compared with the astronomical costs of a war in Europe—as the Russian invasion of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine has already demonstrated.

In his one nod to allies, Trump promised to “unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth.” European leaders abhor terrorism as much as anyone (their populations have suffered more attacks in recent years than we have). But it is hard to imagine senior officials here signing up to an unachievable mission objective—eradicating all terrorism—with an administration practicing insult diplomacy rather than alliance management.

Unfortunately, what most of America’s friends will take away from Trump’s inaugural address is its dark, nationalistic tone and its myopic focus on “protection” rather than the quest for shared peace and prosperity, based on Western values, that has driven every American president for generations. That is damage that cannot be undone.

James P. Rubin is a former assistant secretary of state in the Bill Clinton administration.