This Blog was, like most of the rest of the world, incensed by the the arbitrary travel ban, as the previous post explains, for two main reasons. Its implementation was incompetent, nobody seemed to be able to agree what it meant, and hundreds of travelers were caught mid-journey by the apparent invalidation of legal documents and visas. Embassies gave conflicting advice, much of which turned out to be wrong. This caused unnecessary distress to vulnerable people in violation of every principle for which the United States was believed to stand. Second, if the object was to make America safer, it will almost certainly have the opposite effect. That view is shared by almost every government and agency outside the United States, with any experience of fighting and resisting terrorism. This is not a good way to run a country, even if it is only your eighth day of trying.
The dust is now beginning to settle and most caught up in the chaos have been able to complete their journeys. Of course many more will now have to change their aspirations, because entry to America is going to get a whole lot more difficult, but everyone accepts that it is up to the US to decide what its immigration policy is, and even if it closes its doors entirely, it is entitled to do so. The shambles of the travel ban was more about how to do it than what to do, even if most thought the project misguided.
Here we saw the Achilles heel of this new kind of administration. Within it there are some extremely able people with powerful strategic brains and a focus on a different path forward leading to a better deal for all Americans. But there is also a small band of red-necks driven by prejudice and ideologies, which will be destructive unless restrained. Trump must keep them under tight control, allowing them to contribute but not to implement. They were the ones who landed him in the travel ban mess.
Where this blog supports Trump is on the bigger picture of the need to re-balance an economy so that it benefits what America calls its middle class, abandoned by what is now reviled as the liberal elite, where real poverty is beginning once more to emerge when the essentials of civilized life like main water become unaffordable. I have argued for a long time the very positions which Trump’s economic team are now proclaiming regarding currency manipulation and the need to repatriate jobs for skilled workers, together with the recent assertion that the euro is actually the Deutschmark devalued to Germany’s advantage over both its neighbours and the US. I have for long said the same things about NATO and the need for the US to disengage from Europe, which should retake control of its own destiny and protect its own interests. I wholeheartedly support a serious attempt to reach a proper understanding with Russia.
The world is going to have to live with a new dynamic. For seventy years America has told the free world what it must do. In return America has picked up the tab for its defence and economic growth. So everyone else was able to get on with their day, knowing that rich Uncle Sam would always see there was food on the table and enemies were repelled. Up till the end of the Cold War this made sense. After that the notion of the US as the world policeman has gone very badly wrong.
But now the election of Trump marks a sea change in the way not just Trump himself, but millions of Americans think. America will now do what it wants in its own interests, which will be interpreted as what goes on inside Americas borders, not from some vision of global meddling. Making America great again is not about empire; it is about the homeland, glitzy in some parts, but rotting in others, What the rest of the world does in response is up to it. That is what freedom now means.
But with freedom comes responsibility. Responsibility for ones own destiny. So if the EU wants to bust apart, let it. It is a new age of sovereign countries, controlled borders, balanced currencies and productive work. Trade blocks and tax havens are out. Picking fights which require the spilling of American blood are the past, not the future. We must learn to live with it. That may not be as bad as it sounds.
There is another lesson for the world to take in. Whilst America is the most inventive and innovative country in the world it is socially very conservative and old fashioned. Old social values trump (sorry) new ones. This has always been the case. It has its good side but also its dark side. Of course there are great American liberal thinkers and movements which inspire the like minded across the world. This Blog identifies with those traditions and could never support the alternative. But it is the conservative tradition which dominates the American heartlands and, for the time being, it also governs. We have to get used to that too.