Is Trump's Unorthodoxy Becoming Orthodox?
Victor Davis Hanson Posted: Feb 04, 2020
Conventional Washington wisdom had assumed that an ascendant Beijing was almost preordained to world hegemony. Trump's tariffs and polarization of China were considered about the worst thing an American president could do.
The accepted bipartisan strategy was to accommodate, not oppose, China's growing power. The hope was that its newfound wealth and global influence would liberalize the ruling communist government.
Four years later, only a naif believes that. Instead, there is an emerging consensus that China's cutthroat violations of international norms were long ago overdue for an accounting.
China's re-education camps, its Orwellian internal surveillance, its crackdown on Hong Kong democracy activists and its secrecy about the deadly coronavirus outbreak have all convinced the world that China has now become a dangerous international outlier.
Trump courted moderate Arab nations in forming an anti-Iranian coalition opposed to Iran's terrorist and nuclear agendas. His policies utterly reversed the Obama administration's estrangement from Israel and outreach to Tehran.
Last week, Trump nonchalantly offered the Palestinians a take-it-or-leave-it independent state on the West Bank, but without believing that a West Bank settlement was the key to peace in the entire Middle East.
Trump's cancellation of the Iran deal, in particular, was met with international outrage. More global anger followed after the targeted killing of Iranian terrorist leader Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
In short, Trump's Middle East recalibrations won few supporters among the bipartisan establishment.
But recently, Europeans have privately started to agree that more sanctions are needed on Iran, that the world is better off with Soleimani gone, and that the West Bank is not central to regional peace.
Iran has now become a pariah. U.S.-sponsored sanctions have reduced the theocracy to near-bankruptcy. Most nations understand that if Iran kills Americans or openly starts up its nuclear program, the U.S. will inflict disproportional damage on its infrastructure -- a warning that at first baffled, then angered and now has humiliated Iran.
In other words, there is now an entirely new Middle East orthodoxy that was unimaginable just three years ago.
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