A great unravelling is under way in the greatest country on earth
I am haunted by Abraham Lincoln’s warning that the only power that can destroy America is ourselves. If you aren’t worried by that prospect, you are not paying attention. Thomas FriedmanContributor
Mar 13, 2025 – 12.35pm
If you are confused by President Donald Trump’s zigzagging strategies on Ukraine, tariffs, microchips or a host of other issues, it is not your fault. It’s his.
What you are seeing is a president who ran for re-election to avoid criminal prosecution and to get revenge on people he falsely accused of stealing the 2020 election. He never had a coherent theory of the biggest trends in the world today and how to best align America with them to thrive in the 21st century. That is not why he ran.
And once he won, Trump brought back his old obsessions and grievances – with tariffs and Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky and Canada – and staffed his administration with an extraordinary number of fringe ideologues who met one overriding criterion: loyalty first and always to Trump and his whims over and above the Constitution, traditional values of American foreign policy or basic laws of economics.
The result is what you are seeing today: a crazy cocktail of on-again-off-again tariffs, on-again-off-again assistance for Ukraine, on-again-off-again cuts in government departments and programs domestic and foreign – conflicting edicts all carried out by cabinet secretaries and staff members who are united by a fear of being tweeted about by Elon Musk or Trump should they deviate from whatever policy line emerged unfiltered in the last five minutes from our Dear Leader’s social media feed.
Four years of this will not work, folks.
Our markets will have a nervous breakdown from uncertainty, our entrepreneurs will have a nervous breakdown, our manufacturers will have a nervous breakdown, our investors – foreign and domestic – will have a nervous breakdown, our allies will have a nervous breakdown, and we’re going to give the rest of the world a nervous breakdown.
You cannot run a country, you cannot be an American ally, you cannot run a business and you cannot be a long-term American trading partner when, in a short period, the US president threatens Ukraine, threatens Russia, withdraws his threat to Russia, threatens huge tariffs on Mexico and Canada and postpones them – again – doubles tariffs on China and threatens to impose even more on Europe and Canada.
Top officials of our oldest allies say privately they fear we are becoming not just unstable but their enemy. The only person who gets treated with kid gloves is Putin, and America’s traditional friends are in shock. The biggest lie
But here is Trump’s biggest lie of all his big lies: he claims that he inherited an economy in ruins and that’s why he has to do all these things. Nonsense. Joe Biden got a lot of things wrong, but by the end of his term, with the help of a wise Federal Reserve, the Biden economy was actually in pretty good shape and trending in the right direction. America certainly did not need global tariff shock therapy.
Corporate and household balance sheets were relatively healthy, oil prices were on the low side, unemployment was only about 4 per cent, consumer spending was rising, and GDP growth was about 2 per cent. We definitely needed to address the trade imbalance with China – Trump has been right about that all along – but that was really the only urgent agenda item, and we could have done that with targeted tariff increases on Beijing, co-ordinated with our allies doing the same, which is how you get Beijing to move.
Now economists fear that the profound uncertainty Trump is injecting into the economy could drive down interest rates for all the wrong reasons – because of so much investor uncertainty driving down growth, here and abroad. Or we could get an even worse combination: stagnant growth and inflation (from so many tariffs), known as stagflation.
But this is not just your grandfather’s cyclical economic uncertainty Trump has triggered. This is the uncertainty that cuts to the bone, the uncertainty that comes from seeing a world you knew for 80 years being unravelled by the most powerful player – who doesn’t know what he is doing and is surrounded by bobbleheads. Kennedy’s declaration inverted
The world has enjoyed an extraordinary period of economic growth and absence of great-power wars since 1945. Of course, it was not perfect, and there have been many troubled years and countries that lagged. But in the broad sweep of world history, these 80 years have been remarkably peaceful and prosperous for a lot of people, in a lot of places.
And the No. 1 reason the world was the way it was, was because America was the way it was.
That America was summed up by two lines in John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address on January 20, 1961: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
And: “So, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”
Trump and his vacuous Vice President, J.D. Vance, have completely turned Kennedy’s call on its head. The Trump-Vance version is:
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that today’s America will pay no price, bear no burden, incur no hardship, and it will abandon any friends and cuddle up to any foes in order to assure the Trump administration’s political survival – even if it means the abandonment of liberty wherever that be profitable or convenient for us.
So, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for President Trump. And my fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, ask how much you are ready to pay for America to defend your freedom from Russia or China.
“What Leon Wieseltier once said of Benjamin Netanyahu is doubly true of Trump: He is such a small man, in such a big time.”
When a country as central as America – one that has played the critical stabilising role since 1945, acting through institutions such as NATO, the World Health Organisation, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation, and, yes, paying a bigger share than others to make the pie much bigger, which benefited us most because we had the biggest slice – suddenly departs from that role and becomes a predator on this system, watch out.
To the extent Trump has manifested any discernible, consistent foreign policy philosophy, it is one that he never campaigned on and has no parallel in history.
“Trump is an isolationist-imperialist,” Nahum Barnea, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, remarked to me the other day. He wants all the benefits of imperialism, including your territory and your minerals, without sending any US troops or paying any compensation.
I would call Trump’s foreign policy philosophy not “containment” or “engagement” but “smash and grab”. Trump aspires to be a geopolitical shoplifter. He wants to stuff his pockets with Greenland, Panama, Canada and the Gaza Strip – just grab them off the shelves, without paying – then run back to his American safe house. Our postwar allies have never seen this America before.
If Trump wants to take America on a 180-degree turn, he owes it to the country to have a coherent plan, based on sound economics and a team that represents the best and the brightest, not the most sycophantic and right-wing woke. And he owes us an explanation of how purging professional staff from key bureaucracies that keep the nation running from administration to administration, whether at the Justice Department or the IRS, and appointing fringe ideologues to key positions is good for the country and not just him.
And most of all, he owes every American, irrespective of party, some basic human decency. The only way any president can remotely succeed in any such radical turn, or even a lesser one, is if he reaches out to his opponents and at least tries to bring them along as much as possible. I get it, they are angry. But Trump is president. He should be bigger than them.
Alas, though, that is not Trump. What Leon Wieseltier once said of Benjamin Netanyahu is doubly true of Trump: He is such a small man, in such a big time.
If it is the contrast with Kennedy’s inaugural speech that depresses me most today, it is Abraham Lincoln’s January 1838 speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, that haunts me most – particularly his warning that the only power that can destroy us is ourselves, by our abuse of our most cherished institutions, and by our abuse of one another.
“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?” Lincoln asked. “I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.”
If those words don’t haunt you too, you’re not paying attention.
