How Team Trump has boosted America’s strategic position

Political discourse continues to be a discordant contest between haters and admirers of President Trump. But meanwhile, there has been substantial progress toward an improved strategic environment for the United States and the West.

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Ever since Pearl Harbor, FDR produced the blueprint for all subsequent American strategic policy. In his war message he said: “We will make very certain that this form of treachery never again endangers us.” The United States must not appease its mortal enemies and must always retain the military power to deter a direct attack on it.

All 13 of the presidents who have followed FDR have minded those guidelines, though some have made a more convincing job of it than others.

Stalin, who precipitated the war with his Nazi-Soviet Pact with Hitler, ended up only with rather secondary strategic assets in Eastern Europe, where Russia was very unwelcome, and from which it had pledged to withdraw.

The Cold War was another chapter of strategic genius, as Team Roosevelt — Truman, Eisenhower, George Marshall, Douglas MacArthur and others — designed the containment policy of defensive alliances.

This was the concept of the “Free World,” even if many of its members, such as Iran, nationalist China, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey, South Korea and most of Latin America weren’t ­democracies (though many did become democracies).

When President Reagan devised a non-nuclear theoretical system of missile defense at high altitudes by use of lasers, and the Soviet deterrent capability was threatened with obsolescence, the entire international Communist challenge, and the Soviet Union itself, collapsed like a soufflé.

In the intervening years, Islamist fanatics have launched terrorist attacks that can’t easily be pinned on any country, the international left has made a partial comeback and the rise of state-capitalist China has posed a new strategic threat to the West.

Against this historic backdrop, the Trump administration has taken a number of extremely significant and sensible initiatives, even if the public explanation of them has necessarily been incomplete and, at times, regrettably simplistic or blunt.

Team Trump has followed the FDR-Churchill advice of the 1930s and moved to challenge Chinese trade aggression, industrial espionage and monetary manipulation in good time rather than appeasing it until it is too late to avoid a serious and possibly dangerous rivalry.

It has, moreover, avoided the hysterical Russophobia of the Democrats and some prominent congressional Republicans in avoiding a freeze-out of Moscow that would drive that country into the grasping arms of Beijing.

We must continue to expand the Western world peacefully. We have rolled its eastern frontier back from 120 miles from the Rhine at the western extremity of East Germany in 1991, to somewhere in Ukraine today. We must create the conditions that would strengthen the Western emulators in Russia, who date back to Peter the Great 300 years ago, over the nativists. We must have the great Russian civilization and the vast Russian Eurasian territory in the West.

This administration has exploited the encroachments on the Arab world of our former Turkish and Iranian allies, by helping to align Egypt and Saudi Arabia with Israel against Turkish and Iranian hegemony. It has turned the European rebuff of Turkey and President Carter’s undermining of the Shah of Iran to advantage.

With the disintegration of Iraq and Syria, the Palestinian issue has almost ceased to be a serious problem without the sponsorship of the main Arab powers.

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This administration has also confronted and debunked the extreme claims of the climate militants and has revived the concept of nuclear nonproliferation with respect to Iran and North Korea. And it has ended the easy dumping of over-heavy quantities of exports from long prosperous ­allies in Europe and Japan that was strategically justifiable in the 1950s but not recently.

An additional positive development, if it happens, would be the defection of Britain from the European Union, always a somewhat anti-American organization, for closer relations with the United States and Canada.

All of these are legitimate and prudent strategic actions of the United States. Some are original, some had been abandoned by previous administrations and some had been ineffectively pursued. All are complicated international issues that can only gradually be resolved.

But they are all in progress and all have progressed appreciably. These are facts easily lost sight of in such a febrile and over-strenuous pre-electoral campaign as this.

Conrad Black’s latest book is “Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other.” This column was adapted from American Greatness.