Donald Trump’s Poland speech articulating his foreign policy principles has generated much comment and would have generated more but for all the Russia scandal news. It’s an important window into the president’s gestalt as he views the world. As I wrote recently, I don’t care for the “west against the rest” as a paradigm US foreign policy because it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, a point Martin Wolf makes powerfully in his column on Tuesday.
Certainly, there is an argument for the president’s invocation of western civilisation. Unlike many of my friends and colleagues in American universities, I sympathise with the concern that contemporary educational norms pass too lightly over the accomplishments of America and the west in favour of a fashionable multiculturalism. Indeed, I have joked after reading multiple issues of its flagship journal that the American Studies Association should be renamed the anti-American Studies Association since it sees the US largely through its sins towards minority groups.
But the president has a staggering hypocrisy problem in rooting his foreign policy in the western values and the survival of the west.