I was a high school freshman in 1957 but I still remember the news coverage of mob bosses meeting in upstate New York. It became known as the “Apalachin Meeting.”
After the assassination of Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese called a meeting of Mafia families from across the U.S. to cement his personal control of gambling, loan sharking, and drugs in the United States. It was a diplomatic gathering to avoid more gang warfare and secure the Mafia’s economic (criminal) interests.
That is the lens through which Donald Trump sees international relations. Let’s see…Russia gets Europe. China gets Asia. The US gets the Western Hemisphere, and we can negotiate around the edges…Greenland, for example. “We’re all bosses here. Let’s figure out how to share the spoils.”
JFK had a different moral compass when he said, “…in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
Trump sees the world differently. “I live on this planet. I breathe the same air as Putin and Xi. I cherish MY children’s future (In Albania, in Gaza). And I am immortal…”
The self-centered personality of Donald Trump is our most fundamental problem regarding China, Iran, and the rest of the international world. He thinks this is all about him. It is not. It is about the place of the United States in the world as well as “The World” in general. We live in a dangerous time.
In the past, the United States has had skilled diplomats to lead, advise, and represent us and our interests, and also help to define what our broader interests are.
And now? We have an impulsive, self-centered fellow who sends his inexperienced son-in-law and old business partners to settle wars in the Middle East. In early 2025, President Trump proposed a plan for the United States to potentially take over the Gaza Strip, level the areas destroyed already, and redevelop the territory into a luxurious coastal resort; the “Riviera of the Middle East,” he called it.
Getting ready for his second administration, Trump sent his son, Don Junior, to Greenland to look around after announcing his intention to seize it. Asked whether he could rule out using military or economic force on the matter, Trump said he could not. When Donald Junior got off the plane, he announced to the people of Greenland, “We’re going to treat you well.”
Will Canada be our 51st state? Or will it be Venezuela?
I just finished reading Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, Downhill All the Way. It covers his and Virginia Woolf’s lives in the period between the First and the Second World Wars. In that time, many watched with deep concern as Hitler’s Party rose to power as a result of the unbearable demands placed on Germany following World War I. As the Allies sought to punish the Germans for their aggression, creating terrible economic conditions for the German people, it provided ammunition for the Nazis to rise to power. The cost of that diplomatic error involved, literally, millions of lives.
We learned not to repeat that mistake after World War II. Instead, at the behest of Franklin Roosevelt and others, the United Nations was created. A transition to democracy in Germany became an important and successful goal of the Allies. NATO was formed as an effective deterrent against an expansionist Russian threat. The worst of the worst, nuclear war, was avoided, and progress was (fitfully) made.
Seventy years later, Trump seems to have learned different lessons from Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, using attacks on racial and religious minorities to achieve power, underlining the use of violence to achieve his aims, domestically and internationally.
But we are not the Germany of the 1930s. We are the United States of now…and we can fight back using the democratic and republican resources at our disposal.
We are now in our very own American historical moment…the most dangerous one since the American Civil War. For instance, thousands of National Guard troops from Southern states are being brought to Washington, D.C., where they will be stationed for the next two years. As one commenter stated with some concern, “It’s becoming almost normal to see armed, uniformed military walking the streets of the nation’s capital.”
For me, the most admirable Republican President in my lifetime was Dwight David Eisenhower. He was a conservative and a military man, but absolutely dedicated to the America that had been created in the 40 years before his own presidency. His goal was to preserve and protect. He sought to conserve that which the American people had created. Trump wants to destroy it…and he’s receiving far too much help from those who should know better.
I hope we are able to use the means and methods provided to us by the Founders to resist this move toward a Trumpian future.
We’ve got a democratic republic…if we can keep it.
Jim Walsh is a writer who lives in Nahant.