Present at the Destruction

Trump is destroying the foundations of the unprecedented peace, security, and prosperity that the United States essentially built 80 years ago, and has enjoyed ever since.

By Robert Zubrin

Over the past three weeks, President Donald Trump has launched a massive attack on both the Atlantic alliance and the international system of free trade. The harmfulness of these moves cannot be overstated. To understand why, some background is necessary.

The United States has a pretty good track record at winning wars, but there is only one important conflict in recent memory where we also won the peace. Fortunately, this singular victory occurred in conjunction with the largest of them all, World War II.

The postwar peace was the result of an extraordinary work of American statecraft. It occurred because a very serious and smart group of men realized that, if the fruits of the hard won victory were not to turn rotten again, the flaws in the world system that had led to the global conflagration needed to be corrected. So they created two critical institutions.

The first was the Western alliance, later formalized as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to provid…