Richard Haas, the president emeritus of the Council of Foreign Relations, told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Thursday that what President Donald Trump is doing to the United States is truly historic -- but not in a good way.
In breaking down Trump's continued quest to take a wrecking ball to decades-old military and economic alliances with other democratic nations, Haas struggled to recall the leader of any other great power behaving in a similar manner.
"This is something going on here that is without a precedent in history," he said. "The United States has built an order for 80 years, Europe has been a central part of it, along with our allies in Asia."
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He then said what Trump is doing to that order is completely different from anything he's seen from past empires.
"Normally, orders come to an end one of two ways: Either somebody rises up to overwhelm it, like, say, Germany and Japan did during the '30s... or it crumbles from within the way the Soviet Union crumbled, or the way the Ottoman Empire crumbled," he said. "This is something without historical precedent. The United States built and maintained an order pretty successfully, including economically. The last I checked, we're a lot wealthier than we ever were. We did this for 80 years, and now this order is being dismantled by none other than the United States."
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