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William S. Cohen was secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton. He was previously a U.S. senator from Maine, U.S. representative for Maine’s 2nd Congressional District and a member of the Bangor City Council.
Baseball’s great philosopher Yogi Berra once observed, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” It is well to keep this epic insight in mind for any attempt to forecast the political events that may take place beginning Jan. 20.
During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump invoked the “America First” mantra that contained broad populist and nationalist themes but was short on specificity. Trump pledged to “take our country back” — from whom and to where — was never clearly defined.
Ambiguity in presidential campaign rhetoric is not unprecedented. It has the virtue of permitting a candidate’s supporters to hum a popular melody without knowing all of the song’s lyrics. But the lack of clarity also contains the risk of sowing discontent when partisan loyalists feel their expectations have been betrayed.
Candidate Trump, for example, promised to secure our nation’s borders; aggressively round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants; preserve American jobs for Americans; uproot the “deep state”; and place tariffs on all foreign-made goods, particularly on those from China, all while lowering inflation.
In the minds of MAGA Republicans, the word “FOREIGN” was printed in uppercase letters, while the internal contradictions contained in the policy agenda were relegated to footnotes. This became evident when Trump recently agreed to support Elon Musk’s and Vivek Ramaswamy’s call to expand the H-1B visa program to bring more highly skilled workers to America to make us more competitive in the fields of science and technology.
Trump loyalists cried foul, asserting that, knowingly or not, he was supporting the “replacement theory,” a plan to replace American workers with lower-waged (and likely nonwhite) talent from foreign countries.
More discontents are likely to follow if: higher tariffs on foreign-made goods increase the costs of daily necessities; agricultural enterprises lose their undocumented workforce and risk having their crops left unharvested or their milking cows go untended; thousands of civil servants are replaced with untrained partisans, causing government services to sputter; the American people see armed military personnel used to suppress peaceful protests or to enforce immigration deportations; and attempts to eliminate “Obamacare” in favor of a health care “concept” that fails to include coverage for preexisting medical conditions or a sufficient immigrant labor force to deliver appropriate health care service.
These concerns may prove unfounded or exaggerated, but it is not unreasonable to assume that President Trump will have to trim his promises if wants to avoid creating an economic environment that jeopardizes the razor-thin Republican majority in the 2026 congressional elections.
In foreign policy matters, the America First declaration has caused our allies to experience unprecedented levels of anxiety and prompted them to ponder a series of important questions.
Will Trump: Suspend providing bullets and billions to help Ukraine defend its freedom against Russia’s brutal war? Refuse to express support for NATO’S Article 5 provisions or for the existence of NATO itself? Embolden Vladimir Putin to expand his territorial ambitions to the Baltics and beyond? Signal to China’s president, Xi Jinping, that an America unwilling to defend a struggling democracy in Europe would not be eager to help defend a small Asian island that “belongs” to China’s mainland? Wage the equivalent of a new “cold war” with China or adopt a policy of “managed competition”? Cause our Indo-Pacific allies to doubt our security reliability and, for some, to turn to developing nuclear weapons? How these questions are answered will profoundly affect global economic and security prospects.
While Trump’s transactional and unilateralist proclivities will bedevil our allies, by contrast, “strong men” adversaries who govern by fear and retribution appear to welcome his arrival since a less interventionist America (the Panama Canal and Greenland excluded) is likely to provide them with greater latitude for international mischief and for suppressing internal political dissent without condemnation or consequence.
Much of the above will likely be dismissed as doom-and-gloom hypothesizing by the liberal elite, and it may turn out that Trump’s America First policies will prove successful in achieving domestic prosperity and global stability.
No laws, institutions, customs or cultures should be able to claim immunity from change. New ideas, or even a reversion to old ones, can bring about improvement in our personal lives and the fortunes of our country. It would be well to remember Anton Chekov’s message in his play “The Cherry Orchard,” where an aristocratic landowner is forced to sell her family orchard to pay off debts. The sound of axes cutting down the cherry trees on the family estate to serve as lumber for the new landowner was both haunting and instructive about the failure to adapt to the forces of change.
History will have to judge whether it would have been better to remodel the structure of America’s checks-and-balance republic rather than swinging a large axe against many of its cherished pillars.
