Don’t waste the opportunity Trump’s presidency gives us
I’ve had the honor of knowing the leaders of many nations around the world. Among the most principled and realistic ones I’ve known is Vaclav Klaus, who served as president of the Czech Republic from 2003 to 2013. Before that, this former professor of economics served as his nation’s finance minister and its prime minister.His manner of speaking is straightforward and direct — and he likes what he hears from America’s 45th and 47th president, Donald Trump.
As Mr. Klaus made clear in a recent speech in Slovakia, European observers and dissenting voices in the United States don’t seem to understand the points that Mr. Trump is making. They focus only on how he differs sharply from past presidents. But Mr. Klaus welcomes Mr. Trump’s switch to a more business-style of governing.
“Such a change was much needed and will have huge consequences,” Mr. Klaus said. Leaders comfortable with the old model are complaining bitterly, but the “new era of international politics” that Mr. Trump has launched was long overdue. His blunt style is a shock to the system, but a necessary one.
Unfortunately, many of Mr. Klaus’ European colleagues don’t see it that way. They regard Mr. Trump’s style with horror, deriding him as a bully unwilling to play the game the way it’s been played for decades. In the process, Mr. Klaus notes sadly, they’re wasting a good opportunity to learn from him — and better serve their own constituencies.
“He doesn’t like empty moralizing,” Mr. Klaus said. “As a businessman, he prefers negotiating and making deals rather than preaching good intentions.”
Those last three words sum up the approach of many world leaders. To them, what a politician says and how he says it matter more than what he does.
That’s why they love grandiose agreements, like the 2016 Paris climate deal. Never mind that the signatories include China, the world’s foremost emitter of greenhouse gases. The globalists evidently prefer rank hypocrisy to Mr. Trump’s more honest approach. That’s why their anger is reserved not for China for flouting the deal but for Mr. Trump for refusing to join in their pretense.
Mr. Klaus had a more sensible take on Mr. Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris deal: “It is, without any doubt, a great encouragement for all opponents of utterly arbitrary and entirely irresponsible climate alarmism. It let them know that not everything had been lost just yet and that it is worth to keep fighting.”
The globalists’ ire at Mr. Trump is really rooted in the fact that he’s making it hard for them to keep coasting. By flipping the tables and challenging “business as usual,” he’s “endangered the comfortable existence of many European politicians who had been living in a world of irresponsibility and inefficiency” that evolved in the post-Cold War period, Mr. Klaus said in his recent speech.
What’s ironic is that even as these globalists criticize Mr. Trump, they prove his approach is correct. Consider how EU leaders recently agreed in Brussels to provide more for their own defense.
They cast this decision as a rebuke to Mr. Trump — as they’re stepping up now that the U.S. is supposedly leaving them to fend for themselves. How awful! And yet, in the process, they inadvertently proved two things that completely vindicate Mr. Trump’s actions.
irony and hypocrites.
