The Trump administration is even invoking the power blocs of previous eras, mulling the creation of an “Economic Prosperity Network” of like-minded countries that would detach themselves from China. economic offshoring in response to China’s “predatory trade and economic policies” and deceptions over the origins of the pandemic. The coronavirus crisis has accelerated Trump’s agenda, inspiring a new wave of “America First” isolationism, as his trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, argued in a recent essay calling for a reversal of U.S. The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World, Barry Gewen, W.W. No one wants anything to do with transforming the world anymore-so much so that Americans put a frank neo-isolationist, Donald Trump, in the White House so that he could shut the country off from the world. The Wilsonian crusaderism that transformed sensible Cold War containment into a futile and delusional battle against the myth of monolithic communism, ending horribly in Vietnam and then reawakened in the post-Cold War era as a neo-Reaganite call to end “evil” regimes, finishing tragically in Iraq, has all but exhausted itself. America’s crusades are over or at best are corroded and crumbling at their derelict foundations. The world, from Washington’s perspective especially, has gotten Kissingerian again. To be precise, we desperately need Kissinger’s ideas and instincts about how to muddle our way through a world that, we now realize, isn’t working very well-and probably never will. Indeed, not only can we not ignore the old statesman, who turned 97 in May, but we need him more than ever. So argues Barry Gewen in his incisive new intellectual history of Kissinger and his times, The Inevitability of Tragedy. What you can’t do is ignore him-especially now. You can hate Henry Kissinger and think him evil.
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