Last year, on the eve of U.S. President Donald Trump’s return to office, the esteemed historian Margaret MacMillan considered what the past can tell us about the future of American democracy and the international order. Could both survive the stress of a second Trump term?
The historical record offers “a reminder that the strength of institutions can be very hard to assess before they are directly challenged,” MacMillan wrote. After the onset of the Great Depression, for example, “the democratic systems of the United Kingdom and the United States proved resilient, but those of Germany and Japan collapsed, and the world descended into the worst military conflict of the modern era.”
It is also difficult to parse the extent to which a leader who “likes to see himself as the destroyer of conventions and rules” can truly “divert the course of history” on his own, MacMillan argued. Whether Trump will “usher in a new age” or find his influence constrained may, in the end, “depend as much on the balance of forces around him as on his own use of power.”
|
