David Ignatius's thoughtful tribute to Zbigniew Brzezinski doubles, inexorably, as a wholesale condemnation of Trump.
Brzezinski, who died Friday, devoted most of his career to explaining and enhancing this idea of a robust, supple, U.S.-led architecture for global security and prosperity….
Brzezinski was deeply troubled in his final months by the evidence that this order — the work of his generation — had been undermined almost capriciously by the rise of the inexperienced President Trump.
If there is fault in Ignatius's observations, it lies in describing Trump as merely "inexperienced" in the field of foreign policy. He is that, of course, but he is far more than that. He's a deliberate plague, an aggressive arrogance, a ferociously unschooled bully who delights in entertaining the rabble with pretentious stupidities. He's a populist whose foreign policy is to make the United States less popular among the honorable nations of the world.
Ignatius writes that "Brzezinski’s concept of the liberal international order was that it rested on a framework of alliances and global institutions that could adapt as the world evolved." Brzezinski's ordered concept was, for decades, shared by American lawmakers on a bipartisan basis. Trump's substituting concept is that of bromances with vile dictators and, as Ignatius puts it, "recklessly challenging the institutions of the West."
President Carter's national security adviser "would have been appalled, but not surprised," continues Ignatius, "by the results of Trump’s Group of Seven meeting last week." The columnist's use of "appalled" brushes against understatement. For what Trump unfurled in Europe bordered on the treasonous betrayal of virtually everything good and decent that the United States once stood for in the international arena.
Trump is no president in the traditional sense of the title. He is instead a sickness — more a cancer on the presidency than a president.