“There is no virtue in ignorance,” said US President Barack Obama, speaking at a commencement ceremony at Rutgers University, NJ, on 15 May. He was commenting on Donald Trump, the Republican Party's presidential elections frontrunner. Rutgers is where I earned a master's degree in 1954 in history and political science, a great preparation for later degrees in international law and international organisations. More importantly, Rutgers taught me how to do research, how religion and politics intersect, and how to learn about American economic history. It was one of my real alma maters. There is now a possibility that a con man like Donald Trump may assume America's presidency. If he does, a Trump presidency could signal total lunacy in US foreign policy. This would not lead to the collapse of America, however. America, the home of continuous innovation through education and selective immigration, is not collapsible. It reinvents itself, like the generation of electricity in a car by simply using it to motor forward. America is now an angry place, but that anger brews on the bottom. The middle and the top keep on reinventing themselves, thus keeping the anger contained without much effect on global competitiveness. I recently read a book by Robert Gordon, a professor of economics at Northwestern University, The Rise and Fall of American Growth. It has been called “the most important book on economics this year”. But I am digressing from Trump's ignorance in many areas, especially foreign policy, which is the subject of this article. But before returning to this it is worth noting what Gordon says about American inventiveness. He describes the period from 1870 to 1970 as being a “golden age”. Why? “It was a period when the foundations of the modern world were laid — electricity, flush toilets, central heating, cars, planes, radio, vaccines, clean water and antibiotics,” Gordon writes, adding that all of these were innovations that transformed living and working conditions. But he has not proven the “fall of American growth”. He has advanced no proof that could be verified by observation or experience. A theory is no proof. This is where I wish to pivot back to Trump as a totally ignorant voice, most of all in foreign policy. He is worse than ignorant. He is dangerous. Forget for a moment about his lack of details, or his flip-flops. Just examine his few policy positions, which he keeps on reinterpreting to his hypnotised audiences. With his slogan “Making America Great Again,” Trump looks at greatness only through the prism of brutal power. For example, he pledges a major build-up of the US military, the swift destruction of the Islamic State (IS) group, the rejection of trade deals, the arming of Japan and South Korea with nuclear weapons, the disbanding, then the putting back together again, of NATO, and for US allies to pay for their own defence. He has announced his intention to scuttle the Iran nuclear deal, to force Mexico to pay for the planned construction of a wall on the border with the US, to take over Middle Eastern oil by force, and he has accused China of “ripping off America” while praising Russian President Vladimir Putin's policy of using force. He has advocated America's renunciation of its debts to other nations and represents the world's 1.7 billion Muslims as potential terrorists, saying he would ban them from entry to America “until we figure out what the hell is going on”. Trump is a real-estate mogul and a broker. He has no experience whatsoever in foreign policy. He has never run for any public office. He is simply tapping into the veins of rage of blue-collar Americans and left-behind Americans. He is manipulating the vacuum created by the fissures in the Republican Party between conservatives, Evangelicals, America Firsters, isolationists and nativists. Various tendencies are now bubbling to the surface of the American landscape. Each of the 50 states, especially under the Obama administration, has been prone to asserting state rights over federal rights. Texas is not the only state that threatens secession from the Union, as its constitution provides for that possibility. There is a US Congress hobbled by inaction because of deep divisions between a Republican majority and a Democratic minority, and a president who is obstructed in the halls of Congress from moving any legislation forward, or even securing a hearing for his nominee for the Supreme Court. There is a Supreme Court missing its full count of nine justices, but having three conservative justices, one “swing” justice, and four liberal justices. Not to mention an electoral system where the vote of the average citizen has to go through a more politically privileged delegate whose vote decides who will be president. In this fractious climate, the likes of Trump are thriving. F rom the outside: Let us see how the outside world regards these Trump policy positions, positions that he now flips politically, attempting to soften them by referring to then as “suggestions”. In the UK, the country with the most enduring special relationship with America, Prime Minister David Cameron calls them “ignorant”. This is the prime minister of a major US ally whose own House of Commons has debated preventing Trump from entering the country. Mexico's president has had stronger words. The Russians have watched with amusement. The Gulf Arabs have scurried diplomatically for explanations. However, the Chinese have had the final laugh. One of their intellectuals, Jiayang Fan, has described “the appeal of Trump in China,” saying, “Mao's worldview has found curious potency in the mouth of the Republican candidate who shares his knack for polemical excess and xenophobic paranoia.” Aside from Trump's ignorance in foreign policy, his lying about himself goes beyond his being a narcissist. It is egocentrism in the extreme, including his description of himself as a “self-made man”. This is a patently bogus claim. The Donald had his business career launched by a $100 million gift from his father, whereas Abraham Lincoln, Trump's alleged role model, had to flee from the hands of his father, as that father “rented out” young Abraham to work for rural neighbours in Indiana. Another bogus claim made by Trump is on the matter of taxation. Trump unabashedly flaunts his crookedness. For the past 60 years every aspirant to the presidency has released his tax returns to the public, the reason being that transparency shows that a would-be president abides by the same rules as everyone else. But Trump refuses to divulge his tax returns. One Wall Street executive, Steven Rattner, has quoted Trump as saying, “I fight like hell to pay as little as possible”. This bold admission stands in contrast to Trump saying, “There is nothing to learn from tax returns.” There is the same bogus claim on the question of his respect for women and gender equality. In a front-page article on 15 May, the US newspaper The New York Times all but denuded Trump of one of his principal lies, revealing his dealings with Miss USA contestants and saying that “he has long fixated on and evaluated women's looks”. Here are some other revelations gleaned from 50 interviews conducted over the past six weeks: his public treatment of women is “degrading”; he made “unwelcome romantic advances and unending commentary on the female form”; he showed “unsettling workplace conduct”; reports of a “contradictory portrait of a wealthy, well-known and provocative man”; in his dealings, “Trump had the power, and the women did not”; and reports that “Trump frequently sought assurances, at times from strangers, that the women in his life were beautiful”. About his own daughter, Ivanka, he asked, “Don't you think my daughter's hot? She's hot, right?” At that time Ivanka was 16 years old. Nonetheless, Trump “sees himself as a promoter of women”. In an interview with the same newspaper, Trump “described himself as a champion of women, someone who took pride in hiring them.” He is a delusional man who aspires to be America's president and commander-in-chief. On 27 April, he claimed, “America is going to be strong again. America is going to be great again. We're going to finally have a coherent foreign policy based on American interests and the interests of our allies.” The New York Times commented on “discrepancies”. In his confrontation with Democratic Party frontrunner Hillary Clinton he has again used the feminist card, but as usual in a lopsided way. He has proclaimed, “Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she would get five per cent of the vote.” For Trump, war is global and has no borders. He has thus given rise to a mountain of negative comments. These are summed up in the following remarks that contend that Trump has no legitimate claim to becoming a proper commander-in-chief: “When one has a hammer, everything looks like a nail”; “When one's experience is limited to real-estate deals, everything looks like a lease negotiation”; and “For someone who claims he is ready to lead the free world, that is inexcusable.” These derisive comments have not been limited to the mainstream American press. They were also the gist of recent testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is headed by a Republican, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee. Trump's derangement knows no limits. It is a bad temper falsely projected as foreign policy. Seeking the headlines, he pays a televised visit to Henry Kissinger, the father of foreign interventionism. Holding out an olive branch to North Korea, he declares he could win the rogue state over with one phone call. As he closes the gap in the polls with Hillary Clinton, I can imagine lots of foreign ministries closing the file on constructive discourse with Washington, except for those who see in Trump's occupancy of the Oval Office an opportunity to ally themselves with his lunacy. Nothing that Trump has said can outmatch his buffoonery in the tragic case of the recent disappearance of EgyptAir Flight 804 over the Mediterranean. He was the only voice to declare it “an act of Islamist terrorism”. For him, it is a waste of time to wait for the results of the expert investigation. It seems that no human event, including tragic death, is anything other than an occasion for cheap political exploitation. Judging by the conduct of Trump, it is no surprise that the title of the best recent book on the America of the age of Trump is The Fractured Republic by Yuval Levin. This is an apt diagnosis of a period of bluster and sabre-rattling in an America where even Congress has only a 16 per cent positive approval rating. “There is no virtue in ignorance.” How apt. The writer is a professor of law at New York University.
