The views expressed here are solely the author’s.
At the end of World War II, there were less than 3 billion people in the world and the overwhelming majority lived in absolute poverty.
Today, there are 7 1/2 billion members of humanity and less than 10% of us live in absolute poverty, while far more of us than the total who lived in 1945 have access to lives better, in many ways, than the kings and emperors of most of human history.
There has never been a better time to be alive and the accelerating pace of both technological and cultural innovation, and the democratization of both the production and dissemination of innovation, portend the possibility of a future that is great, nearly utopian, by historical standards.
What happened between 1945 and now, to make all of this progress occur?
The American Century happened.
The American project of world leadership happened, grounded not in conquest but in what Jack Kennedy described as paying the price and bearing the burden required for the "survival and success of liberty" – the project first described and advocated by Henry Luce, in the essay titled "The American Century."
Nations can't conquer others, and American led alliances among free nations will protect this vital norm. Free trade benefits all of the human race, and so does free passage on the high seas and international airspace. Within nations, there are obligations to uphold universal human rights, including the rights of the majority of humans who are women and girls.
Just some of the key ideas of the American Century. And, my Lord, how it did work. So much greater a share of a vastly larger humanity lifted from poverty and freed from tyranny, all around the world, than was ever before more than a dream or a religious vision of the world saved.
For 70 years American presidents, Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, more "hawkish" (as we used to understand that term), and less, all shared what now in hindsight seems an amazing degree of consensus about both the means and the ends of the role of the United States in the world.
Of course, we were often hypocrites. America burned villages in order to "save" them, allied with an endless cast of petty tyrants if they even feigned loyalty to us in our contest with the Soviets, and played realpolitik with Chairman Mao, perhaps history's greatest murderer. We said "never again" about genocide, but sat back as the killing fields of Cambodia ran red, as the machetes took their gruesome toll in Rwanda, and as Syria became a charnel house, and many more sins.
But a nation can only be judged a hypocrite if it's accepted that the nation has righteous and worthy principles from which its actions are deviating. We can only be wrong in these ways because we knew the direction of what is right, and were consciously dedicated to doing it.
In the end, how can anyone not recognize the degree to which the good has outweighed the bad in the outcomes for humanity forged by America's post World War II global leadership? How can anyone not see the enormity of the progress purchased through the application to the world of American values and the sacrifices of the troops we sent to every corner of the world to carry out these policies?
And, crucially, all this "do-gooding" also did well, astoundingly well, by ordinary Americans at home.
Market based economies have a business cycle, so of course there have been painful downturns, but, measured decade upon decade, there has been a continuous and dramatic advance in the material quality of life of typical, middle-class American families, improving every aspect of life -- all of it tied substantially to the relatively free movement of goods and people across international borders which was a cornerstone principle of the "World Order" of the American Century.
Our cars are safer, more luxurious, more efficient, less damaging to the environment. Our diets have been enriched by countless options in cuisine, all accessible almost everywhere and almost always. Our homes are larger and better equipped in too many ways to mention, but let's mention a few, such as multiple bathrooms, air-conditioning, labor saving kitchens and so much more, going from luxuries for the rich to being commonplace for the common person.
If the products of the liberal world order were suddenly removed from a typical American home right now and replaced by "made in America" substitutes, typical Americans would live much poorer lives. This is so because the world getting richer didn't come by making America poorer. Rather, America creating the framework within which the world got richer, helped make America richer too, and not just for the "1%", but for the large majority of Americans.
And, if the products of the American world order made possible by liberal immigration and refugee policies were removed from our lives, well, our lives would be unrecognizable. To wit -- Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian father.
These are facts. Not "alternative facts," just facts.
And the impact of the American Century on our moral lives was advancement at perhaps an even greater pace and to an even greater degree. The calls for justice from the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, and the disabilities rights movement all were heard and ultimately answered to a very substantial degree, and in a short space of time, in substantial part, because we could not stand to be the "leader of the free world" without expanding the realm of freedom within the part of the world which is our own country.
We knew what the Nazis had done and what the Communists were doing and would do everywhere if not for us, and, later, what the Islamic extremists do and espouse, and we made ourselves better because of it.
So the American Century did good and well, for America and humanity. As the saying goes, however, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
America has gone mad. We've elected a madman President. That would be bad, and terrifyingly dangerous, enough, but this particular madman has, as another saying goes, a "method to his madness."
There is not just Trump. There truly is "Trumpism", and it seems to be a fairly coherent set of principles, nearly a complete flipside to the world view of the American Century.
With his views on immigration and trade, Trump reverses the bedrock ideas about globalization which have so transformed the life of humanity. Likewise on his views with respect to the rules of national behavior which the United States largely wrote an enforced for 70 years -- it's OK for the Russians to seize Crimea and target civilians in Aleppo, it's OK for the United States to seize the natural resources of smaller and weaker countries. Likewise his views on international institutions the United States largely created and defended for 70 years – the most successful military alliance in human history, NATO, is "obsolete", at the very moment when it is more relevant than in decades, to protect the peace, prosperity, and freedom of Europe, which the alliance helped forge out of the ashes of the two world wars.
Despite what many are arguing, Trumpism is not a blank page. It is just a very different view of the world.
He calls it "America first". It should more properly be called the doctrine of the "un-American Century"
Some can't understand why Trump would both pledge what sounds like a return to isolationism and a rapid and large build up of American military power. In fact, there's no contradiction. Trump wants to maintain, even to restore to former glories, the preeminence of American power.
But he wants to use that power in a radically unilateralist way, and not the unilateralism of the moral crusade George W. Bush and Dick Cheney believed it was right to pursue, but a unilateralism in promotion solely of narrowly defined American mercantile and security interests.
It's a throwback to 19th Century European "statecraft," which gave the world colonial exploitation and lit the fuse for the mass carnage of the 20th Century. Actual "carnage."
By thinking of world affairs not as properly governed by rules, those rules being based on American ideals, but rather governed by a vulgar and zero-sum transactionalism, Trump's un-American views return the world to the balance of power, survival of the fittest, "order" which led to the two world wars.
The awful irony of this, beyond it's spectacular immorality, is that it is so highly likely to produce the exact opposite result from that which it seeks – a prosperous, and safe America.
However much President Trump, his likeminded advisors, such as Steve Bannon, and many of his rank-and-file voters, may wish it, America's dependence on the peace, prosperity and stability of the wider world cannot be undone or replaced by any degree of purportedly self interested bellicosity.
In the two world wars, America was shielded for years from any narrowly defined direct threats to our way of life by the oceans and by other powers which could, for a time, do the fighting for us.
Today, we are instantly and perpetually vulnerable, we are on the front lines in our living rooms, whether in regard to devastating cyber attacks or ballistic missiles in the hands of the likes of the North Korean dictator, or weapons of mass destruction reaching the hands of jihadis, but also with respect the effects of other powers, from Russia to China, to Iran, projecting themselves in such a way as to consolidate economic and geopolitical spheres of influence in much of the rest of the world, aimed to advance their wealth and power at our expense.
We cannot escape these threats, or the global threat of climate change, by declaring ourselves a fierce, unprincipled, and unpredictable free agent. The threats require not an abandonment of the values and insights on which we built the American Century, but a redoubling of our commitment to them and a renewal of a common American purpose around them.
"America First", if seriously pursued, will end up with America diminished, or even destroyed. The policies President Trump has articulated are indeed un-American, properly protecting and pursuing neither our principles nor our interests.
Unless this is somehow undone before the damage is profound, our children will lose the spectacular opportunity of the present moment for the realization of the very best of human potential, at home and globally, the awesome opportunity created in and by the American Century, and we will leave behind instead its mirror image, the potential darkness of an un-American Century.