Alan Zendell, April 13, 2025

In 1962, as a college junior, I needed an elective to fill out my program. Given the state of the world and the Cold War, I thought Americans ought to be learning Russian, so I registered for Russian 101. I had already studied Spanish and German, both of which are similar to English in important ways, particularly in the use of tenses. Russian, however is different from English in subtle but important ways.

To a beginning student Russian is deceptively easy. The Cyrillic alphabet is similar enough to both Greek and Hebrew that what looks impossible to some people felt like fun, breaking a secret code. What makes the early stages of learning Russian relatively easy is that there are no irregular verbs in Russian when they’re used in past tense. That eliminates a ton of complications that drove me crazy in Spanish and German. But my professor warned us not to get cocky – the hard stuff was yet to come. It came quickly when he explained that past tense is a misnomer in Russian, because the language does not use tenses as we know them. Instead, it uses “aspects” which are subtly different from tenses, but similar enough to be dangerous if a student, or, say, a diplomat doesn’t pay close attention.

John F. Kennedy was president. I was seventeen when he was elected, and as a  Freshman at an Ivy League school, I was overly impressed with silly things like the absurd competition among the Ivies over which was best. Rankers usually picked Yale or Harvard, which infuriated Columbia. (I would have picked Princeton since Albert Einstein was there.) In that context, Kennedy’s Cabinet picks made a lasting impression. His predecessors had relied on established diplomats and professionals with impressive real-world experience,  but Kennedy selected a Cabinet of Harvard academics.

A lot of people, mostly academics, thought that was wonderful, but experienced critics warned that lack of real-world experience would ultimately be a problem. In 1962, as tensions between Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev rose precipitously, my Russian professor spent our lecture sessions ranting about the lack of anyone in Kennedy’s Cabinet who could speak fluent Russian or was an expert on the Soviet Union. He said in the shrillest terms, as the Cuban Missile Crisis worsened, that Kennedy’s people were overmatched by the Russians. But having better, more knowledgeable diplomats isn’t enough if the other side is incompetent.

Effective diplomacy, which means knowing how to resolve differences without dropping bombs, requires that both sides understand each other clearly, in terms of  both language and cultural norms. If you’ve ever tried to debate someone who is either uninformed or not very smart, you understand the danger. If two sides armed with nuclear missiles miss the subtle differences in their languages, or simply don’t understand how their opposite numbers think, the result could be the end of civilization. Ask someone who was there in 1962 – we all thought we were going to be nuked.

I’m concerned that Trump may have made a similar error with respect to both Russia and China. The way he campaigned that he  would end the war in Ukraine in one day suggested he really believed he and Vladimir Putin were buds, and he could easily wrest a cease-fire agreement that would end the war without leaving Europe exposed. When he essentailly threw Volodymir Zelensky out of the White House, humiliating him in front of the world, and Zelensky was forced to come  back and accept Trump’s plan, Trump strutted around, fully expecting his friend Vlad to go along with it. Instead, however, Putin broke off truce talks and increased attacks on Ukraine, and those attacks are more successful every day because we’ve withheld arms shipment to Kyiv. Nice work, Donald!

The jeopardy with respect to China may be more extreme. Not only do Trump’s tariff warriors not speak Chinese, Trump doesn’t seem to understand the Chinese psyche. In his transactional way of doing business, everything is a short-term give and take. But Trump, who has repeatedly shown a lack of understanding of history, clearly misread the playing field with China. Playing chicken with Xi Jinping is not a good idea, because Xi will never back down. Trump fails to understand the Mandarin philosophy that has dominated Chinese leaders for millennia. Xi is more than willing to sacrifice the lives and livelihoods of millions of his citizens, as his forbears always have been. China takes a thousand-year view, while Trump cares only about his own remaining years on Earth.

If getting China to cave is the lynch pin to Trump’s trade war, we’re in for a long confrontation that will have catastrophic consequences for the world economy and greatly increase the risk of major military confrontations. If saner, more well-informed heads don’t start guiding policy, Trump’s legacy will be one of destruction.