Trump Does Not Know How to Run an Empire
Even if he doesn’t know it, Trump’s war on the bureaucracy is in direct conflict with his plans to exert power abroad.
America’s 41st president, George H. W. Bush, hated the word empire, but he knew how to run one. He was president at the moment the Berlin Wall fell: when the United States instantly became a unipolar power. His deft foreign policy made him the second greatest one-term president in American history (after James K. Polk, who oversaw the largest-ever expansion of our territory, making us truly a continental nation). The elder Bush knew exactly how to both project and husband American power. In order to keep the Pacific stable, he refused to break diplomatic relations with China after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, as members of the Washington policy and intellectual class then were demanding. He refused to make a victory tour through Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War, in order not to humiliate the Soviets, who might then have used military force to preserve the Warsaw Pact. And he refused to march on to Baghdad after liberating Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1991, for fear of dismantling the Iraqi state.
