Trump affirms Madeleine Albright’s insight that the U.S. is ‘the indispensable nation’

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If there is one phrase from the American lexicon that Trump insiders and MAGA activists reviled – one impulse that they were determined to eliminate from the country’s politics – it was that the United States was “the indispensable nation.”

Those three words were introduced into American foreign policy and the country’s civic conversation by then-secretary of state Madeleine Albright in a 1998 interview on the NBC Today show.

To the Trump ascendancy, that locution was discredited and then demonized. It meant a panoply of evils such as “forever wars,” nation-building, constant involvement in overseas controversies – the very elements of the American past that they have resisted and rejected for a decade and vowed to eliminate from the country’s portfolio.

Now, Donald Trump, no slave to ideological orthodoxy or even to his own prior statements, has affirmed the insight that Ms. Albright expressed.

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His disappointment in not having been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize Friday – a garland that he campaigned for in much the same manner he stumped for votes in the New Hampshire primary – was palpable. He’s left with having achieved the redemption of the view that Richard Nixon, a president Mr. Trump shirks from quoting, expressed in his 1969 Inaugural Address, when the 37th president said “the greatest honour history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.”

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At the same time, Mr. Trump’s peace plan stands as the ultimate contemporary example of American indispensability. Symbolic proof: the full-page silhouette of the President, comprised of pictures of Israeli hostages, on the front of Friday’s Jerusalem Post.

Over the past two years of relentless military conflict in Gaza, other countries – Saudi Arabia, Egypt, France – put forward peace and ceasefire plans, but only the Trump plan prevailed, if only tentatively, if only preliminarily.

“This achievement – getting the hostages back, dramatically curtailing the war – is a significant development that Vladimir Putin and the Chinese leadership could only dream of having accomplished,” John Hannah, deputy national-security adviser for the Middle East in the George W. Bush administration and a diplomat who has advised both Republicans and Democrats, said in an interview.

“Only an American president could have brought together all the key stakeholders and the entire world.”

In expressing his sense of triumph at the success of his initiative, Mr. Trump – a portrait of excess and eccentricity, a heroic figure to those on the right and a threat to democratic values to those on the left – might well have employed Ms. Albright’s 27-year-old words: “We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”

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To adapt a phrase from Genesis, itself situated in the Holy Land, the voice was the voice of Ms. Albright, who died three years ago, but the hands engaged in the peacemaking were the hands of Mr. Trump.

“The Europeans, countries in East Asia and the Persian Gulf, and others may want to move past the United States as the international broker for peace,” said Peter Harris, a Colorado State University political scientist.

“And some figures inside the administration would like to see the U.S. walk away from global flashpoints. But it hasn’t happened. The United States remains the only world power that can and wants to broker these kinds of agreements.”

So skeptical of American involvement and intervention abroad was the MAGA insurgency – so leery was the President in his first term of literally playing the Trump card in international diplomacy – that in his resignation letter, defence secretary James Mattis, already alienated from administration insiders, was moved to remind Mr. Trump of America’s essential quality. The United States, he said, was “the indispensable nation in the free world” and that “our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.”

Mr. Mattis’s viewpoint was not simply disavowed, it was dismissed peremptorily.

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Until now.

Today, the United States is regarded as indispensable in two dimensions.

One is evident in the exasperation abroad over Mr. Trump’s skepticism about the NATO alliance and the multiple bilateral and multilateral defence and economic ties that have created order and prevented big-power conflicts for more than three-quarters of a century. The prospect of formal American withdrawal, or even a lapse of enthusiasm and engagement in those institutions and alliances, worries American allies across Europe and Asia.

The other is apparent in sentiments like those expressed earlier this week by Canadian Air Force Major-General J.D. Smyth that the proposed U.S. Golden Dome missile-defence project was vital for Canada’s security. That is another measure of the indispensability, if not the welcome, of the United States beyond its borders, even in the elbows-up environment of Canadian sentiment.

Though Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to take credit for the peace plan, even asserting in a nationally televised address his own authorship, it was clear that Mr. Trump was the straw that stirred the drink in the negotiations.

Indeed, it swiftly became clear that the American President nudged, and then pushed, Mr. Netanyahu into an agreement that, with the release of the hostages, will deprive Hamas of the only leverage it had in the political negotiations and military engagement in the region.

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But for all the success of the Trump initiative, several vital historical questions remain unresolved.

There remains the ethical, academic and cultural struggle over the legacies of the Holocaust, which produced the murder of six million Jews, and the 1948 Nakba, the name Palestinians apply to the repelling of 750,000 from their homes as a result of Israel’s independence.

The immediate fighting may be coming to an end, but the issue of who has the right to the land where Israel sits, and who has the moral high ground in the dispute, may not be resolved in the life of the Trump administration, or indeed in the lives of the principals in these negotiations and those whose lives are affected by them.

Despite Mr. Trump’s apparent triumph, generations from now may still be asking if Palestine is a place name or the name of a nation in a specific place, and whether Israel is a refuge from genocide or is a perpetrator of genocide.

Even an indispensable nation cannot wipe away the intractable.