编者按：本文作者是《纽时》专栏作家弗里德曼，英文发表于3月11日，最早的题目是”你不能这样管理一个国家”（You cannot run a country like this），之后被改为“一场大灾难正在发生”（A Great Unraveling Is Underway），中文版2025年3月13日刊登再《纽时》中文版。在这个时候如此尖锐地批评特朗普总统，的确需要勇气。文章英文附在中文之后。
如果你对特朗普总统在乌克兰问题、关税、芯片或其他诸多问题上反复无常的策略感到困惑，那不是你的问题。是他的。你所看到的这位总统，竞选第二任期是为了逃避刑事诉讼而，并报复那些他无端指责在2020年大选中“窃取”了选票的人。他从未有条理地论述过当今世界的重大趋势，以及如何让美国顺应这一趋势，从而在21世纪蓬勃发展。他参选的初衷可不是这个。
赢得大选后，特朗普立刻重拾他旧有的执念和怨恨——包括对关税、普京、泽连斯基以及加拿大等等。他组建的政府充斥着数量惊人的极端意识形态分子，这些人符合一个首要且唯一的标准：始终把对特朗普及其突发奇想的忠诚置于对宪法、美国外交政策传统价值观或基本经济法则的忠诚之上。
结果就是你如今所看到的：时而实施时而取消的关税、时而支持时而中断对乌克兰的援助、时而削减时而恢复国内外政府部门和项目开支，各种相互矛盾的指令层出不穷。而内阁部长和幕僚们之所以会执行这些指令，是因为他们都心怀恐惧，担心一旦偏离了我们这位“敬爱的领袖”在社交媒体上刚刚发布的任何政策路线，就会遭到埃隆·马斯克或特朗普发推指责。
各位，这样的状况持续四年是行不通的。
我们的市场会因不确定性而陷入崩溃，我们的企业家会精神崩溃，我们的制造商也会精神崩溃，我们国内外的投资者都会精神崩溃，我们的盟友会精神崩溃，而且我们还会让世界其他国家也陷入精神崩溃。
当美国总统在短时间内先是威胁乌克兰，接着威胁俄罗斯，然后又撤回对俄罗斯的威胁，威胁要对墨西哥和加拿大征收高额关税，随后又再次推迟征收，对中国大幅提高关税，还威胁要对欧洲和加拿大加征更多关税时，你就无法管理好一个国家，无法成为美国的盟友，无法经营好一家企业，也无法成为美国的长期贸易伙伴。
我们最亲密盟友的高层官员私下表示，他们担心我们不仅变得不稳定，甚至实际上正在成为他们的敌人。唯一受到温柔对待的人是普京，而美国的传统盟友们都感到震惊不已。
但在特朗普所有的弥天大谎中，这是最大的一个：他声称自己接手的是一个千疮百孔的经济，所以才不得不采取这些举措。简直是无稽之谈。乔·拜登确实犯了不少错误，但在明智的美联储的帮助下，美国经济在他的任期结束时实际上状况相当不错，并且朝着正确的方向发展。美国绝对不需要全球关税休克疗法。
企业和家庭的资产负债表相对健康，油价处于低位，失业率仅在4%左右，消费者支出在增加，国内生产总值增长率约为2%。我们确实需要解决与中国的贸易失衡问题——在这一点上特朗普一直是正确的——但这实际上是唯一紧迫的议程。而且我们本可以有针对性地对中国提高关税，并协调我们的盟友采取同样的行动，这才是促使中国做出改变的正确方式。
现在，经济学家们担心，特朗普给经济注入的这种巨大不确定性可能会因为一些错误的原因而导致利率下降——因为太多的投资者因不确定性而降低了国内外的经济增长预期。或者我们可能会面临更糟糕的情况：经济增长停滞和通货膨胀（由众多关税引发）并存，也就是所谓的滞胀。
但特朗普引发的这种不确定性并非爷爷奶奶辈的那种周期性的经济不确定性。这是一种深入骨髓的不确定性，来自你眼睁睁看着一个80年来自己所熟知的世界，被世上最强大的人物——一个不知道自己在做什么且身边围绕着一群唯唯诺诺之辈的人——所瓦解。
自1945年以来，世界经历了一段非凡的经济增长时期，并且没有发生过大国之间的战争。当然，它并非十全十美，也有许多动荡不安的年份，还有一些国家发展滞后。但从世界历史的宏观角度来看，这80年对很多地方的很多人来说，都是相当和平与繁荣的。
而世界之所以呈现出这样的局面，最主要的原因就在于美国的地位。
1961年1月20日，约翰·F·肯尼迪在就职演说中的两句话很好地总结了当时的美国：“让每一个国家都知道，无论它对我们怀有善意还是恶意，为确保自由的存在与胜利，我们将付出一切代价，背负一切重担，应对一切艰难，支持一切朋友，反抗一切敌人。”
还有：“所以，我的美国同胞们，不要问你们的国家能为你们做些什么，而要问你们能为自己的国家做些什么。全世界的公民们，不要问美国将为你们做些什么，而要问我们共同能为人类的自由做些什么。”
特朗普和他那空洞无物的副总统JD·万斯，完全颠倒了肯尼迪的号召。特朗普-万斯版本是这样的：
让每一个国家都知道，无论它对我们怀有善意还是恶意，如今的美国不会付出任何代价，不会背负任何重担，不会应对任何艰难，而且为了确保特朗普政府的政治存续，它会抛弃任何朋友，向任何敌人献媚——哪怕这意味着只要对我们有利或方便，就可以在任何地方放弃自由。
所以，我的美国同胞们，不要问你们的国家能为你们做些什么，而要问你们能为特朗普总统做些什么。全世界的公民们，不要问美国将为你们做些什么，而要问你们准备好为让美国保护你们免受俄罗斯或中国的威胁而付出多少代价。
像美国这样至关重要的国家——自1945年以来一直通过北约、世界卫生组织、世界银行和世界贸易组织等机构发挥着关键的稳定作用，并且确实比其他国家承担了更多的责任以做大蛋糕，而我们因为份额最大从中受益最多——当这样一个国家突然背离其角色，成为这个体系的掠夺者时，大家可要当心了。
如果说特朗普有什么可以辨识且始终如一的外交政策理念的话，那也是他从未在竞选时宣扬过的、而且在历史上也绝无仅有的理念。
以色列《新消息报》的专栏作家纳胡姆·巴内亚近日对我说：“特朗普是一个孤立主义-帝国主义者。”他想要得到帝国主义的所有好处，包括他国的领土和矿产资源，却不想派遣任何美国军队，也不想支付任何补偿。
我不会把特朗普的外交政策理念称为“遏制”或“接触”，而会称之为“打砸抢”。特朗普一心想成为地缘政治上的小偷。他想把格陵兰岛、巴拿马、加拿大和加沙地带都据为己有——就像把它们从货架上取下来一样，不付出任何代价——然后跑回他在美国的“安全庇护所”。我们“二战”后的盟友们从未见过这样的美国。
如果特朗普想让美国来个180度大转弯，他就应该基于合理的经济学理论制定出一套连贯的计划，并且组建一个由最优秀、最杰出的人才组成的团队，而不是那些最会谄媚且极端右翼的人。他还应该向我们解释清楚，将那些让国家在不同政府更迭期间都能正常运转的关键机构（无论是司法部还是国税局）的专业人员清除出去，然后任命一些极端意识形态分子担任关键职位，到底对国家有什么好处，而不仅仅是对他自己有好处。
最重要的是——最重要的是——他应该让每一个美国人，无论其所属党派，看到最基本的为人的体面。任何一位总统想要在这样的激进转变中取得哪怕是一点成功，或者即使是较小幅度的转变，唯一的办法就是向他的反对者伸出橄榄枝，至少要尽可能地争取他们的支持。我理解，他们很愤怒。但特朗普是总统，他应该比他们更大度。
唉，可特朗普不是这样的人。利昂·维泽尔蒂尔曾评价本雅明·内塔尼亚胡的话在特朗普身上更是加倍适用：他是一个如此渺小的人，却身处如此重大的时代。
如果说与肯尼迪就职演说的对比是如今最让我沮丧的事情，那么林肯1838年1月在伊利诺伊州斯普林菲尔德青年男子学园的演讲则最让我难以忘怀——尤其是他的警告：唯一能够摧毁我们的力量就是我们自己，通过滥用我们最珍视的制度，以及相互伤害。
“那么，危险何时会降临呢？”林肯问道，“我的答案是，如果危险真的降临到我们头上，那它一定是从我们内部产生的。它不可能来自国外。如果我们注定要灭亡，那我们自己必然是罪魁祸首和终结者。作为一个自由的民族，我们要么永远生存下去，要么自取灭亡。”
但凡稍有知觉的人，都会时时念起这番话。
A Great Unraveling Is Underway
If you are confused by President Trump’s zigzagging strategies on Ukraine, tariffs, microchips or a host of other issues, it is not your fault. It’s his. What you are seeing is a president who ran for re-election to avoid criminal prosecution and to get revenge on people he falsely accused of stealing the 2020 election. He never had a coherent theory of the biggest trends in the world today and how to best align America with them to thrive in the 21st century. That is not why he ran.
And once he won, Trump brought back his old obsessions and grievances — with tariffs and Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky and Canada — and staffed his administration with an extraordinary number of fringe ideologues who met one overriding criterion: loyalty first and always to Trump and his whims over and above the Constitution, traditional values of American foreign policy or basic laws of economics.
The result is what you are seeing today: a crazy cocktail of on-again-off-again tariffs, on-again-off-again assistance for Ukraine, on-again-off-again cuts in government departments and programs both domestic and foreign — conflicting edicts all carried out by cabinet secretaries and staff members who are united by a fear of being tweeted about by Elon Musk or Trump should they deviate from whatever policy line emerged unfiltered in the last five minutes from our Dear Leader’s social media feed.
Four years of this will not work, folks.
Our markets will have a nervous breakdown from uncertainty, our entrepreneurs will have a nervous breakdown, our manufacturers will have a nervous breakdown, our investors — foreign and domestic — will have a nervous breakdown, our allies will have a nervous breakdown and we’re going to give the rest of the world a nervous breakdown.
You cannot run a country, you cannot be an American ally, you cannot run a business and you cannot be a long-term American trading partner when, in a short period, the U.S. president threatens Ukraine, threatens Russia, withdraws his threat to Russia, threatens huge tariffs on Mexico and Canada and postpones them — again — doubles tariffs on China and threatens to impose even more on Europe and Canada.
Top officials of our oldest allies say privately they fear that we are becoming not just unstable, but actually their enemy. The only person who gets treated with kid gloves is Putin, and America’s traditional friends are in shock.
But here is Trump’s biggest lie of all his big lies: He claims that he inherited an economy in ruins and that’s why he has to do all of these things. Nonsense. Joe Biden got a lot of things wrong, but by the end of his term, with the help of a wise Federal Reserve, the Biden economy was actually in pretty good shape and trending in the right direction. America certainly did not need global tariff shock therapy.
Corporate and household balance sheets were relatively healthy, oil prices were on the low side, unemployment was around only 4 percent, consumer spending was rising and G.D.P. growth was around 2 percent. We definitely needed to address the trade imbalance with China — Trump has been right about that all along — but that was really the only urgent agenda item, and we could have done that with targeted tariff increases on Beijing, coordinated with our allies doing the same, which is how you get Beijing to move.
Now economists fear that the profound uncertainty Trump is injecting into the economy could drive down interest rates for all the wrong reasons — because of so much investor uncertainty driving down growth, both here and abroad. Or we could get an even worse combination: the combination of stagnant growth and inflation (from so many tariffs) known as stagflation.
But this is not just your grandfather’s cyclical economic uncertainty Trump has triggered. This is the uncertainty that cuts to the bone, the uncertainty that comes from seeing a world that you knew for 80 years being unraveled by the most powerful player — who doesn’t know what he is doing and is surrounded by bobbleheads.
The world has enjoyed an extraordinary period of economic growth and absence of great-power wars since 1945. Of course, it was not perfect, and there have been many troubled years and countries that lagged. But in the broad sweep of world history, these 80 years have been remarkably peaceful and prosperous for a lot of people, in a lot of places.
And the No. 1 reason that the world was the way it was, was because America was the way it was.
That America was summed up by two lines in John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address on Jan. 20, 1961: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
And: “So, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”
Trump and his vacuous vice president, JD Vance, have completely turned Kennedy’s call on its head. The Trump-Vance version is:
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that today’s America will pay no price, bear no burden, incur no hardship, and it will abandon any friends and cuddle up to any foes in order to assure the Trump administration’s political survival — even if it means the abandonment of liberty wherever that be profitable or convenient for us.
So, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for President Trump. And my fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, ask how much you are ready to pay for America to defend your freedom from Russia or China.
When a country as central as America — one that has played the critical stabilizing role since 1945, acting through institutions like NATO, the World Health Organization, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, and, yes, paying a bigger share than others to make the pie much bigger, which benefited us most because we had the biggest slice — when a country like ours suddenly departs from that role and becomes a predator on this system, watch out.
To the extent Trump has manifested any discernible, consistent foreign policy philosophy, it is one that he never campaigned on and has no parallel in history.
“Trump is an isolationist-imperialist,” Nahum Barnea, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, remarked to me the other day. He wants all the benefits of imperialism, including your territory and your minerals, without sending any U.S. troops or paying any compensation.
I would call Trump’s foreign policy philosophy not “containment” or “engagement,” but “smash and grab.” Trump aspires to be a geopolitical shoplifter. He wants to stuff his pockets with Greenland, Panama, Canada and Gaza — just grab them off the shelves, without paying — and then run back to his American safe house. Our postwar allies have never seen this America before.
If Trump wants to take America on a 180-degree turn, he owes it to the country to have a coherent plan, based on sound economics and a team that represents the best and the brightest, not the most sycophantic and right-wing woke. And he owes us an explanation of exactly how purging professional staff from key bureaucracies that keep the nation running from administration to administration, whether at the Justice Department or the I.R.S., and appointing fringe ideologues to key positions is good for the country and not just him.
And most of all — most of all — he owes every American, irrespective of party, some basic human decency. The only way any president can remotely succeed in any such radical turn, or even a lesser one, is if he reaches out to his opponents and at least tries to bring them along as much as possible. I get it, they are angry. But Trump is president. He should be bigger than them.
Alas, though, that is not Trump. What Leon Wieseltier once said of Benjamin Netanyahu is doubly true of Trump: He is such a small man, in such a big time.
If it is the contrast with Kennedy’s inaugural speech that depresses me most today, it is Lincoln’s January 1838 speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Ill., that haunts me most — particularly his warning that the only power that can destroy us is ourselves, by our abuse of our most cherished institutions, and by our abuse of one another.
“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?” Lincoln asked. “I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.”
If those words don’t haunt you too, you’re not paying attention.
