Sorry Trump, Americans Need a Predictable President for Peace
by Stephen Cooper
In an article for the Associated Press called Imagining a Trump Administration? Count on unpredictability, Nancy Benac writes that Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump likes to complain, “We talk too much,” and, “We’re totally predictable.” “I want to be unpredictable,” Trump told Bill O’Reilly, “The voters want unpredictability.”
Like most Trumpisms — salty twitter tirades tweeted in the wee hours of the night — this simply is not true. Americans want, and respectfully I submit Americans need a President who is predictable.
At pp. 104-05 of her book What Moves Man: The Realist Theory of International Relations and its Judgment of Human Nature (State University of New York Press 2004), Annette Freyberg-Inan wrote: “Stability means that the behavior of other actors becomes more predictable, and the predictability of the effects of one’s decisions is an essential prerequisite for the calculations necessary for rational decision making.”
Echoing Freyberg-Inan’s conclusion on predictability is Tom Wall. In a piece called Please be Predictable for dairycoach.com, Wall wrote: “Ambassador Mark Green [the former U.S. Ambassador to Tanzania now President of the International Republican Institute] posted the following statement online . . . I had an International Relations professor who used to preach to us, ‘When you’re a superpower, you must be the most predictable nation on earth. Everyone, friend and foe alike, needs to know that if they do X, America will do Y. The whole world is based upon that idea.’”
Freyberg-Inan, Wall, Ambassador Green, and Ambassador Green’s former International Relations professor are not the first to draw connections between predictability and peace and certainly they won’t be the last. See, e.g., Jovan Babi?, Trust, Predictability and Lasting Peace (“The main focus in the paper is the connection between trust and peace which makes predictability as a necessary condition of the normalcy of life possible, especially collective and communal life.”); Howard H. Stevenson and Mihnea C. Moldoveanu, The Power of Predictability, Harvard Business Review, July-August 1995 issue (“What our ancestors discovered holds true today: Survival still depends on the ability to respond quickly to change, and organizations can still help people predict the outcomes of their actions and thus act swiftly and predictably. Without predictability, people will be too scared not only to take risks but to take any actions at all. Life within an organization will become what it was for the solitary hunter: uncertain, brutish, and short.”).
What these academics are saying –objectively smart folks, not just blowhards claiming to be so — is that unsurprisingly, Donald Trump could not be more wrong. In fact, Americans want and Americans need a President who is predictable: Predictable about this country’s use and nonuse of nuclear weapons, predictable about long-standing nuclear policy in sensitive areas of the world, and a president who predictably and declaratively says “no” when asked softball questions like, “would you ever use a nuclear bomb in Europe?”
Americans want and need a President who predictably and consistently will treat women with respect, fairness, and equality — not one who, among other vulgarities, consistently jokes how his daughter is so attractive that if he weren’t her father he might make a play for her. As demonstrated by his recent contradictory and buffoonish statements about punishing women who have abortions, Donald Trump, will be anything but predictable concerning his respect for women and the rule of law on women’s reproductive rights.
Americans understand in these trying, sometimes terrifying times, that the United States needs a stable, predictable leader in the Oval Office — not an unhinged, rudderless, narcissistic ego in a suit — willing to change course with each new poll or political wave.
Stephen Cooper is a former federal and D.C. public defender. He has contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers in the United States and overseas. He writes full-time and lives in Woodland Hills, California.