Why Donald Trump Is Obsessed with William McKinley
Late in his life, McKinley reconsidered protectionism. He was reëlected in 1900, and by his second Administration he felt that the United States should greet globalization by entering foreign markets. “Isolation is no longer possible or desirable,” he declared in Buffalo in 1901. “Commercial wars are unprofitable.” That speech would be his last; Czolgosz shot him the following day. Nevertheless, the tariff man died a trade man.
McKinley has occasionally been hailed as a visionary—“the architect of the American century,” his biographer Robert W. Merry calls him. It’s less that McKinley’s strategic outlook was so bold, though, than that those of his contemporaries were so narrow. National defense in McKinley’s day largely meant preventing invasions—an undemanding task, given the country’s peaceful neighbors and oceanic moats. In 1890, the year McKinley’s tariffs sent panicked Canadians scrambling to the battlements, the State Department had only sixty-seven Washington employees. Most were clerks, who divided their duties alphabetically rather than by region—one imagines Canadian affairs being handled by the Bulgaria-Chile desk.
What changed things, ultimately, was not McKinley’s speech in Buffalo but the Second World War, which drew U.S. leaders to adopt a far wider view of the national interest. Andrew Preston, a historian at the University of Virginia (and an acquaintance of mine), describes the shift in his thoughtful new book, “Total Defense” (Harvard). The key, Preston argues, was reconceptualizing risk. After the war, high-ranking officials spoke less of defense and more of security, an expansive concept that went well beyond protecting borders. “We are now concerned with the peace of the entire world,” the Army chief of staff, George C. Marshall, explained. To keep that peace, the government would employ, by the early fifties, not dozens of workers but tens of thousands, in diplomacy, intelligence, and foreign aid.
This new posture was far from intuitive. When the Second World War began, it spread in Europe and Asia but seemed unlikely to touch the contiguous United States. “Panzer tanks were not about to roll through Washington, DC,” the historian Stephen Wertheim writes. The America First Committee, which had some four hundred and fifty chapters and subchapters at its peak, insisted that the country should keep out of the distant war.
Even after December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked some of the territories that McKinley had claimed—Hawaii, the Philippines, and Guam—people from Kansas or California didn’t necessarily see any reason to don uniforms. Marshall was worried. He hired the Hollywood director Frank Capra to make motivational films. Capra’s seven-film documentary series, “Why We Fight” (1942-45), is now regarded as a classic, but Preston points out how bizarre it was. People in France, China, the U.S.S.R., and Britain did not need to be told why they were fighting. Only in the contiguous United States did citizens require high-budget movies to understand the chain of events by which the war might endanger their homes.
Presidents required tutelage, too. “I know nothing of foreign affairs,” Harry S. Truman confessed, after the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in April, 1945, unexpectedly plopped him into the Oval Office. To get up to speed, Truman took frequent trips to the White House’s Map Room, where Admiral William D. Leahy tutored him. Truman pored over files and took home briefcases full of papers, reading so much that he feared permanently damaging his vision. The image that appeared before his strained eyes was of the United States as a colossus astride the world, with bases, allies, and interests covering the globe. It was “the most powerful nation, perhaps, in all history,” Truman said.
Powerful yet imperilled. “We must relentlessly preserve our superiority on land and sea and in the air,” Truman insisted. This was not merely a military matter. National security had a “much broader basis,” he announced in his 1947 State of the Union address. It rested on prices, on agriculture, on industry, and on human freedoms. This was a new conception of security, global in its extent and so expansive in its content that, Preston observes, “it could include almost anything.”
Certainly, it included trade. Many believed that economic barriers had sparked the war in the first place. As long as rising powers like Japan and Germany felt that their only route to securing critical resources such as rubber, coal, and oil was invading their neighbors, the world would never be safe. If the United States could use its vast power to hold trade doors open, those same countries would opt for commerce rather than conquest. Prosperity was the carrot. The U.S. military, plus those of its allies, was the stick.
Any President attempting to orchestrate a global system like the one during the Gilded Age would have faced a capitalist revolt. But after the Second World War, with their overseas competitors literally bombed out, U.S. manufacturers had no reason for objection. Lowering U.S. tariffs would induce other countries to lower theirs, providing an opening for U.S. firms. Doing so also gave foreigners a chance to earn dollars, which they used to buy American goods. Openness provided such clear benefits that the president of Ford himself pushed to eliminate the tariff on imported cars.
Liberal internationalism meant, crucially, trading with erstwhile enemies. The United States had nuked and napalmed Japan yet afterward promoted the Japanese economy assiduously. Washington extended military protection and used diplomatic leverage to open other countries’ markets to Japanese exports. During the Korean War, the Pentagon spent hundreds of millions of dollars annually on Japanese goods and services. Japan’s Prime Minister called the war a “gift of the gods.” The president of a struggling automaker, Toyota, described the military purchases as his company’s “salvation.”
Under the wing of the American eagle, Japan’s economy grew more than fiftyfold in the three decades after the Second World War. From the White House’s vantage, this was cause for celebration, not alarm. Its former foe was a prospering ally, and Japan’s manufacturers posed little threat. As Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, explained to Japan’s Prime Minister (according to an official summary of the meeting), “The Japanese don’t make the things we want.”
A parade of Presidents have insisted that liberal internationalism was win-win—good for the United States and good for the world. Other people have demurred. In its determination to be surrounded by free-trading allies, the United States has not exactly kept its hands to itself. During the Cold War, it met the threat of socialism with coups and carpet-bombing. In the years after, its quest to eradicate terrorism upended the Middle East. Even its close allies complained of its overweening power. “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant,” the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau told a Washington audience in 1969. “No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I may call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”
No fun to be the elephant’s bedmate, sure. But is it really so great to be the elephant? Global ambitions have pulled the United States into pointless wars, drained its coffers, and built up its rivals, critics have contended. For a certain stripe of critic, the problem with liberal internationalism isn’t its belligerence but its benevolence. It subsidizes foreigners at the expense of citizens.
That objection gained force with the rise of Japan. There was a stretch between the mid-seventies and the mid-nineties when Japan, by then the world’s second-largest economy, seemed poised to overtake the United States as the first. In 1980, fuel-efficient Japanese imports made up a quarter of the cars sold in the U.S. market. Hundreds of thousands of workers in the U.S. automotive industry lost their jobs that year.
Japan’s progress played out over the New York skyline. Mitsubishi bought Rockefeller Center; the Japanese construction firm Aoki became a co-owner of the iconic Plaza Hotel; and a Japanese tycoon, Hideki Yokoi, acquired the Empire State Building. Would the Japanese, like the Muppets, take Manhattan? Nationalists pinned their hopes on a flamboyant local investor with a taste for tall buildings: Donald Trump. He bought the Plaza (“my ‘Mona Lisa’ ”) from Aoki and gained a share in Yokoi’s Empire State Building. The journalist J. Taylor Buckley imagined a final showdown between the “pride of the USA” and Japanese investors: “Trump buys the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; Japan buys St. Peter’s Basilica; Trump buys the Moscow Circus; Japan buys the Kennedy Center.”
In fact, as the historian Jennifer M. Miller has observed, Trump’s dealings with Japan were more complicated. Japanese businessmen filled his casinos, bought his condos, and loaned him money. He still didn’t like them, though. On a trip to Tokyo in 1990, according to the reporter Harry Hurt III, Trump refused to try the local food. (“I’m not going to eat any fucking raw fish.”) He stormed out of a formal dinner with Japanese bankers on his first night and scarcely ate until he found a McDonald’s the next afternoon. He demanded to see the Emperor, but the Emperor’s spokesman had no idea who Trump was.
Trump took Japan’s success as a betrayal. After dining with the editor Abe Rosenthal and the writer Gay Talese, he recalled being struck by their references to “the feeling of supremacy that the country had in the nineteen-fifties”—a feeling that Trump was born too late to fully enjoy. “Since the Vietnam War, and even a little bit before, this country hasn’t had the feeling of supremacy,” Trump reflected. This was because Japan and other U.S. allies were “just ripping off America left and right and down the middle.”
