If President Trump weren't here — wouldn't we miss him? — a comment about the cycle of destruction and creation

12 June 2018

Consider these two contrasting perspectives — could both be correct?

First, with President Trump's latest casting of Canada as demon (during the G-7), Der Spiegel International wrote that:

The debacle at the G-7 clearly shows that the real problem with Donald Trump's policies is Donald Trump himself. There is no rhyme or reason to his actions aside from the desire -- the need -- to be the best, the most important, the biggest. The collapse of the West and the destruction of alliances that have held up for decades are merely the side effects of this unprecedented ego trip.

At the G-7 summit, Trump treated America's oldest friends as though they were enemies. At the same time, he fawns over Russian President Vladimir Putin and calls dictators such as North Korea's Kim Jong Un "very honorable."

In this conflict, Europe must also learn how to be louder than Trump -- its message must reach not only European citizens, but Americans as well. Many in the United States, after all, haven't yet fully realized the degree to which Trump has damaged the Western alliance.

Second, apparently disagreeing with Der Spiegel, politically conservative Pat Buchanan wrote that:

Trump sees America as a nation being milked by allies who free ride on our defense effort, as they engage in trade practices that prosper their own peoples at America’s expense.

Where our elites live to play masters of the universe, Trump sees a world laughing behind America’s back, while allies exploit our magnanimity and idealism for their own national ends.

The numbers are impossible to refute and hard to explain.

Last year, the EU had a $151 billion trade surplus with the U.S. China ran a $376 billion trade surplus with the U.S., the largest in history. The world sold us $796 billion more in good 2018 s than we sold to the world.

A nation that spends more than it takes in from taxes, and consumes more of the world’s goods than it produces itself for export, year in and year out, is a nation on the way down.

We are emulating our British cousins of the 19th century.

Buchanan makes a legitimate point. Other nations are parasitically feeding off the United States. America's imperialistic plutocracy has been fine with that. Its corporate multi-nationals profit by bleeding the world's publics. That Americans are included in this predatory behavior offends Buchanan.

Der Spiegel's point is also well-taken. Trashing multi-focal strategic strength is generally not a good idea in a potentially off-kilter world. As American strength fades, one would think that its democracy-based allies would become more, rather than less, important.

The moral? — It may be that President Trump's penchant for creating chaos is just what the mired United States needs

Not because it will work out well, but because it may shatter an invisibly teetering unipolar status quo. Destruction, in the Hindu religious paradigm, has its inescapable place in the cycle of creation.

Burning it all down — in President Trump's egotistical, occasionally insightful ways — may be necessary to making the United States come to terms with the Looting Elites that he often abrasively represents. That his erratic behavior makes America's ossified Deep State uncomfortable is, for example, not all bad.

That is what I mean about missing President Trump, were he not here.

The President's genius for showmanship and tumult-creation may be serving a staggeringly stagnant United States more beneficially than it appears.

Destroyers generally do not recognize themselves as such. And most of us do not welcome them, even when their appearance is absolutely necessary to our own (personal or cultural) evolution.

PeteFree.com

If President Trump weren't here — wouldn't we miss him? — a comment about the cycle of destruction and creation