"Working with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, he reoriented the federal judiciary, appointing three carefully vetted conservatives to the Supreme Court and 53 appellate-court judges, two shy of Barack Obama's count during two terms. By making aggressive use of executive authority, Mr. Trump demonstrated that many limitations on presidential power are customary norms rather than legal restraints. Future presidents and Congresses will have to decide whether to ratify Mr. Trump's expansive conception of his office or enact new limits.
On the domestic front, Mr. Trump's most enduring legacy may be on the Republican Party. When he announced his candidacy in June 2015, the GOP was a coalition of social conservatives, national defense types and free-marketeers. Mr. Trump made his peace with social conservativism and supply-side economics -- tax cuts and deregulation -- while altering his party's stance on foreign, trade and fiscal policy.
Mr. Trump endorsed robust military budgets while challenging party orthodoxy on alliances and the use of American power. "America first" represented a shift away from internationalism toward self-interest understood mainly in economic terms. He repudiated what he called "endless wars," especially those initiated by George W. Bush, and turned away from democracy promotion, which Ronald Reagan and Mr. Bush emphasized.
Mr. Trump's revisions to party orthodoxy in economic policy were equally far-reaching. From President Eisenhower to Speaker Paul Ryan, Republicans favored balancing the budget, even if some were more talk than action. Mr. Trump barely paid it lip service. In his announcement speech, he promised to "save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security without cuts," adding for emphasis: "Have to do it." During his first campaign, he proudly called himself the "king of debt"; later he presided over a trillion-dollar annual deficit even before the Covid-19 pandemic.
Although white working-class voters began moving away from the Democratic Party half a century earlier, Mr. Trump was the first Republican nominee to make their concerns central to his policy. He shifted away from open trade governed by multilateral agreements toward managed bilateral deals, and he made eliminating trade deficits and restoring factory jobs key objectives for trade deals. On immigration, he ended the split between Republican elected officials and working-class voters, who regarded a large inflow of immigrants as a threat to their jobs and way of life. Republicans who had backed comprehensive immigration reform -- as did both Reagan and Mr. Bush -- found themselves sidelined.
So long as working-class economic and cultural concerns play a central role in shaping the party's agenda, suburban professionals and corporate leaders will be forced to choose between taking a back seat in their party and realigning with the Democrats, whose views on some issues are closer to theirs.
Yet the election of 2020 was nothing like the root-and-branch repudiation of Trumpism that Democrats (and not a few Republicans) had hoped for. It was a victory for his party, which outperformed expectations in the Senate and made gains in the House and state legislatures. The 2024 Republican nominee will likely be someone who embraces the president's orientation.
In foreign policy, Mr. Trump has presided over -- and in some cases hastened -- the end of several eras:
-- The China integration era. Both political parties have abandoned the hopeful thesis that economic growth will lead Beijing to embrace democracy and the Western economic order. Instead, Xi Jinping's domination of Chinese politics has ended halting moves toward political and economic liberalization. Unless his model of a state-dominated economy, enforced political and cultural uniformity, fervent nationalism, and drive for regional hegemony hits a wall, China will remain a revisionist power with which opportunities for cooperation will be limited.
-- The era of unchecked globalization. Political conflict and the Covid-19 pandemic have heightened doubts about relying on global supply chains. Because efficiency often comes at the expense of resilience, policy makers and business leaders are groping toward a new balance. The drive for self-reliance in strategically important sectors -- defense, information technology and health, among others -- will call for targeted public investment and the transfer of some production facilities to the U.S. or reliable partners such as Canada and Mexico.
-- The 9/11 era. American patience with what leaders of both parties call "endless wars" has run out. Residual forces may remain in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the U.S. will no longer fight Islamist terrorism with large ground deployments in the Middle East. If Iran attacks American interests in the region, retaliation may be necessary, but American administrations will remain reluctant to enter a full-fledged military conflict with Tehran.
-- The Israel-Palestinian era. Although the U.S. will continue to encourage a negotiated solution, the Trump administration's diplomacy has encouraged many Arab states to stop conditioning their stance toward Israel on a final resolution with the Palestinians. The Saudis may be slow to follow the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in establishing formal ties with the Jewish state, but the formalization of links between those countries and Israel couldn't have happened without Saudi assent. The conflict between Sunni Arab states and Iran, Syria and Hezbollah dominates the region. Israel is firmly in the Sunni camp, and Mr. Biden will have difficulty returning to the Obama-era detente with Iran unless Tehran agrees to curb its support for terrorist groups.
-- The era of transnational threats and alliances. Although Democrats insist on the continuing significance of issues such as climate change, migration and nuclear proliferation, both parties now acknowledge the return of great-power rivalries, especially with China.
The U.S. and Europe might have gone their separate ways after the Cold War ended. Instead, America's standing as the world's only superpower made possible, even invited, involvement in conflicts from the Balkans to the Middle East and Libya. Although the U.S. and Europe didn't always agree, both understood them as quarrels within a family united by shared values. Both accepted the continuing utility of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the broad commonality of economic interests between the U.S. and Europe.
America's leadership rested not only on might, but also on predictability. Mr. Trump's election, and his attacks on NATO and the European Union, shattered European confidence that American politics would oscillate within fixed limits. Europeans now believe that substantial numbers of Americans have no investment in NATO or the EU and see Washington's 75-year leadership of the world's democracies as a burden they would like to lay down. "Europeans are afraid that there is no longer a foreign-policy consensus in the United States," Ivan Krastev of the Bulgaria-based Center for Liberal Strategies has observed. "Every new administration can mean a totally new policy, and for them this is a nightmare."
America's political polarization is leading some Europeans to reconsider their basic strategies for security and prosperity. Some are beginning to think seriously about "strategic autonomy," and many are reluctant to take sides in the rising conflict between the U.S. and China.
Finally, the Trump presidency has crystallized a fundamental shift in Americans' view of the future.
For centuries, the idea of an inexorable movement to a more peaceful, prosperous and rational world has been central to Western thought. The century of economic advancement and European stability after the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna produced a burst of confidence in historical progress, culminating in the belief that the dense network of intra-European ties had rendered war between major European powers irrational and outmoded.
Two world wars, the rise of fascism, and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a global competitor shattered this confidence. A new generation hardened by bloody war and bitter peace came to see freedom as precious but endangered and human nature as harboring the capacity for unimaginable evil. The outcome of the struggle between liberal democracy and communism was far from assured.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union ended 75 years of threats to freedom, and progress seemed inevitable. The end of history had seemingly arrived, and the world could look forward to the steady spread of freedom and open markets.
The number of democracies rose significantly, and previously closed economies entered the global economy. As models of governance and economics converged, optimists believed, the world would become more integrated across national boundaries. The World Trade Organization and the European Union symbolized this hope. So did Barack Obama, whose election seemed to mark a new era of racial reconciliation. Mr. Obama often characterized ideas or practices he regarded as misguided as being on the "wrong side of history."
But the political impact of the slow recovery from the Great Recession, which had been underestimated, came into focus. The rise of authoritarian populism in some democracies, Britain's decision to leave the EU, and the emergence of China as a political as well as an economic adversary ended a quarter-century of optimism. It became clear that the movement toward global democracy had peaked in the first decade of the 21st century. Heightened conflicts over immigration and ethnicity undermined confidence that existing arrangements were adequate to deal with cultural differences.
With the election of Mr. Trump, each of these trends played out in the U.S. Complacency about the survival of American democracy gave way to deep concern. Mr. Trump's critics saw him as a threat not only to racial progress and social inclusion but to the Constitution. And they came to understand that this threat represented the culmination of longstanding trends.
Partisan polarization had not only blocked agreement on public policy but also eroded safeguards -- normative as well as institutional -- for our constitutional order, which the Founders designed to protect liberty by preventing undue concentrations of power. As partisan divisions paralyzed Congress, the executive and the judiciary expanded to fill the vacuum, threatening the constitutional balance among the branches.
Mr. Obama's policies sparked a populist backlash on the right, and critics emerged on the left as well. Immigration advocates labeled him the "deporter in chief." African-American leaders focused on widening economic gaps between white and black Americans and racial inequities in policing and criminal justice. The deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of police in 2014 set the stage for the protests that broke out this year after the killing of George Floyd.
In the 12 years after Mr. Obama's first victory hope gave way to fear, confidence to doubt. More Americans came to understand that history doesn't inexorably flow in a single direction and that broad cultural and political movements can spark counterreactions." [1]
Aggressive Lithuanian foreign policy based on ideology of Landsbergiai has become obsolete. We need to learn to live peacefully with our neighbors.
1. Trump Remade His Party and the World
Galston, William A. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]14 Nov 2020: A.11.
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