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Feb. 20, 2025 Editor, The News-Gazette: Three years ago, Russia amassed its troops along the border with Ukraine, assuring the world the deployment was a “military exercise.” In February 2022, Russia attacked, unleashing a nightmare.
Today, a similar pattern is occurring within our own country, as autocrat Trump crudely shoves us closer toward a systemic failure of our democracy and position of world leader for his personal gain and self-aggrandizement.
Trump rants about “making America great again,” while destroying the programs that make us great — the United Nations; humanitarian aid through USAID and the World Health Organization; educational, medical and scientific research, the Paris Climate Agreement, etc. He has fired seasoned diplomats and knowledgeable government workers often illegally and often without severance pay.
I think slimming down the Washington bureaucracy is long overdue but putting a bull in the china shop is not a solution. It will take the intelligence and diplomacy of the very people he’s firing to unravel this Gordian Knot.
We all are part of a tightly woven world economy. Eric Beinhocker, an economist at Oxford University, has said, “There is no such thing as an American economy any more …. not in that isolated sense. No country in the world alone can make an iPhone,” quoting Apple, which reports the phone is made by ‘thousands of businesses and millions of people in more than 50 countries and regions,” many of which Trump is defunding or reducing funding. The list lengthens daily.
Thomas L. Friedman, a highly respected journalist, with three Pulitzers, says, “The scariest thing about what President Trump is doing with his tariffsfor- all strategy, I believe, is that he has no clue what he is doing — or how the economy works. He’s just making it up as he goes along. And we’re all along for the ride.”
We must demand that Trump keep the United States allied with the world as its number one leader and benefactor, as China and Russia are eager and ready to take over.
In fact, they’ve already begun. SARAH CLAYTON Rockbridge County
