Trump Offers A Reality Check

Trump's recent Middle East trip was, as National Review's Jimmy Quinn noted, a "delicate balancing act." Simultaneously working to get Saudi and Syria to join the Abraham Accords (one of the more significant achievements of his first term) and looking for a diplomatic way to slow Iran's Mad Mullahs' pursuit of nuclear weapons, Trump is attempting to chew a very big bite without choking on it.

Nestled in all that was one stand-out comment. In praising the modernizations in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, he opined that,

It's crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from Western interventionists or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.

This is a major departure in tone from nearly a century of American attempts at nation-building and at the exportation of Western values, themselves the offspring of European colonialism of the previous four centuries. While you and I have ample reason (and mountains of empirical evidence) to conclude that the values of the Enlightenment are superior to any other set of social mores and structures, is is also amply clear that the West's attempts to push-export these values to societies that don’t naturally thirst for them has simply not worked.

Where the soil for them has been fertile, yes, Western-style precepts have taken root. A number of African nations styled their constitutions after America's. Sowing of ideas works when the ideas resonate and germinate freely. Attempting to restructure nations whose cultures clash with Western values is, on the other hand, a fool's errand. An arrogant, condescending fool, if we are to be brutally honest. Since at least Viet Nam, this has proven to be the case time and again, and it's past time the West admits this and stops trying to push a string.

And Trump pointed it out:

In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.

Libertarians have long been torn about how and what to do about nations where the values of liberty we hold so dear don't exist. The moral argument is that we have an obligation to try and liberate those who, by accident of birth, live under oppression and are denied the rights we have deemed inalienable. The flip side is that it's simply not possible most of the time, and we have plenty of examples where attempts have made things worse, not better. Ponder the end of the British Raj in India, and the two million that died during the Partition. Ponder the terrible toppling of dominoes that followed the West's intervention in Iraq's invasion of Kuwait - the millions that have died and the trillions of dollars that have been wasted. Ponder, more recently, the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the allies who were abandoned to the brutality of the Taliban.

One cannot help but feel sympathy for the oppressed around the world. Women and gays in Islamic nations are treated at best like second class citizens. Populations living in hellish poverty and oppression in places like North Korea and Venezuela. Groups like the Uyghurs are treated like slaves in China.

But, there is only so much the West can do, and so much of what the West has done has not only made things worse in all those "over theres," it has harmed the West itself. The waves of migrants that have come to Western Europe from the Middle East - migrants driven, ironically, in that direction by the West's efforts at making the Middle East better - have not assimilated into Western culture. Abetted by starry-eyed multiculturalists, nations like the UK, France, Germany, and Sweden have large Muslim migrant populations that do not want to live Western values, and instead embrace the oppressive tenets of Sharia.

Konstantin Kisin has noted that multiethnic societies can survive - and America is proof that they can flourish - but multicultural ones cannot. Most domestic disagreements here in America are nevertheless still founded on our ideas of liberty and equality, no matter the leftists and socialist-wannabes denouncing those values from time to time. The denouncers are ultra-quick to assert those values when their own soft swaddle-blankets are yanked away. Cultures that treat women like property and that throw gays off rooftops are problematic, to put it mildly, but we cannot fix them from outside. Ditto for kingdoms, single-party nations, and socialist hellholes. We can choose not to do business with them, or restrict our interactions, but we must be honest about the effectiveness of such behavior. Six decades of embargoing Cuba has accomplished... what, other than contributing to the poverty and squalor that Cubans endure?

Trump is a transactional fella. He has some good instincts, and some bad ones, but ultimately everything is a Deal. I disagree (stridently, in some cases) with some of his actions and policies, but I agree with others. If he exhibits enough humility (yeah, that's pretty funny) to say "we will work deals with these nations but we won't try to force them to change into versions of us," I consider that a Good Thing and a welcome change in tone from just about every Presidency since WWII. And a template for future Presidents.

Neocons all over America are sky-screaming at this very moment.