Donald Trump's 1990 Playboy is a window into the man's world view and his spitball takes on the global events of 1989-90. And they represent a very heterodox view of contemporary events and both then and in hindsight are, well, kind of dumb. America's prestige in early 1990 appeared quite strong and the collapse of communism seemingly vindicated the US-led alliance system.

The events of 1989 in which various communist regimes' hold on power collapsed over the course of a few months caught many politicians and observers flat-footed. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, for instance, was on a very high-profile state visit to Poland when the Berlin Wall fell. Most European heads of state had not anticipated any chance at German unification and feared a revival of the old Reich. French President François Mitterrand approached the collapse of the GDR and possible German unification as did UK PM Margaret Thatcher. The collapse of communism might have looked like a boon to the Western powers, but the glow of this victory obscured some of the rifts in the NATO alliance that had been growing in the decade. There were disagreements over the removal of American-led short-ranged nuclear forces with some in the FRG wanting them out and others like Thatcher fearing the US would negotiate them away for nothing. The sudden possibility of German unification threatened to drive these rifts even wider by injecting an uncertain element within them.

This was why the May 1989 Brussels NATO summit, held a few months before Trump's interview, was an unexpected success. A good many commentators predicted the summit would at best be a photo-op or even underscore the fractures in the alliance. US President George Bush was able to unite a somewhat raucous bunch of NATO leaders to form a coherent front to the events of the last few months. This was not an accident; both in speeches and in internal memoranda, Bush's team emphasized the need to "end the division of Europe on our terms." Bush was able to parlay a proposed mutual cutback in US and Soviet conventional forces to sidestep the controversial nuclear issue. Kohl would declare "we were all winners" at the close of the conference and US leadership of NATO was reaffirmed.

This leadership put Bush in a good position as a moderator against the reluctant British and French as events in Germany unfolded over the next few months. Bush achieved this not through expressions of strength or threatening to withdraw US support, but rather through personal contact with various heads of state and other forms of "soft" power and diplomacy. Contrary to Trump's view, the "kinder, gentler" approach paid dividends in these months. Some of these approaches were quite personal. For instance, while giving a July speech in Hungary calling for a "free and open Europe," delivered in a sodden rainstorm, the American President gave his raincoat to an elderly Hungarian woman. But behind this approach was a commitment to control the process of change in ways beneficial to the NATO and Western system. Bush would confidently assert at a December 1989 NATO meeting that there would be "no Yalta-style deal on Eastern Europe," in which the US would seek short-term gains at the expense of long-term security.

The cumulative effect of these public and private diplomatic offensives was that it appeared to many that the NATO system of collective defense and the containment of Soviet communism had worked. The alliance provided a structure for heads of state to hash out differences and form a collective front that allowed them to be in the driver's seat during sudden shocks of 1989.

Circling back to Trump's idea that the world was laughing at us, well, the facts really do not back this up in Europe. Thatcher feared American withdrawal from Europe by a sweet-talking Gorbachev, but for the most part, her position was an outlier. The Western European leadership tended towards having American military commitment match the threat from the Warsaw Pact. West German public opinion polls by the Allensbach Institute maintained data over the decades of the Cold War also confirmed this trend. One question asked "if you read in the newspaper that tomorrow the US were withdrawing their forces from Europe, would you regret or welcome that news?" Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the West Germans who would welcome that news hovered between the teens and low-twenties with a solid majority in the regret camp. By 1989 and 90, those numbers were reversed with a majority welcoming such news. There was much the same trend with the question "would are security be guaranteed without American military forces within West Germany?". Allensbach polls though showed that a good portion of West Germans wanted a residual presence of American military forces and continued German membership in NATO.

In many respects, Trump's exhalation of might and fears of decline were representative of the zeitgeist of 1987/88, not 1989/90. Paul Kennedy's bestselling book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 pushed a theory that imperial decline is the result of military overstretch in which commitments of military force become ever harder to balance with economic imperatives. Kennedy waffled a little on American power, but did conclude that America's postwar position would assuredly erode. There were other commentators in this period who also opined on American decline. Most of this commentary looked to Japan as a model for managing American decline. Ezra Vogel's Japan as Number One: Lessons for America sung the praises of Japanese bureaucracy, education, and industry. The 1989 book The Japan That Can Say No was bestseller in Japan is in a way two books, with one half written by Sony founder Morita Akio and the other by a rather controversial Japanese politician and nationalist Ishihara Shintaro. The Ishihara half argued Japan should tack its own course in geopolitical affairs and step out from the shadow of US hegemony.

In this respect, Trump's interview is in line with the Japan-bashing trend that would continue through the early nineties - I write more about it my answer here. But this pessimistic approach seemed out of date by 1990. Kennedy would spend the better part of a the decade fighting a rear-guard defense of his overstretch thesis Fears of US decline in manufacturing vis-à-vis countries like Germany and Japan remained a strong feature within the American public and politics in the nineties. This fueled the short political careers of both Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot. But this was more of a flash in the pan as America's would-be economic rivals floundered in the 1990s. The deep structural problems of the Japanese economy, signs of which were apparent by 1990, led to the bursting of a bubble and the so-called "hollow years" that make the Japan-bashing alarmism look like hyperbole dashed with racism. By the same token, there would be no second Wirtschaftswunder as it was apparent to most visitors to the GDR how far behind its economy was compared to its more affluent FRG counterpart.

The collapse of communism and the 1989/90 moment did fuel a certain degree of hubris about American power and what Bush called a "New World Order." NATO worked well as a venue for collective defense, but floundered over where it should go after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. But such problems lay in the future. By January 1990, the American-led alliance was riding high in that it looked to many observers that it had kept the Soviet bear at bay without resort to a nuclear war. Furthermore, many Europeans and Americans were looking forward to a "peace dividend" of reduced military spending and a reduction of armed forces.

Trump missed all of these developments in his interview. Instead he posited a zero-sum game in which America had been conned by West Germany, Japan, and Saudi Arabia to pay for their defense while they produced better export-goods. Not only does this ignore possible US interests in maintaining armed forces in these countries, it also ignored the sizable investments these countries made building up their own militaries as well as the political costs for these leaders to have US bases on their territory. With the possible exception of Japan, the events of this period burnished America's image abroad and redeemed the alliance system it created after the Second World War.

Sources

Asmus, Ronald D. German Unification and Its Ramifications. Santa Monica, CA.: Rand, 1991.

Falk, Barbara J. "1989 and Post-Cold War Policymaking: Were the “Wrong” Lessons Learned from the Fall of Communism?." International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society IJPS 22, no. 3 (2009): 291-313.

Raucher, Alan R. "The Recent American Declinism Controversy: The Case of Historian Paul Kennedy." Studies in Popular Culture 24, no. 2 (2001): 37-63.

Spohr, Kristina. Post Wall, Post Square: How Bush, Gorbachev, Kohl, and Deng Shaped the World After 1989. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.