WASHINGTON _ President Trump's double-whammy assaults on NATO and the Paris accord on climate change have confirmed his break from America's commitment to collective action against threats to democratic government, which has endured since the end of World War II and the Cold War that followed.
His trumpeting of "America first" in his first presidential trip abroad was rightly assessed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel as a go-it-alone declaration by Trump. She pointedly told her countrymen they could no longer count on the United States as leader of the Western community of nations.
In doing so, she unmasked Trump's abysmal misreading of the critical outgrowth of the era's central geopolitical battle of philosophies, which brought the end of fascism in Nazi Germany and Italy, imperialism in Japan and, finally, Soviet communism.
Since its founding in 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was the collective bulwark against communist expansion into Eastern and Central Europe. It eventually shattered the rival Warsaw Pact and cemented the military and economic superiority of the extended Western alliance, including the U.S., Canada and Australia.
The recent evidence of nationalist tendencies in the United Kingdom's split from the European Union, and similar rumblings in France, have been welcomed by Trump as justification for declaring "America first" against the rest of the world taking avaricious advantage of us.
He seems unwilling or unable to recognize the damage he has already inflicted on this nation's image and reputation as the global leader, politically and militarily. While continuing to boast of American superiority in every realm, and of his own personal qualities of judgment and will, Trump repeatedly conveys a laughable sense of national victimhood that his faithful flowers readily accept.
In recklessly withdrawing the United States from the entirely voluntary Paris accord, Trump ignored that the nation he now leads is the world's second worst emitter of carbon dioxide behind only China. He has acted contrary to the wide warnings of a near-unanimous scientific community that human use of fossil fuels is changing the Earth's climate, perhaps irrevocably.
A debate that ought to be evolving on a nonpartisan basis has Democrats generally seizing the initiative for remaining in the Paris accord, as Republicans are generally stumbling to find their footing. Many leading energy producers, however, have already broken with Trump on the issue.
Two of the leading Democratic governors, Jerry Brown of California and Andrew Cuomo of New York, have been aggressive advocates of tighter carbon emission controls in their states. Former Democratic Vice President Al Gore has re-emerged as a major voice opposing the Trump pullout, having personally sought to dissuade him.
The argument over climate change has put the Trump administration on the defensive once again as it tries, even with GOP in control of both houses of Congress, to repeal and replace Obamacare. The Trump political team, meanwhile, remains bogged down by congressional and FBI investigations into alleged collusion with the Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 election.
A push for infrastructure repair is about to start as a new possible political diversion from that political headache. But testimony by fired FBI Director James Comey scheduled Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee will keep the public focus on him. He is expected to say he was asked by Trump not to take legal action against former Gen. Michael Flynn, formerly Trump's national security adviser. Such testimony obviously will add more credibility to claims that Trump is has obstructed justice.
Whatever else he may achieve, Trump's radical, mindless attempt to chart a new course in American foreign policy will do much to derail the U.S. leadership of the West that has prevailed since the victories against dictatorship in the last century. Where is the Republican establishment pushback against this assault on what has been a core GOP article of conservative faith for so many years?
