Historian and columnist Nicolas Beverez has predicted that the United States will meet the fate of its erstwhile foe, the Soviet Union.
Beverez stated in an opinion piece for Le Figaro that “rage is tearing the United States apart and destroying its leadership.”
“A little more than thirty years after the collapse of Sovietism, the United States in turn is threatening to disintegrate, giving credence to Tocqueville who stressed that democracies die less from military defeats than from their institutions being corrupted by demagogues and citizens losing civic sense under the effect of individualism,” he wrote.
Beverez blamed this dim outlook on President Donald Trump, who engaged the nation in a “suicidal strategy by weighing a new Cold War with a nation torn apart and cut off from its European and Asian allies.”
He argued that this strategy was the opposite of what Harry Truman did during his office to try to contain Soviet geopolitical ambitions. Truman adopted the so-called Truman Doctrine, a foreign policy that ditched isolationism for proactive role in suppressing the spread of communism, and helped rebuild the post-war Western Europe under the Marshall Plan.
The United States is suffering from four crises at once, Beverez continues. The first one is the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 110,000 people in the US (the world’s biggest death toll), caused record-high unemployment and looks set to wipe 6.5 percent off the nation’s economy this year.
Another crisis is the protests over the killing of George Floyd. Widespread outrage over police brutality has led to civil unrest not seen since the 1960s, and re-ignited the Black Lives Matter movement against systemic racism.
Demonstrations have spread across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, with police arresting more than 10,000 people nationwide. Donald Trump’s “populism” and threats to restore order with the help of the army were wreaking havoc on the US, Beverez suggested.
The columnist also brought up attempts by Trump to bypass Congress, which he said are destroying the system of constitutional checks and balances. The Trump administration has defied Democrats more than once during his presidency, from blocking subpoenas to pushing through controversial arms deals.
Despite the woes America encountered in the last year of Donald Trump’s first term, Beverez believes he could still get re-elected in November because of the weakness of his only remaining rival, Joe Biden.
Pollsters say that public approval for Donald Trump has declined over the past four weeks over his administration’s handling of the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, with Biden gaining ground nationwide and in key battleground states.
According to an average of polls by RealClearPolitics, Biden has an 8-percent national lead over Trump — his biggest lead since the end of last year.
