The Scary Election – For Us and the World

I was talking to some people the other day about our trip to eastern Europe in July.  I mentioned (as I did here) that, while we were there, we talked to a couple from Hungary about our presidential election, and they asked if Donald Trump really had a chance to win.  I said that the couple were scared of Donald Trump.

One of the people asked, don’t they realize how bad Hillary Clinton is:

• Her efforts to keep her emails secret – even the ones relating to her job¹ – and her inability to tell the truth about them.²
• The relations between the Clinton Foundation and her time as Secretary of State.  (Here and here.)
• Telling the parents of people killed at Benghazi that the attack was caused by some silly video when she knew it wasn’t.³
• Her refusal to have a regular press conference for months.⁴
• And so on and so on.

As one of the other people said, the Hungarian couple don’t know about these things because they are internal to the United States.  They affect us, but they don’t affect other countries.  I think that person was right.

What people in other countries see is foreign policy.  And Donald Trump scares them.  They see a need for the United States to be a leader in the world – because there is nobody else who can be a leader for good.  Vladimir Putin?  Xi Jinging?  The United States can be a leader for good if the President is a person who can lead.  Unfortunately, our current President hasn’t wanted to do much leading, and his predecessor led us in the wrong direction a couple of times.  But as a person smarter than me said, “Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny.”⁵  Just because the current president and his predecessor haven’t done as good as they could have, doesn’t mean that the next president will fail, too.  Harry Truman made mistakes, but he led when he had to.  So did Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.  And George H.W. Bush.

The United States and the President of the United States can be a force for good in the world.  We can lead.  That is what this couple saw.  And that is why they are scared of Donald Trump.  Mr. Trump likes Vladimir Putin.  He says he’ll honor our commitments under Article 5 of the NATO agreement – for countries that have spent enough.⁶  When it comes to foreign affairs, they think Donald Trump is scary, and that scares them.  Because what he does could affect them.  They were behind the Iron Curtain for 40 years.  They know what scary can result in.

The couple didn’t focus on the more internal things that make a lot of people in the United States not like Hillary Clinton.  Plus they would probably say, maybe correctly, their politicians are just as bad.

Does this mean we need to elect Hillary Clinton because people in other countries are scared of Donald Trump and of what he might do?  I certainly understand the position of those who say: I live here and I don’t want to be stuck with her.  I can’t vote for her because of them.  Hillary Clinton will be four more years of President Obama and a generation of bad decisions from the Supreme Court.  I can't do that.  I understand – and almost agree.

Maybe it’s because I’m old.  Maybe it’s because I remember a lot of things.  I remember how great it felt when the threat of nuclear war went away when the Soviet Union went away – and how it sort of came back (at least for a while) when Pakistan tested its bomb after India already one.  I remember thinking to myself: Are we really back to these worries again?

I think that is what the Hungarian couple were talking about.  There is scary internal and there is scary external.  All countries have scary internal, but the United States is one of the few countries whose scary external affects the rest of the world, too.

Whether that means people should vote against Donald Trump because he is so scary for the world is a difficult question.  I know how I am going to answer it – because he is scary for me, too.  But I can understand how other people, seeing how scary Hillary Clinton is for the United States internally, might answer it differently.
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¹ Maybe she always intended to turn the emails on her private server over to the State Department, but she ultimately did so only after the State Department asked for them.
² See this post.
³ Parents of one of the people killed at Benghazi says that then-Secretary of State Clinton told them that.  Secretary Clinton has denied it.  It’s a question of whom you believe. Here and here.
⁴ Secretary Clinton held a fifteen-minute, six-question press conference yesterday, after I wrote this post but before I posted it.
⁵ David Kilcullen, Blood Year: The Unraveling of Western Counterterrorism (2016), p. 229.
⁶ Mr. Trump's problems on foreign policy go on and on.  For more examples, see here, but that is just a small sample.