Oceanic Folly
William McKinley would like a word with Donald Trump
This is a brief note about something Donald Trump said.
It’s not the worst thing Donald Trump said. It’s probably not even the worst thing Donald Trump said on any randomly selected day.
But I do want to highlight it and contrast it with a certain historical document because I’m afraid what Trump said is something many Americans think. And that thing is wrong. Dangerously wrong. (Also, the historical document is wonderful and deserves to be better known.)
Trump made the statement in an interview with populist gadfly Nigel Farage on Britain’s GB television network in March. The big controversy then was Trump’s earlier comment about inviting Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies that didn’t “pay up.” Farage all but urged Trump to assure NATO he wasn’t abandoning it. Trump obliged. In classic Trump fashion.
Transcribing Trump is always a challenge thanks to the man’s habit of spraying words with joyful disregard for syntax, meaning, or fact. Most of what we read in newspapers has been cleaned up to be more comprehensible. I think that’s a mistake. So following is a transcript generated from a recording by an automated transcriber.
Why should we guard these these countries that have a lot of money. And the United States was paying for most of NATO. And when I went there, and I already had it out with them, and now they stopped paying again, but now they're paying because of those comments that you saw two or three weeks ago. I don't know if you know, but a lot of money's come in since those comments were made. So NATO was not paying.
As pundits have pointed out a thousand times — and Trump has ignored a thousand times — NATO doesn’t issue bills that members pay. Members pay for their own militaries. NATO expects them to maintain certain capabilities. And NATO sets a minimum spending requirement of 2% of GDP. But spending is controlled at the national level. No country is doing a dine-and-dash on NATO.
But I went to the first meeting early in my administration, and I saw what was going on. I said, you're gonna have to pay your bills, everybody. And the second meeting, I hit them hard. And the question was asked by the head of a major country in front of everyone else, 28 countries at the time, including us, they said, so if we don't pay our bills, are you going to protect us from Russia? I said, You mean you're delinquent? You're not paying the bills? Yes. Nope, I'm not going to pay you. We're not going to do it. We're not going to defend you. If you're not paying your bills. We're not going to defend you. It's very simple. And hundreds of billions of dollars came flowing. And now if I say yes, I am, they're not going to pay their bills. Why would they do it? Obama would go make a speech, Bush would go make a speech. And frankly, my biggest fan, I don't know if that's still true. I would hope so Secretary, the Secretary General, Mr. Stoltenberg was, he couldn't believe it. He said, I can't believe it. He got people to pay up hundreds of billions of dollars. And NATO became strong because of me. Now. NATO has to treat the US fairly, because if it's not for the United States, NATO literally doesn't even exist. But they took advantage of us like most countries…. But uh, you know, the United States should pay its fair share, not everybody else's fair share. Fair enough. I believe the United States was paying 90% of NATO, the cost of NATO, could be 100%.
This is all gibberish. All of it. No, I won’t go through the numbers because what’s the point? Anyone who believes this crap won’t care. The simple truth is that defence spending in NATO countries has indeed risen substantially, and continues to rise rapidly, thanks not to Donald Trump but to Vladimir Putin: Nothing gooses military spending like a dictator invading his neighbours.
But that’s all background. What I want to highlight is what next emerged from Trump’s stream of consciousness.
It was the most unfair thing and don't forget, it's more important to them than it is to us. We have an ocean in between some problems. Okay. We have a nice, big, beautiful ocean.
A while back, I wrote a history of American isolationism and argued that it is wrong to say, as so many do, that Trump is an isolationist. He’s not. At least not in the traditional sense. He’s more of what we might call a “gangster isolationist.”
But that reference to “a nice, big, beautiful ocean”? Adjectives aside, that is classic isolationism.
Since America’s founding, isolationists argued that the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans were such mighty defences that the United States did not need foreign alliances. (Or a large peacetime military. That’s the part of isolationism Trump & Co. always ignore.)
Read almost any isolationist in the 19th or early 20th centuries and you’ll see references to America’s big, beautiful oceans. The rest of the world be damned: America was safe and sound behind its mighty oceanic ramparts. (Politicians were a lot more poetic than Trump back in the day.)
That made considerable sense in the era of George Washington. It made sense in Andrew Jackson’s time. Even in Abraham Lincoln’s.
But in the late 19th century, with the rise of the telegraph and the steamship and global trade and migration — and the explosive growth of the American economy — it gradually made less and less sense.
By the time the 19th century became the 20th century, prominent observers were saying that isolationism had to be consigned to the history books. The world had simply changed too much. Technology had “annihilated time and space,” to use a favourite phrase of the era. The United States could no longer rest comfortably behind its oceans and ignore the rest of the world.
One of those observers was President William McKinley.
Speaking at a world’s fair in Buffalo, New York, he laid out his vision of the changing world in a grand speech on September 5, 1901.
After all, how near one to the other is every part of the world. Modern inventions have brought into close relation widely separated peoples and made them better acquainted. Geographic and political divisions will continue to exist, but distances have been effaced. Swift ships and swift trains are becoming cosmopolitan. They invade fields which a few years ago were impenetrable. The world's products are exchanged as never before, and with increasing transportation facilities come increasing knowledge and larger trade. Prices are fixed with mathematical precision by supply and demand. The world's selling prices are regulated by market and crop reports.
We travel greater distances in a shorter space of time and with more ease than was ever dreamed of by the fathers. Isolation is no longer possible or desirable. The same important news is read, though in different languages, the same day in all christendom. The telegraph keeps us advised of what is occurring everywhere, and the press foreshadows, with more or less accuracy, the plans and purposes of the nations.
Market prices of products and of securities are hourly known in every commercial mart, and the investments of the people extend beyond their own national boundaries into the remotest parts of the earth. Vast transactions are conducted and international exchanges are made by the tick of the cable. Every event of interest is immediately bulletined. The quick gathering and transmission of news, like rapid transit, are of recent origin and are only made possible by the genius of the inventor and the courage of the investor. It took a special messenger of the Government, with every facility known at the time for rapid travel, nineteen days to go from the city of Washington to New Orleans with a message to General Jackson that the war with England had ceased and a treaty of peace had been signed. How different now!
We reached General Miles in Puerto Rico by cable, and he was able, through the military telegraph, to stop his army on the firing line with the message that the United States and Spain had signed a protocol suspending hostilities. We knew almost instantly of the first shots fired at Santiago, and the subsequent surrender of the Spanish forces was known at Washington within less than an hour of its consummation The first ship of Cervera's fleet had hardly emerged from that historic harbor when the fact was flashed to our capital, and the swift destruction that followed was announced immediately through the wonderful medium of telegraphy.
So accustomed are we to safe and easy communication with distant lands that its temporary interruption, even in ordinary times, results in loss and inconvenience. We shall never forget the days of anxious waiting and awful suspense when no information was permitted to be sent from Pekin, and the diplomatic representatives of the nations in China, cut off from all communication, inside and outside of the walled capital, were surrounded by an angry and misguided mob that threatened their lives; nor the joy that filled the world when a single message from the Government of the United States brought through our minister the first news of the safety of the besieged diplomats.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was not a mile of steam railroad on the globe. Now there are enough miles to make its circuit many times. Then there was not a line of electric telegraph; now we have a vast mileage traversing all lands and seas. God and man have linked the nations together. No nation can longer be indifferent to any other. And as we are brought more and more in touch with each other the less occasion there is for misunderstandings and the stronger the disposition, when we have differences, to adjust them in the court of arbitration, which is the noblest forum for the settlement of international disputes.
President McKinley — a Republican, please remember — went on to say that the United States must further develop and extend trade relations throughout the world. While McKinley had made his name as a backer of tariffs, he saw “reciprocity” — mutually agreed free trade — as the ultimate goal. The world will come together, develop, and advance, he insisted. What has already been achieved is glorious. But the future promises so much more.
Shortly after delivering this speech, McKinley was assassinated.
Now, here we are, 123 years later, in a world that is almost incomprehensibly more interconnected and interdependent than in McKinley’s day, and the leading candidate for president is prattling about cutting off trade and threatening alliances. Because America has “a nice, big, beautiful ocean.”
The ghost of William McKinley weeps.
Great as always. One small point that, as a fellow Canadian has no doubt occurred to you but does not seem to have dawned on anyone else; Canada is among the Nato delinquents and, even by our own government's estimates, will remain so for some years. So Mr. Trump has invited Russia to mass troops along the longest undefended border in the world. Perhaps it has escaped the notice of his supporters that the world is round not spherical.
As a longtime admirer of the much-underrated William McKinley, i could not have stated his views on world trade cooperation any more succinctly than he did in his final speech— or as you have so ably recapped here—after being pulled by Congress into a war he did not want or approve of, but which he managed shrewdly and quickly. Becoming a world power meant, as he knew instinctively, that with it came real, imaginative responsibility for helping lead that world to a better state of affairs. Whether his viewpoint might have prevailed— some early prototype of the League of Nations, peaceful but flexible and proactive at heading off future wars through global prosperity— is probably unlikely, but at least he was willing to push for it. I think he would shudder to see what ridiculous nonsense his party seems so willing to embrace a century later, led by an unpredictable charlatan who could not think his way out of a wet paper bag— but talks loudly and laughably about his misunderstandings of where we have been and still need to go s a world power. Many thanks for this posting.