The Hard Hat Riot and the Great Turning Point of the late 1960s

 Several months ago, The American Experience on PBS screened a superb documentary, The Hard Hat Riot.  It explored a unique episode in the Vietnam war protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s.  After major revolts and building occupations at Berkeley (beginning in 1964), Cornell and Columbia (1968), and Harvard (1969), campuses around the country erupted in May 1970 after President Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia and the deaths of four students at Kent State at the hands of the National Guard followed.  More than fifty campuses around the country were shut down by protests and never reopened until the fall, and hundreds of others--including Harvard and other Ivy League institutions--canceled exams and encouraged students to use their free time to mount more antiwar protests.  Just days later, on May 8, a huge antiwar demonstration in downtown Manhattan was interrupted by hundreds of construction workers, who began beating the demonstrators.  The confrontation moved to the mayor's office at City Hall Park, where Mayor John Lindsay had ordered the lowering of the flag to half staff in honor of one of the dead Kent State students, who came from Long Island, and the angry construction workers first forced city officials to raise the flag, and then set upon students at Pace University, across the street.  The documentary includes only a few talking heads, led by David Paul Kuhn, who wrote the book upon which it is based.  It draws overwhelmingly from interviews with participants on both sides, and with a couple of Nixon White House aides.  It tells the story of a cultural and political split that continues to this day, and it occurred to me that it is a brilliant representation of the great cultural turning point that my generation was leading the nation into at that time, with fateful consequences.

The great changes then underway, we can now see, overturned a cultural and political order that had grown up in the United States and most of the developed world in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.  It was an era of very strong institutions, led by national governments, that commanded the loyalty of the great mass of the population and demanded, and received, enormous sacrifices from them.  The United States in particular had abandoned a more libertarian tradition to mobilize millions of young men in three stages:  for the First World War in 1917-18, for the Second World War in 1941-5, and then for the Cold War, beginning in 1950 and continuing, really, all the way to 1970.  The military draft had ended in 1919 and again (effectively) in 1946, but it had continued for 20 years in 1970, now feeding the Vietnam war.  The great mobilizations also led to unprecedented economic demands upon  the population, including marginal tax rates that topped out at 91 percent by 1945 and had dropped only to 70 percent in 1965.  Meanwhile, the New Deal had transformed the role of the federal government, making it the employer of last resort, tightly regulating financial institutions, establishing the rights of organized labor, and passing Social Security.  That in turn had led to the passage of Medicare in 1965.  A significant minority of Americans had always opposed this expansion of the federal government's role, but the election of 1964, in which New Dealer Lyndon Johnson overwhelmingly defeated unreconstructed libertarian Barry Goldwater with more than 60 percent of the popular vote, showed the extent of the national consensus.

The first two-thirds of the century were also an era of strict social mores.  The United States before 1968 was not, as many people now seem to believe, a real-life version of The Handmaid's Tale, but gender roles were quite strict in all economic classes of society.  Divorce was quite stigmatized and was barely legal in several states, and homosexuality was prohibited by law.  The marriage rate for US adults had peaked at 72 percent in 1960 (it is now 50 percent.) Crime rates were relatively low.  Meanwhile, the population was becoming better educated at an extraordinary rate.  While only 30 percent of 18-22 year-olds attended college in 1950, 50 percent of them were in college in 1969--and there were far more young people in that age group in 1969 than in 1950 because of the baby boom. 

The United States seemed to be progressing on many fronts in 1965, most notably with respect to civil rights for black Americans, now protected for the first time by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  But Lyndon Johnson's Administration triggered a great turning point in American life in the middle of that year when it embarked upon a long large-scale conflict in Vietnam.  That conflict gave a substantial part of the new Boom generation, born from 1943 through 1960, the target for a revolt that became a more general rebellion against fundamental aspects of the mid-century era.

As The Hard Hat Riot shows, one must not overgeneralize about the Boom generation.  The events of the 1960s looked very different to different social classes, different races, and ultimately to the two different sexes, and in 1972, the first election in which very large numbers of Boomers could vote, their vote divided evenly between Nixon and McGovern.  Boomers were the most pro-Trump generation in 2016 and 2020, losing that honor to Gen Xers in 2024, and Trump himself will obviously go down in history as the most important political leader that my generation has produced.  Yet the minority of Boomers in elite institutions who turned the academic and political world upside down in the late 1960s had, I believe, an extraordinary long-term influence, because of the nature of its revolt.  To understand this, I return to the 1990s works of my contemporaries, William Strauss and Neil Howe.

In The Fourth Turning (1997) Strauss and Howe defined the Boom generation as a Prophet generation.  Such generations are children in the wake of the last great crisis in national life--in our case, the Depression and the Second  World War--and grow up in relatively stable, comfortable circumstances.  As you adults, however, they take over a now-vacant role:  society's moral stewards, who propagate their own views of good and evil.  As a very young and acute student of Strauss and Howe pointed out just a few years after that book was published, one finds the same story in the  Book of Genesis. Adam and Eve are living in the rich paradise the lord has created for them, but he has commanded them not to eat from the Tree of Good and Evil, which will allow them to make their own moral judgments.  Naturally, human nature being what it is, they immediately do so.  In Genesis the lord expels them from paradise; in history, such generations tend to redefine paradise and make their vision come to life.  The Boomer campus activists of the late 1960s opposed the Vietnam War and anything connected to it because it was evil.  Nothing, in their eyes, could justify it: not that it had been decided upon by a duly elected president and duly elected legislators, not that it initially commanded a consensus of opinion among the foreign policy establishment, and not that (until 1968) a majority of the American public supported it, with many arguing that we should fight harder.  And because the war was evil, and continued despite their opposition, any institution that collaborated with it in any way--including colleges and universities with ROTC programs and Defense Department contacts--was evil as well, and must be brought to a halt.  These views are on display both in The Hard Hat Riot and in another great documentary, Berkeley in the Sixties.  And by 1970 many activists had taken a further step, claiming that our whole society was criminally implicated not only in the Vietnam War, but in racism and sexism, and that its laws were unworthy of respect.  Like their contemporary Donald Trump today, they were guided only by their own morality.

The student revolt grabbed the attention of many colleges and universities, of the elite media, and, by 1970, of an increasing number of liberal politicians in both parties.  In subsequent decades, as I have often argued here, their essential approach to politics--an emphasis on defining what is morally right, and insisting that reality must conform to their view--became very influential and even dominant in those same sectors.  At the time, however, they provoked intense opposition among many (though not all) of their own parents, who had succeeded in life by playing by the rules.  As as the interviews in The Hard Hat Riot demonstrate beyond question, they also aroused enormous anger among their less wealthy working class contemporaries, who had gone into demanding occupations instead of going to college, who had thereby remained subject to the draft, and who had fought, and sometimes been killed or wounded, in Vietnam.  They, like their parents, had played by the rules, and they resented the college students who didn't have to and who now claimed the right to chart the nation's destiny.  And already, the student revolt, combined with general dissatisfaction over the Vietnam War, inflation, and white racial resentment, had started a critical national political realignment.

Lyndon Johnson in 1964 had won 61 percent of the popular vote; Hubert Humphrey in 1968 had won just 43.4 percent, losing to Richard Nixon with 43.4 percent, while George Wallace won 13.5 percent of the vote.  The next two Democrats to win a majority of the popular vote would be Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Barack Obama in 2008.  And a parallel drama had played out in the city of New York, one that is not sufficiently explained in The Hard Hat Riot.  John Lindsay, a very handsome and charismatic liberal Republican Congressman, had won the mayoralty in 1965 with 45 percent of the vote, compared to 41 percent for regular Democrat Abe Beame and 13.4 percent for conservative journalist William F. Buckley Jr. The documentary makes clear that Lindsay had had a difficult first term, losing repeated confrontations with the city's municipal workers' unions.   It does not mention that in 1969 Lindsay had lost the Republican nomination to John Marchi in the primary, while a conservative Democrat, Mario Proccacino, had defeated a slew of liberal Democratic candidates. Running on the Liberal Party ticket, Lindsay had won a narrow victory with just 42 percent of the vote.  But Lindsay remained a darling of the liberal media, and by 1970 he had joined a number of other liberal politicians in essentially taking up the cause of the war protesters against the war.  So it was that in the week that a large body of construction workers decided to beat up antiwar student demonstrators in downtown Manhattan, Lindsay had ordered that the flag over City Hall be lowered to half staff--not in honor of the week's casualties in Vietnam, but in honor of a single Kent State student killed by the National Guard who happened to hail from Long Island.  At the height of the second phase of the riot, the hard hats intimidated Lindsay's staff into raising it again.  They still believed in the positive symbolism of the American flag, not that of the Vietcong flag which so many protesters carried.

By 1972, the war had wound down, draft calls had fallen and the end of the draft was imminent, and campuses were quiet. Meanwhile, George McGovern, an early opponent of the war and the favorite of the new Democratic left, had won Democratic nomination. Nixon carried every jurisdiction but Massachusetts (where I proudly soldiered in the McGovern campaign) and the District of Columbia, with 60.7 percent of the popular vote, and the era of Republican majorities--briefly and narrowly interrupted by Jimmy Carter in 1976 after Watergate--had begun.  

I am now convinced that the leftwing Boomer revolt of the late 1960s was the first step in something much bigger:  a general revolt touching every major group in American society against the strict discipline and spirit of sacrifice for the common good that had dominated the middle third of the twentieth century.  In subsequent decades that revolt led to lower taxes, less government regulation, and the overturning of virtually every social taboo that had shaped American life hitherto.  That revolt secured basic rights for women and gays, on the one hand, but freed business from the regulatory hand of the federal government, on the other.  It encouraged the better off to use their power to become even better off--not only business people and financial interests, but professionals in law, academia, and medicine as well.  It was closely related the increasing inequality of income and wealth that began in the 1970s and reversed the trends of the previous 30 years, for both white and black Americans.  It destroyed the loyalty of both Democrats and Republicans to their party establishments and thus paved the way for Donald Trump.  And all this proves, to me, that the extraordinary discipline of the midcentury period that allowed institutions to do so much--sometimes for evil, but more often for good--represented only one side of human nature, and provoked, as Newton would say, an equal and opposite reaction.  

In 1941 an historian from the previous Prophet generation, a Harvard professor named Roger Merriman who had taught an introductory history course to students including Franklin Roosevelt and John R. Kennedy, gave his last lecture before retiring.  He emphasized that history was a succession of alternating periods, one tending towards more centralized power, the next towards anarchy.  He could not have known then, anymore than we did in 1965, that the next turning point in that long story was only a few decades away.   I did not, because of certain intellectual changes in academia that are also part of the story I have been telling, have the opportunity to play the role that he did at Harvard or anywhere else, but thanks to my friend William Strauss (d. 2007) and his co-author Neil Howe, I have been able to revive the tradition to which he belonged. The students of the late 1960s did not on their own cause the changes we have lived through, they played their key role in an historical drama that was written many millennia ago, and which no generation can control.  We are in another climactic drama now--and however it ends, it will not be the last.  Such is the way of history.

Venezuela and our new era

 I thought about 25 hours ago when I first learned about the armed seizure of Venezuelan president Francisco Maduro that the Trump administration might have pulled off a political coup, in two senses of the word.  Having argued without much evidence that Maduro was waging war on the United States by sending lethal drugs into the country and flooding the US with dangerous immigrants, President Trump had now apprehended the criminal and would put him on trial.  The operation reminded me of the first President Bush's invasion of Panama in 1990 to depose and arrest Manuel Noriega--an important analogy, as we shall see in a moment--but it had gone much more smoothly.  And few people, it seemed to me, would be very disturbed by Maduro's deposition, since Venezuela had descended into economic chaos under him and his predecessor Hugo Chavez and he had recently retained power only by stealing an election.  The Nobel Committee had just awarded the peace prize to his leading political opponent.  Then came the press conference at Mara Lago, in which the president announced much bigger plans.  The US, he said, would "run" Venezuela until a transition to a new regime could be arranged, and it would secure the return of oil properties which, he claimed, had been unfairly seized by the Venezuelan government to US oil companies. They in turn would revive oil production in Venezuela, with great economic benefits for all.  In addition, he seemed to say, the refugees from Venezuela--who are estimated at 8 million since 2014--would be able to return to that country.  

Let me begin with two pieces of history.  As so often happens, the Trump Administration has found a precedent for what initially looks like an unprecedented step.  In 1989, just before the invasion of Panama, future attorney general William Barr, then of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Council, wrote a memo arguing that the president had the inherent right to order the FBI to make an arrest outside the territorial limits of the United States, and to back up that power with military force.  That memo legitimized the invasion of Panama and the detention and eventual trial and conviction of Manuel Noriega.  This is what is known in some legal circles as a "bootstrap precedent," in which one party to a case--in this instance, the US government--simply repeats a claim that it has made in the past, whether higher authority has ever approved the claim or not.  It also illustrates the two roles that the Office of Legal Counsel can play and has played.  On the one hand, it can tell the Attorney General and the President what the law governing a particular case appears to be, based on the Constitution, statutes, treaties, and court decisions.  On the other, it can put forward its own view of what the law should be,  based on its own sometimes tendentious reading of the Constitution.  That is what it did in this case and what it also did in the notorious torture memorandum under George W. Bush, one of whose authors once confirmed to me that it reflected the view that the executive branch was the proper judge of its own powers.

The second piece of history relates to the nationalization of Venezuelan oil properties, which was mostly carried out by a non-socialist Venezuelan government in 1976.  According to Google AI, the oil companies received some compensation. In 2007 the leftist Hugo Chavez completed the seizure of foreign oil assets, and two US companies sought compensation via international arbitration. They won an award, but Venezuela has been unwilling or unable to pay it, thanks at least in part to sanctions.  International law does require compensation in exchange for nationalization of natural resources, but it does not appear to support President Trump's claim that the United States can simply take back ownership of the properties that US companies surrendered fifty years ago.

I think the president's claims reflect his view of the world and his place of it. He is now the CEO of the United States of America, which he, like Gordon Gecko in Wall Street, thinks can be saved by greed.  He is handling that role in the same way that he did his business enterprises, setting grandiose goals and using every possible means of pressure at his disposal to get his way.  Presidential means include the use of the US military to detain hostile foreign leaders and, in this case, to replace their governments with cooperative ones.  The serious complicating factor is President Trump's chronic inability, both in business and as president, to reconcile his vision with reality.  He spent much of his business career decreeing that massive losses had magically turned to profits, and he now demands the Nobel Prize for ending wars that are still going on and claims in the face of the facts that no one has been murdered in Washington, D.C. for months.  He declared during the press conference that the Venezuelan vice president had told Secretary of State Rubio over the telephone that she would do whatever was necessary, but she is actually demanding that he release and return President Maduro.  And it would appear that there are no US forces left in Venezuela right now either to subdue the country or to "run" it.  Venezuela is larger in area than Texas and has a nearly equal population of about 30 million people.  As I write, Secretary Rubio has just announced that we will keep naval and military forces offshore in the Caribbean and continue to blockade oil exports as "leverage" against Venezuela.  Trump has just hinted that we might take direct, personal action against the vice president as well, if she doesn't cooperate.  This sounds like a new case of assuming that we can have whatever we want by wishing for it.  Rubio also made clear during yesterday's press conference that he would be glad to turn the nation's attention to regime change in Cuba, the home of his forbears.  

The abduction of Maduro has created a new media frenzy that will at least temporarily reduce attention to the Epstein documents.  It is the latest act in the long-running movie serial, Donald Trump, Superhero.  I would not dare guess what the ultimate result of all this will be.

After one year

 Today, for the first time in our history, the United States has a president who has no understanding of the political and intellectual principles that have always defined our nation and that enabled us to survive the great crises of 1861-5 and 1929-45.  The government that the Framers bequeathed to us demands respect for established procedures and precedents.  As our first presidents repeatedly reminded us, that government depends upon mutual respect--which Lincoln maintained even during the Civil War--and upon a commitment to principles bigger than any of us as individuals.  And from the beginning we have tried, with intermittent success, to rely upon known facts to analyze what threatened our nation and how to meet that threat.  Both Lincoln in 1861-5 and FDR in 1940-45 based the great wars they fought on the need to preserve democracy--Lincoln to defend it against the domestic threat of rebellion and FDR to protect it from lawless regimes abroad.  In both of those cases the enormous physical and material sacrifices the nation made to secure victory reaffirmed faith in our institutions, and after 1945 in particular that victory led to measures that improved the lives of tens of millions of Americans, not least in recognition to the sacrifices they had made.  When William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote The Fourth Turning in the mid-1990s they expected to see a similar drama enacted in the next 20 years or so. That has not happened and it looks to me as if it will not happen.

More than any other man ever elected President, Donald Trump has devoted his life to the pursuit of great wealth, fame, and influence.  The first few decades of his business career revealed him to be a man of very erratic judgment, but he compensated for his failures by creating a robber baron persona with the help of an ever-cooperative media.  He built a internationally well-known brand, and that seems to have allowed him to escape ruin during several bankruptcies because he convinced his creditors that his enterprises would do better if they remained associated with his name.  He had developed the technique that he has relied upon as president: reshaping reality with a steady stream of boasts of his own greatness that kept the myth of Trump the great businessman alive.  He insisted that he could do things that lesser men never could.  In the 2000s, when he had exhausted most of his credit with the financial community, he brilliantly turned to television, where he could play the role of managerial genius in a safe environment.  Full disclosure: I think that I watched the first two seasons of The Apprentice myself.  He never impressed me as a manager at all, but he was evidently an effective  performer.

The Apprentice also flattered Trump's self image of omnipotence and invincibility--the characteristic that now defines his second presidency.  He and his devoted team identify and solve every problem saving the nation, including some that we did not know that we had.  He maintains this image, of course, by creating an alternative reality based upon alternative facts.  Our now-stagnant economy is growing at astonishing rates, our 2.7 percent inflation doesn't exist, we enjoy unprecedented respect around the world, huge investments are flowing into the United States, etc., etc., etc.  At the personal level this technique suggests some emotional desperation, a complete inability to admit failure of any kind.  It must be very exhausting to be Donald Trump, and the strain is showing.  

Trump has always loved publicity, and early in his career as a builder he impersonated a publicist to plant favorable stories about himself in major media outlets.  He still has a symbiotic relationship with the media--including his most bitter enemies within it--as shown by its newest obsession, the gift that keeps on giving, the Epstein files.  Our leading newspapers turn out a steady stream of stories about Trump policies going badly and setbacks in the federal courts, reflecting their unshakable belief that someone so at odds with everything they believe simply cannot succeed.  They are not, however, a real threat to his power.

Tariffs rank with illegal immigration as Trump's highest, most sincere policy priorities.  He sees the federal government as his own corporation and cannot resist taking advantage of the revenue-raising opportunities that tariffs provide.  Tariffs and the threat of tariffs are also helping his minions arrange investment deals, which if they bear fruit will surely benefit some of his political allies.  Trump's crypto sales are a new and unrivaled means of turning his brand into cash.  Yet the tariffs have already had disastrous impact upon some economic groups, led by farmers, and they may have more.  They must contribute to inflation which is a real problem.  While our major institutions have obviously failed to convince one-half of the American people that Trump is irretrievably evil, our voters will never surrender their constitutional right to punish their political leadership for poor economic performance.  That remains the most powerful dynamic in American politics, and November's off-year elections showed that it is alive and well in red states and blue states alike.  Yet a Democratic victory in the House elections eleven months from now will only create more chaos in Washington, and new impeachment resolutions will not do any good.  And if Trump's health failed him, it's hard to believe that J. D. Vance would reverse any of his policies. 

Trump's rise is more of a symptom than a cause of our national calamity.  The degradation of our public life, the irresponsibility of our media,  the decline of our educational system, and above all the decades-long assault upon authority of all kinds have combined to make him possible.  Lincoln and FDR led the nation through great crises by mobilizing it to solve enormous problems: disunion and slavery in Lincoln's case, and economic crisis and world war in Roosevelt's.  Our leadership has repeatedly failed to rally the nation to solve our own economic and political problems, and Trump now denies that any economic problems exist.  He has risen to the presidency twice because he knew how to take advantages of our society's weaknesses.  We do not know how, and when, they will be overcome.  It is probably too late for another Lincoln or FDR to reverse these trends, even if one were on the horizon.  The  heroic period in US history that began with FDR and lasted through Reagan is definitely over--but it still belongs to our heritage, and always will.

What has happened to journalism. . .and academia. . .and Hollywood

 I am vacationing, but a substack I get pointed me to this remarkable article about changes in the job market in journalism.  I had already witnessed the parallel changes in academia--where they have also extended to the highest levels.  I would not be pointing you to this article were it not so well-documented.  I'll be back with something of my own next week.

Europe and the United States in Times of Crisis

 Sometime during the 2000s--I think it was around 2005, but it could have been a little later--I was invited to give a talk at a conference in Berlin.  (I have forgotten the details.)  The Bush Administration was already turning away from the legacy of the New Deal, and I already doubted that Democrats would be able to reverse that trend.  I gave a talk reflecting some of themes of my article on the great Atlantic crises of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, which I am linking here.  It focuses on the interplay of political developments in the United States on the one hand, and Britain, France, and Germany on the other.  In the crisis of the late eighteenth century, the United States invented modern democracy, while Britain emerged with an even stronger aristocracy and France and other continental states mixed monarchy with bureaucracy.  In the crisis of 1854-71 (approximate), the victory of the North in the Civil War not only preserved democracy in the United States--the goal Lincoln defined throughout the Civil War--but gave democrats in Europe a tremendous boost, creating governments incorporating universal male suffrage (or something fairly close to it) in Britain, France, and Germany.  The 1929-45 crisis of the twentieth century continued that process an created an alliance of democratic nations based on the rights of labor and welfare states.  By the time I gave my talk in Berlin, the United States was clearly moving in a very different direction at home, and I urged my European audience to make sure that their nations preserved the democratic welfare states that had grown up in the last half century or so, no matter what happened across the Atlantic.

Late last week the Trump Administration issued its first National Security Strategy.  These documents can be very important.  In 2002 the Bush Administration issued one announcing that the US government would wage preventive war against any hostile state threatening to acquire nuclear weapons.   That strategy was implemented in Iraq--where it turned out that the nuclear threat no longer existed--and the Bush Administration had hoped to implement it against Iran and North Korea as well. This year the Trump Administration, working with Israel, did execute it against Iran.  There are many interesting aspects to the new Trump Administration strategy.  A key section on the Balance of Power is equivocal and somewhat self-contradictory, pledging on the one hand to "prevent the global, and in some cases even regional, domination of others," while adding, "The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations."  The section on the Western Hemisphere defines a "'Trump Corollary' to the Monroe Doctrine"--"We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere"--which adds nothing new to traditional policy, and it says nothing, mercifully, about the President's stated desire to make Canada the 51st state, and doesn't refer to the "Gulf of America" or to possible regime change in Venezuela.  It reaffirms a US military commitment to Taiwan.  The most striking portion of the strategy document discusses the subject of my Berlin talk: the political relationship of the United States and Europe.

In astonishing words, the strategy document flatly rejects key policies and beliefs of all the major contemporary European governments and calls explicitly for their replacement by Europe's new rightwing parties.  This begins with a discussion of Europe, the US, and the Russia-Ukraine War.  While declaring a goal of enabling Ukraine's "survival as a viable state," it also rejects allowing Ukraine in NATO and blames the Europeans for the continuation of the war within a most original analysis of where Europe is and where it is going.  (Since I last posted two weeks ago the Trump Administration has backed away from its pro-Russian demands upon Ukraine, but we cannot predict what will come next.)

"Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP—down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today—partly owing to national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness.

"But this economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.

"Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies. Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.

"This lack of self-confidence is most evident in Europe’s relationship with Russia. European allies enjoy a significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure, save nuclear weapons. As a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine, European relations with Russia are now deeply attenuated, and many Europeans regard Russia as an existential threat. Managing European relations with Russia will require significant U.S. diplomatic engagement, both to reestablish conditions of strategic stability across the Eurasian landmass, and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states."

The document rejects "writing off" Europe in favor of changing the direction of European politics so as to prevent "certain NATO members" from becoming "majority non-European" within decades. It specifically recommends "cultivating resistance to Europe's current trajectory within European nations."  This can mean only one thing: promoting the advent to power of the new right in Europe, including Nigel Farage's Reform Party in Britain, Marine Le Pen's National Rally Party in France, and the Alternative for Germany led by Alice Weidel.  In previous eras the US government resisted the advent to power of Communist parties in states like Italy and France, but never before has it endorsed the victory of opposition parties.  And the question, it must be said, is whether the Trump Administration might be on the side of history in setting this goal.  The latest opinion poll in Britain shows the Reform Party with 31 percent support, compared to 20 percent for the Conservatives, 14 percent for the governing Labour Party, 18 percent for the Green Party and 11 percent for the Liberal Democrats.  In France Jordan Bardella (who has replaced the convicted Le Pen) and the National Rally Party show 36 percent support, more than the next two more traditional candidates combined (Emile Macron cannot run again.)  In Germany the latest poll shows the Alternative for Germany with 26 percent support compared to 25 percent for the Christian Democratic Union and 36 percent total for three left wing parties, the Socialists, Greens, and Left Party.  (All polls listed in Wikipedia.) The traditional German parties in particular have been pulling together to try to keep the AfD (its German acronym) out of power, drawing public criticism from Vice President Vance early this year.  The National Security Strategy effectively endorses those parties as candidates for national leadership in our oldest allies.  The prospects of Farage and the Alternative for Germany still look pretty bleak to me, but the National Rally is solidly established as the second leading party in France and the Macron government has become very unpopular.  

This could turn out to be parallel to the last two great Atlantic crises, when Europe did follow the US lead.  The Trump Administration is leading a revolt against our bureaucratic state, based upon impartial principles, to create a non-regulatory government dedicated to helping enterprises of all kinds thrive in return for their financial support. Bureaucracy is indeed stronger in continental Europe, at least, than it has been in the United States, and it is drawing the same kind of resentment. That was what led to Brexit just a few months before the first election of Donald Trump.  

I learned many decades ago to distinguish a nation's government from its people, as the diplomatic documents of the early and mid-20th century invariably did.  The Trump Administration--the government of the United States today--has already lost popularity among the American people and they may well repudiate it in 2024 and 2026, but not before it has made drastic changes in our government's relationship to our society and to its foreign policy abroad.  It has officially embarked upon a completely new course in Europe.  I hope that European governments will rise to the occasion as most of them failed to do 90 years ago.