More Humiliation on the World Stage

The long-term consequences of allowing this to continue

[Photo Credit: Fabrice Coffrini via Getty Images]

The one thing Donald has always feared most is to be seen as a loser and the humiliation that comes with that. Given the perfect storm of his incompetence, increasing decline across several categories (the psychological, the cognitive, and the physical); and the sense that he is losing control—over himself and the narrative—and the desperation that goes along with that, it was perhaps inevitable that humiliation has come to stalk him at every turn. He humiliates himself on an almost daily basis and often in the most public ways imaginable. It feels like a bit of cosmic poetic justice.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, his humiliation is ours. The rest of the world doesn’t see Donald as the problem. Our allies lay the blame squarely at the feet of an American electorate that, with full knowledge of Donald’s incompetence, psychological unfitness, and megalomania, put him back in charge; a judicial branch, with the corrupt Supreme Court as its back-stop, that granted him virtually complete immunity and continues to expand the reach of his imperial presidency; and a legislative branch that has ceded its own Constitutional authority to rein in Donald’s worst impulses despite his blatant corruption, obvious mental decline, and clear desire to dismantle the post-World War II order for his own profit.

Donald may be the one threatening and insulting our closest allies; he may be the one giving the orders, but it is, rightly, America that the rest of the world condemns.

Yesterday, Donald addressed world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. His remarks underscored the degree to which he is psychologically, emotionally, and cognitively unfit to lead the most powerful country on the planet. Somehow, he managed to outdo the disastrous press conference he gave in the White House briefing on Tuesday, which was itself defined by incoherence, delusional babbling, and lies.

At Davos, his speech, using the word loosely, was a melange of threats, unfounded and ahistorical grievances, and his thus far unimpeded imperialistic ambitions and illustrates the dangerous crossroads we’ve reached.

Throughout, Donald spoke openly about his contempt for NATO and his sense that he is owed something:

The United States is treated very unfairly by NATO. I want to tell you that. And when you think about it, nobody can dispute it. We give so much and we get so little in return. And I’ve been a critic of NATO for many years, and yet I’ve done more to help NATO than any other president, by far, than any other person.

You wouldn’t have NATO if I didn’t get involved in my first term. The war with Ukraine is an example. We are thousands of miles away, separated by a giant ocean. It’s a war that should have never started, and it wouldn’t have started if the 2020 U.S. presidential election weren’t rigged.

It was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that. They found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. It’s probably [not] breaking news, but it should be. It was a rigged election.

Donald then doubled down on his fixation with taking over Greenland, as though this were an option legitimately available to him, even though Greenland is a semi-autonomous territory governed by Denmark, one of America’s longtime NATO allies.

It’s the United States alone that can protect this giant mass of land, this giant piece of ice—develop it and improve it and make it so that it’s good for Europe and safe for Europe and good for us…

There’s nothing wrong with it. But this would not be a threat to NATO. This would greatly enhance the security of the entire alliance, the NATO alliance.

Donald has no understanding of how alliances work, because the best way to ensure the continued security of the region is to coordinate with our NATO partners, as we have been doing for decades. But throughout the course of his entire life, everything has always been his for the taking. Donald has wholly embraced my grandfather’s philosophy that life is a zero-sum game: there can be only one winner, only one person on top. In his worldview, alliances and friendships simply do not exist or, to the extent they do, should be met with contempt. As far as Donald is concerned, anybody who is willing to work with somebody else—or any country that is willing to work with another country—to advance an agenda that promotes the common good is a loser.

Donald repeated his claim that the United States gets nothing from NATO, which for him is reason enough to destabilize the Western alliance that has preserved relative global stability since World War II.

We’ve never gotten anything, except we pay for NATO. And we paid for many years until I came along.

We paid for, in my opinion, 100% of NATO because they weren’t paying their bills. And all we’re asking for [emphasis mine] is to get Greenland, including right title and ownership, because you need the ownership to defend it.

You can’t defend it on a lease. Number one, legally, it’s not defensible that way—totally. And number two, psychologically, who the hell wants to defend a license agreement or a lease?

The claim that the United States has never received anything from NATO is demonstrably false. NATO allies stood with the United States in Afghanistan after September 11. They also participated, however tragically—in Iraq. To pretend otherwise is a disgraceful and self-serving bit of revisionist history.

Donald then issued a thinly veiled threat against America’s allies.

We never asked for anything and we never got anything. We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be, frankly, unstoppable…

I don’t have to use force. I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force.

Once again, the lie resurfaces. The United States has asked much of NATO and our allies have responded with their support. Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty ensures this kind of collective defense.

Donald’s message is unmistakable: he wants Greenland, he believes he deserves it, and he will obtain it one way or another. He has said he will take it “the easy way or the hard way.”

Other NATO members must take Donald at his word. The fact that major media outlets focused on his claim that he “won’t use force,” rather than on the threat embedded within his rhetoric, is of a piece with the herculean efforts undertaken over the last decade to normalize his increasingly abnormal behavior.

If America absents itself from the post-World War II liberal democratic alliance, that doesn’t mean of necessity that the alliance will fail (although that becomes the more likely outcome); but it does mean we will we have come to the end of American leadership. We are already a country greatly diminished; we will become, perhaps permanently, a country scorned, a pariah.

America’s humiliation aside, what we saw in Davos was the dawning recognition among leaders of the EU and other allies that a red line has been crossed. As Belgium’s prime minister, Bart De Wever, succinctly put it, “A Nato country is threatening another Nato country with military invasion.”

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney put it this way:

The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing … the illusion begins to crack. . . . We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

Human rights lawyer, Geoffrey Nice said,

The rules-based order is over, and its ending reflects the decades-old fallacy that European and US values and security interests were the same.

We do not need any more proof that Donald is a deeply psychiatrically disordered man, but if we did, more evidence can be found every day in his outbursts, his hypersomnia, his alarming lack of impulse control, and his increasingly obvious deviance and corruption.

It is, more importantly, the response of the Republican Party and other dark forces in America that is more relevantly diagnostic. Donald threatens to dismantle American institutions and governance and, with his saber-rattling and threats to our allies, destroy the post-World War II order. The silence of Donald’s enablers is tantamount to complicity. Their unwavering dedication to a madman and an agenda that threatens to destabilize America domestically and internationally tells us everything we need to know about what we are fighting against and against whom we need to wage the fight.