Road Warrior

“Home field advantage” often conveys a big edge in performance in most team sports.   Hockey, basketball and football teams compete for an entire season to gain a higher seed and , therefore, home field advantage throughout the playoffs.  But occasionally there is that anomalous team that actually does better on the road.

Donald Trump is that kind of guy.

It seems that when he is at home, he gets tangled up in Twitter wars with this or that Trump bashing pundit that distracts from his agenda.  Perhaps when he  preparing to meet foreign leaders, he is too busy to have his thumbs on his smartphone.

This week in Warsaw, Trump gave the best speech abroad since Reagan’s “Tear down this wall”  speech over 30 years ago.  He abandoned his “America first” focus and delivered a full throated defense of Western Civilization and made a case of why it is worth defending.  The speech was in direct contrast to the speeches abroad given by Barack Obama (most notably the Cairo speech, in which he spent much of his time apologizing to the world for the West’s arrogance.  Lost in the fetish of multiculturalism are the wonderful attributes of Western Civilization—respect for individual rights, individual liberty, consent of the governed, free speech, equality under the law, innovation, wealth creation.   Advancing those virtues abroad were largely absent during the Obama years.  They are what set us apart from the Chinese tyranny, the Russian oligarchy, and the Middle East dictatorships.   These values are what make us superior and are worth fighting to defend.

It was fitting that the speech was made in Warsaw.  Poland was caught between two dictatorships during WWII—Hitler and Stalin and it suffered under Soviet rule for 45 years.

The Poles know tyranny.  Yet they endured.  And the Russian bear remain  at their doorstep.  The , Poles along with the Czechs and the Hungarians are resisting the EU dictates to take more Islamic immigrants. They are not afraid to defend their culture and do not accept terrorism as “part and parcel of modern life.” 

His speech was stirring, acknowledging the durability of the Poles, the importance of religion and warned of the threats from within and without (including excessive regulation) that threaten Western culture.   The Poles loved it and the throng chanted “USA” on several occasions.

Trump has been derided as bigoted and sneered at because of his America first foreign policy.

But his Middle East speech and his Warsaw speech showed something quite different.  His Middle East speech laid out a vision for what Islamic culture could be if it expunged the plague of terrorism.  In Poland, he challenged the West and asked if it had the will to survive.  In both places, he talked about the greatness of those people, their accomplishments and their civilizations. 

I found it puzzling that Richard Haass found the speech “tired and tedious.”  I found it stirring and so did the Poles.  It was almost as if Haass and I had read two different texts.

I found the speech inspiring, and it would be terribly ironic if Trump became a great foreign policy president.