The United States under President Donald Trump is liked less by the rest of the world than it was during the presidencies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but it is furtively much more admired.
It is also more respected in the way that matters most, which is that other nations know they cannot ignore or flout us with impunity. The nation is more powerful.
The transformation is due to the leadership of a president unwilling to buy the fool’s gold of feigned foreign friendship at the price of American national security and the future of the West.
Trump’s detractors see his narcissism and avarice and make the mistake of thinking those are all that motivate him. They don’t believe that making America great again is a real goal or that he could approach it rationally even if he cared about it.
Their hatred blinds them, so they appraise him poorly and couldn’t bring themselves to give him credit even if the red miasma of their loathing did not prevent them from seeing he deserves it.
It’s true that Trump has no ideology or coherent set of principles. He clings to a jumble of mutually exclusive opinions, and they clash all the time in his startlingly contradictory pronouncements. But like the hedgehog that knows one big thing, Trump has a single irreducible aim, which is revealed by the MAGA slogan — it really is to restore this nation’s strength and global preeminence.
He never loses sight of it, and it guides him even when he makes sharp changes of course. It is there when he rhapsodizes about the beauty of tariffs and switches to the efficacy of trade deals. It is not lost when he is musing about doing a deal with Iran’s mullahs, nor when he is smashing them with bunker busters in Operation Midnight Hammer.
As an opportunist, he is always weighing disparate choices and recalibrating their relative merits. But that does not mean he wavers in what he is trying to achieve.
Which leaves America where, six months after Trump was sworn into office for the second time?
TRUMP AND DEMOCRATS FIGHT OVER THE FLAG
Here: The U.S. again dominates the Middle East with its ally, Israel; Russia has scuttled away, abandoning its Axis ally; China has been put on notice that America is not afraid to project power on the other side of the world; Iran, the sinister enemy of the past two generations, is a cowed paper tiger; Arab governments are delighted and moving toward normalizing relations with Jerusalem; NATO has agreed to rearm (although the promise to spend 5% of GDP will be fudged); trade deals are being struck; antagonistic foreign taxes are being withdrawn, the economy is humming along and stock prices stand at record highs; the southern border is secure and illegal immigrants are being sent home; billions of dollars stolen by Medicaid cheats are likely to be saved; and the 2017 tax cuts look like they will be made permanent, putting dollars back into the pockets of the Americans who earned them.
Not all of these gains will be secured. Some will be compromised, and others may go awry. But they all make the nation stronger. It’s what America voted for. That doesn’t happen by accident.