Kevin C. Smith

Other countries might be defined by blood, territory or language. America has always been creedal, an ideal of liberty turned into a state. Its critics back-handedly recognise as much. The reason that anti-Americanism is a force in world affairs (unlike anti-Algerianism or anti-Armenianism or anti-Albanianism) is that America’s enemies acknowledge that it stands for something. That something is the package represented by personal autonomy, limited government, constitutional rule, regular elections and private enterprise – in a word, freedom. A bias towards freedom has, until now, characterised US foreign policy. A people habituated to liberty immediately saw what was wrong with Nazism and Communism. Which is why current US foreign policy is so shocking to pro-Americans. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is one of those rare occasions when we can clearly identify the aggressor. Vladimir Putin sought to annex a neighbour that offered him no threat – a neighbour that had given up its nuclear weapons in return for a promise that its sovereignty would be respected within its existing borders. Who guaranteed that promise? Britain, the United States and (never forget) Russia. Donald Trump is backing a belligerent dictatorship against a beleaguered democracy. Putin is the one leader he never disparages. He threatens annexation against Denmark, muses about handing away British territory, wages economic war on Canada. But not Russia. Never Russia. Now Trump is buying diesel from Russia, potash from Belarus, minerals from China – all because he doesn’t want to buy them from Canada, which has stood at America’s side in war after war. American friends, can you not see what this is doing, not just to America’s standing, but to the free world which your fathers have built since 1941? Trump is bringing down the international system from which the US has been the chief beneficiary. And for what? To drink liberal tears? God help us.