In the New York Review of Books, Christopher Brown writes about what a “Manchurian Candidate” would do if elected, and it turns out to almlst exactly what Donald Trump has been doing. He says:
Imagine that the president of the United States was a “Manchurian candidate,” an embedded foreign agent determined to wreak maximum damage on the country and limited only by the need not to act so outrageously and preposterously as to blow his cover. What are some of the things that even a Manchurian candidate would hesitate to do? What would be the limit of the self-inflicted wounds that he would dare to attempt?
In foreign affairs he might hesitate to openly undermine the world order established by the US after World War II, of which it has been the major beneficiary. Surely he would not declare Canada—a country with which we have the longest nonmilitarized frontier in the world and that has been our best trading partner—a threat to national security and target it for absorption through economic extortion as our fifty-first state. Surely he would not openly hope for and encourage the dissolution of the EU. Surely he would not disparage our NATO allies and threaten one member that has been extremely supportive of the US—Denmark—with the military seizure of its overseas territory of Greenland. Surely he would not consistently denigrate the leadership of our democratic allies as weak and stupid while praising our authoritarian rivals as smart and tough, thus revealing his own political role models and authoritarian aspirations.
Surely he would not cut off aid to Ukraine—which without the loss of a single American service member’s life has so taxed the military strength of Russia that it had to abandon a dictator it supported in Syria and has depleted its military stockpile to the extent that it is taking Cold War–era tanks out of mothballs—all to save a minuscule percentage of our defense budget (with most of this Ukrainian allotment spent on procuring weapons in the US in any case). Surely he would not seize the Panama Canal, where one homemade rocket fired from beyond the American reoccupation zone could take out just one lock and effectively close the canal to all traffic, thereby inflicting immense economic and strategic damage on the US. Surely he would not openly advocate the ethnic cleansing and American occupation of Gaza—policies that were prosecuted as violations of international law at Nuremberg. More likely, he might attempt to dismantle USAID, precisely because it is an extremely effective but underappreciated institution of American soft power that presents a favorable face of American expertise and compassion to the rest of the world.