Amid Facile Reports of Chaos, Prudent U.S. Strategy Emerges

An additional positive development, if it happens, would be the defection of the U.K. from the European Union, always a somewhat anti-American organization, for closer relations with the United States and Canada.

Conrad Black
                   Trump’s geopolitical strategy follows respected and successful American tradition

"Almost imperceptibly, as political discourse continues to be a discordant contest between haters and admirers of President Trump with no journalistic distinction between comment and reporting, there has been substantial progress toward an improved strategic environment for the United States and the West generally.

"Journalists in general and the American media in particular have never been especially adept at separating good causes from grand strategy. Even venerated commentators such as Walter Lippmann and Edward R. Murrow, let alone Walter Cronkite, tended not to see geopolitical questions outside their apparent moral effects.

"In the Battle of Britain, for example, it was naturally easier to explain in terms that one country that was a dictatorship and engaged in frightful acts of racial discrimination while bombing the civilian population of a democracy. Therefore, for that reason alone, most Americans identified with the victim and supported them over the author of the aggression, regardless of strategic calculation.

"But apart from Franklin D. Roosevelt, who certainly possessed the same instinct to support the underdog, it was not clear to many Americans—except a few specialists, such as the young George Kennan—that if Nazi Germany retained control of what it then occupied, (Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria, most of France, most of Poland, and the Czechs), and retained it for a whole generation so that the occupied population was effectively Germanized, that entity would be more populous and as powerful as the United States. Few saw that such a greater Nazi Germany, surrounded by satellites like Vichy France, fascist Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, and sympathetic states like Franco’s Spain, would be a mortal danger to the preeminence of the United States." . . .

All of these are legitimate and prudent strategic actions of the United States. Some are original, some had been abandoned by previous administrations, and some had been ineffectively pursued. All are complicated international issues that can only gradually be resolved. But they are all in progress and all have progressed appreciably. These are facts easily lost sight of in such a febrile and over-strenuous pre-electoral campaign as this.