Donald Trump Poisons the World (and that's from a conservative)

David Brooks in the NYT:
"This week, two of Donald Trump’s top advisers, H. R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, wrote the following passage in The Wall Street Journal: “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a cleareyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.”

"That sentence is the epitome of the Trump project. It asserts that selfishness is the sole driver of human affairs. It grows out of a worldview that life is a competitive struggle for gain. It implies that cooperative communities are hypocritical covers for the selfish jockeying underneath.

"The essay explains why the Trump people are suspicious of any cooperative global arrangement, like NATO and the various trade agreements. It helps explain why Trump pulled out of the Paris global-warming accord. This essay explains why Trump gravitates toward leaders like Vladimir Putin, the Saudi princes and various global strongmen: They share his core worldview that life is nakedly a selfish struggle for money and dominance."
...
"We’ve seen this philosophy before, of course. Powerful, selfish people have always adopted this dirty-minded realism to justify their own selfishness. The problem is that this philosophy is based on an error about human beings and it leads to self-destructive behavior in all cases."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/opinion/donald-trump-poisons-the-world.html?_r=0

Similar op-eds:

The Atlantic: The Death Knell for America's Global Leadership

"In an op-ed, the Trump administration’s “adults in the room” envision America in the image of its leader: selfish, isolated, brutish, domineering, and driven by immediate appetites rather than ideals or even longer-term interests."

Daniel Drezner in the Washington Post: "The most extraordinary op-ed of 2017 - I do not mean extraordinary in a good way":

"This paragraph highlights the problem in two ways. First — and this is so obvious I can’t believe I have to type out these words — the United States can’t simultaneously proclaim “America first” and then claim any kind of moral strength. Saying loudly and repeatedly that American values are not going to be a cornerstone of American foreign policy strips you of any moral power whatsoever.

"The second and bigger problem is that the “embrace” of a Hobbesian vision of the world by the most powerful country in the world pretty much guarantees Hobbesian reciprocity by everyone else. Most international relations scholars would agree that there are parts of the world that fit this brutal description. But even realists don’t think it’s a good thing. Cooperation between the United States and its key partners and allies is not based entirely on realpolitik principles. It has helped foster a zone of stability across Europe, North America and the Pacific Rim that has lasted quite some time. In many issue areas, such as trade or counterterrorism or climate change, countries gain far more from cooperation than competition.

"Furthermore, such an embrace of the Hobbesian worldview is, in many ways, anti-American. U.S. foreign policy for the past 70 years was premised on the notion that even in an anarchic world, one could nurture an international order grounded on American values of liberty and democracy and free enterprise. Even before 1945, when the United States was not a superpower, America trafficked in the aspirational goal of a world governed by international law.

"Has the United States always lived up to these aspirations? No, of course not. But these exceptions and emendations were usually acknowledged as unfortunate necessities. Indeed, these values were an important part of American soft power that helped attract allies across the world and keep them after the end of the Cold War, when realists predicted that a balancing coalition might have emerged."