Portrait. The key to understanding Donald Trump's foreign policy was patient in a book written almost twenty years ago. Special Providence (Random House, 2001, untranslated), by geopolitologist Walter Russell Mead. In the aftermath of the assassination of Iranian general Ghassem Soleimani, on January 3, in Iraq, this book perfectly fulfilled its office to explain why a president, officially hostile to military adventures, could embark on this targeted elimination, then say to himself ready to massively bomb Iran in the event of bloody reprisals by the Iranian regime, even though it continues to profess its intention to withdraw from a region which would no longer be of any strategic interest to the United States, according to him.
Walter Russell Mead, who welcomes in his office the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank located a stone's throw from the Trump Hotel, in Washington, does not hide having voted as the overwhelming majority of this intellectual elite in favor of former Democratic Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016. And he often remains banned from the unconventional ways Donald Trump used to lead the United States.
Four American historical figures
Native of South Carolina, academic who passed through Yale, proud of being and who intends to remain so, Walter Russel Mead participated in the creation of the New America think tank defending a "Radical centrism". He supported the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 before measuring the devastation. Very critical of Barack Obama's action in Libya in 2011, which the former president himself considers to be a mistake, he also criticized him for not having respected in 2013 the "red lines" that he were fixed in Syria: the use by the regime of chemical weapons against its people.
For the title of his work which has become a reference, the author is inspired by a formula lent to the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to give a title to his typology of the various American diplomatic schools. "God reserves a special destiny for madmen, drunk people and the United States of America", allegedly assured one of the fathers of German unification. This typology includes that with which Donald Trump's instincts can be associated. She is embodied by four historic American figures: Alexander Hamilton, first secretary to the Treasury (1789-1795), and three presidents. They are Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809), Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) and Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921).
