The Record of Donald Trump's first year in office: Few Achievements, but much Division, Destruction and Aggression

By Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay, Emeritus professor of economics, Université de Montréal

"It is important... that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the of the powers of one department to encroach upon  another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism." 

George Washington (1732-1799), Founding Father and the first president of the United States, serving (1789-1797), (in 'President George Washington's Farewell Address', published on Sept. 19, 1796).

"[Jeffery Epstein] is a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side... Donald Trump (1946-), in a phone interview, as reported in the article, "Jeffery Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery", published by New York Magazine, Oct. 28, 2002.

"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

John Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902), English historian and moralist, (in a letter to an Anglican bishop, 1887).

How can one evaluate the record of the Donald Trump administration 2.0 when, over the past year, the American president has violated many national and international laws and treaties, and rejected every precedent, every convention, every custom and has upended everything!

I- Since his inauguration on January 20, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump (1946-) has displayed a predatory and unstable character and a questionable judgment

Donald Trump seems to lack the qualities that most people in a democracy value in a leader: competence, moderation, honesty, trust, judgment, compassion, humanism, empathy, responsibility, stability, and respect for human life and the rule of law.

 

Since Donald Trump does not seem to have any of those qualities, his violent predatory character, his excessive egocentrism, his lack of ethics or morality, his ignorance and his incompetence make him an extremely dangerous politician.

Over the years, he has gained a reputation among many psychiatrists and psychologists for being a narcissistic person, tyrannical and with an unstable personality—that is, someone who is self-centered and "who takes pleasure in exercising power or authority over people in an unfair or cruel way."

What makes him a dangerous politician, as his chief of staff told Vanity Fair magazine, is that her boss has an "alcoholic's personality", that is, someone who is not fully aware of all the consequences of what he says or does. Mr. Trump also seems to be so insecure that he has developed a childish and constant hunger for praise. And he is continually congratulating himself and lying.

· Trump's alleged involvement in Jeffery Epstein's international sex scandal involving minors

Donald Trump has been accused of sexual depravity including accusations of rape. He entertained a long-standing relationship with Jeffery Epstein, his friendly Floridian neighbor and a sexual criminal who was convicted in the case of a large scale international ring of sex-trafficking.

Once he became president, Mr. Trump was accused of a cover-up, because he refused to publish the Justice Department's millions of pages of the so-called Epstein Files, (despite having promised to do so during his last election campaign). Such a release could shed light on his alleged role in Jeffery Epstein's international system of soliciting minors for prostitution.

The American people are therefore entitled to know all the truth about this important politico-moral scandal, and above all, what had been D. Trump's participation in such a perversion, which ruined the lives of some 1,200 American and European mainly teen-aged girls.

A federal law, passed by Congress, called the 'Epstein Files Transparency Act', was adopted on November 18, 2025. It required that the Trump administration release the totality of the documents in the Epstein files one month later, but with little success.

Despite the law passed by Congress, there is a strong chance that Donald Trump's involvement in the scandal will never be formally known. The Trump Administration 2.0 could destroy the evidence or withhold it indefinitely, while simultaneously launching wars abroad to create a diversion.

II- Trump's abuses of power and state censorship of free speech

President D. Trump has abused his power as president in many areas, especiallly concerning the independence of the Department of Justice. For instance, he named his personal lawyer as deputy attorney general in the DOJ.

He has weaponized the U.S. legal and judiciary system and the entire U.S. government with arbitrary charges against perceived 'political enemies', to exact revenge and retribution, at taxpayers' expense.

Donald Trump has also been abusing the presidential power to pardon. He extended it to hundreds of convicted supporters, some of whom are political donors, while some others are very close to the financial interests of his private business organization and of his immediate family enterprises. (N. B.: He made more than 1,500 reversals of court sentences by decree in one year, an all-time record.)

· On the issue of immigration, while it is true that a country has the right to select its immigrants, the way the Trump administration has launched cruel pursuits of people already living in the U.S. raises eyebrows.

Indeed, to have people arrested by the U.S. Immigration Police (ICE) armed masked goons and having them placed in cages that serve as concentration camps, at home or abroad, can be considered cruel, befitting of a police state. Some Americans have even been killed in a horrible fashion.

It is worth noting that many features of D, Trump's radical political agenda and the use of authoritarian and bullying tactics were outlined in the so-called 'Project 2025', (also known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project). This is a 920-page political plan to profoundly upend the U.S. federal government.

Indeed, the central objective of the plan is "building a governing agenda, not just for next January (2025) but long into the future."

True to his self-centered and authoritarian approach to politics, and contrary to previous American presidents, President D. Trump does not consider himself to be the president of all Americans, but only of those who support him. In so doing, he has stirred up division, hatred and fear in his country.

Moreover, while ignoring the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, he has often attempted to suppress free speech for his political adversaries.

Furthermore, one must also mention his repeated hostile remarks and insults, and constant 'ad hominem' mafia-like threats against anyone, including journalists, intellectuals, artists and television presenters who dare to criticize him or his team, thus negating their fundamental right to free political speech.

This is particularly the case of court vendettas or other pressures and threats by an ego-driven Trump administration against American media outlets, some related to public licenses to operate, to incite them to fire stand-up comics who make comments on some of D. Trump's behavior or statements, in order to intimidate and silence them.

III. D. Trump's attacks against the U.S. Constitution and his political corruption

The United States has an excellent constitution, so designed as to prevent despots, tyrants and special interests from taking over the government. This was done by enshrining in the constitution the principle of the separation of powers and a system of checks and balances.

However, since his January 2025 inauguration as U.S. president, D. Trump has ignored such constitutional protections and has centralized most important levers of political power in the White House.

In so doing, D. Trump has demonstrated that he has no intention to respect his oath of office to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

· Donald Trump and his record level of political corruption

The New York Times conducted an investigation into the extent of Donald Trump's political corruption. For instance, the newspaper analyzed how some 346 of D. Trump's post-election donors received benefits from the new Trump administration in 2025, in exchange for more than half a billion dollars in contributions.

Everything seems to indicate that politician Trump is the most corrupt president in U.S. history.

IV. How the U.S. Supreme Court has contributed to the decline of democracy in the United States

In June 2008, January 2010 and July 2024, a majority of judges on the U.S. Supreme Court issued three important constitutional decision.

a- In the first case, the decision concerned a limited personal right to bear arms in public, in order to be able to "join a well-regulated militia." Indeed, the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads as follows: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

However, in the June 26, 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, a 5-4 Republican majority interpreted the individual right to keep and bear arms as a nearly absolute right. In effect, the Republican majority substituted the objective of "self-defense within the home" for the objective of being able to join a "well-regulated militia", thereby significantly expanding the right to keep and bear arms.

b- In the second case, in a judgment rendered on January 21, 2010, again by a majority of 5 judges against 4, Citizens United v. FEC, the decision dealt with the right of corporations and unions to spend almost unlimited amounts of money in elections, based on the argument that 'spending money' was a "form of expression". This right should not be uniquely the attribute of citizens eligible to vote, but must, according to the Court, be extended to legal organizations. However, in politics, money is much more than an 'expression', it is above all a means to gain political power and influence elected officials.

In the third instance, on July 1st, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered a landmark decision, which was most favorable to the current occupant of the White House.

Indeed, a divided 6-3 Court ruled, in the case of Trump v. United States, that an American sitting president has a broad immunity from prosecution for criminal acts committed in the course of his official duties, thus violating the ancient rule that 'no man is above the law'. And let's not forget that Donald Trump is the only former or sitting U.S. president who has been convicted of criminal charges.

[N. B.: Among the nine current judges on the U.S. Supreme Court, six (Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett) were nominated by a Republican president and three (Kagan, Sotomayor, Brown) were nominated by a Democrat president.]

V. Trump's economic policies based on isolationism and protectionism against other countries

In terms of international economic policy, the current U.S. president has undertaken to rely on the blunt force of regulation and of unilateral and arbitrary import taxes. His objective seems to be to dismantle the 80-year-long, post WWII multilateral economic system, since 1945, and to replace it with a self-serving unilateral and isolationist American system.

To put such a vision in practice, on February 2, 2025, President D. Trump launched a global trade war against most of the trading nations of the world, including neighboring countries that had long standing trade agreements with the U.S. He uses many pretexts and justifications for the unilateral imposition of high and whimsical tariffs on imports from a host of countries and to circumvent existing domestic laws by decrees.

VI- Trump's illegal military attacks against sovereign countries

In the area of military affairs, on September 6, 2025, President D. Trump signed a decree to change the name of the U.S. Department of Defense to the Department of War. Such an aggressive designation would seem to be more in line with his personal belief that "might makes right" and might better suit his military deployments at home or abroad.

On January 3, 2026, D. Trump used the U.S. military to launch an illegal and undeclared war against Venezuela. The goal was to create chaos and rob Venezuela of its oil reserves, the largest in the world, and also to prevent China from buying Venezuelan oil, a casus belli.

This makes seven countries that the Trump administration bombed illegally in only one year: Somalia, Nigeria, Iran, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Venezuela.

D. Trump sees the world through the eyes of a 19th-century potentate, when a handful of militarized empires relied on extortion to divide the world among themselves, at gunpoint.

It's not surprising that the United States has now fallen to near the bottom of the Global Peace Index of countries, according to a recent report by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP).

Conclusions

It should be obvious by now, after a first year of a second term more extremist and chaotic than the first, that Donald Trump is an out-of-control, impulsive and irresponsible individual who would seem to be unfit to hold a high position of authority and decision-making as head of a government.

Indeed, after one full year in office, Donald Trump, with his de facto one-man U.S. federal government in his image, has been an agent of division at home, and of chaos and destruction abroad. His actions have negatively affected the lives of millions of Americans and of citizens in other countries. Some have paid with their lives. 

Under Trump, the U.S. government seems to have fallen into a state of moral decay. This ranges from the establishment of concentration camps to illegal military interventions against other countries, in order to intimidate them and to seize through force their natural resources. That amounts to a predatory behavior and in morality, that is just sheer robbery.

In politics, for the first time in its history, the United States has an occupant in the White House who openly professes to disregard the letter and spirit of the American Constitution, which he took an oath to respect and preserve. This could be enough to disqualify him to be President.

In economics, the D. Trump regime policies have been most chaotic, since January 20, 2025. They are interventionist, isolationist, imperialist and colonialist. Many of them are improvised, misguided and disruptive.

Therefore, the general conclusion is that under the autocratic regime of Donald Trump, the American federal government and its policies have de facto become a serious threat and a danger to the democratic American people and to the civilized world.

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International economist Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay is the author of the book about morals "The code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles" of the book about geopolitics "The New American Empire", and of his recent book, in French, "La régression tranquille du Québec, 1980-2018". 

He holds a Ph.D. in international finance from Stanford University.

Please visit Dr. Tremblay's site or email to a friend here.

Posted Wednesday, January 14, 2026.

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The War between Russia and Ukraine has been Brewing Since 1991

By Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay

(Author of the book about morals "The Code for Global Ethics" and his book about geopolitics "The New American Empire")

________________________________________________________________________

PREFACE

The war in Ukraine is a senseless war that should not have happened with a minimum of judgement, understanding, and diplomacy.

Ukraine is a buffer state between Russia and NATO countries, armed by the United States.

Many politicians and journalists seem to have forgotten the real historical causes behind the Ukraine war.

In 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the US Georges H. Bush administration reassured Russia that NATO would not expand "one inch" toward Eastern Europe, provided that Russia would not oppose the reunification of the two Germanies.

Germany was reunified, but subsequent US administrations soon began expanding NATO in the direction of Russia. After a coup that deposed the elected pro-Russian Ukrainian government, in February of 2014, there was even a decision to have Ukraine, a former member of the USSR, join NATO.

This was part of an American neoconservative plan to encircle Russia in order to weaken it geopolitically, militarily, and economically.

That was crossing a red line that the Russian government could not accept, because it meant having NATO missiles at Russian's borders—just as in 1962, the US Kennedy administration could not accept having Soviet missiles in Cuba, only 90 miles from Florida.

When all efforts failed to reverse the encirclement policy—including a last-ditch diplomatic effort in December of 2021—on February 24, 2022, Russia illegally invaded the neighboring Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine.

In short, if we consider all the decisions that led to this war, it is difficult to come to any other conclusion than that it was a provoked war.

(The following article with more details was published on March 3, 2022.)

________________________________________________________________________

"I think it is the beginning of a new Cold War... I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way." George F. Kennan (1904-2005), American diplomat and historian, (in an interview with Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times, May 2, 1998, about the U.S. expansion of NATO)

[NATO's goal is] "to keep the Russians out [of Europe], the Americans in and the Germans down." Hastings L. Ismay (1887-1965), first NATO Secretary-General (1952-1957)

"We [the State Department] have invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine." Victoria Nuland (1961- ), Under Secretary at the State Department, in a speech, Dec. 13, 2013.

"The North Atlantic Alliance continues to expand, despite all our protests and concerns... Despite all that, in December 2021, we made yet another attempt to reach agreement with the United States and its allies on the principles of European security and NATO's non-expansion. Our efforts were in vain... For the United States and its allies, it is a policy of containing Russia, with obvious geopolitical dividends. For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation." Vladimir Putin (1952- ), Speech to the Nation, Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2022.

The tragic and illegal war of aggression launched by Russia (pop. 146 million) against Ukraine (pop. 44 million), its neighbor, on Thurs. February 24, 2022, has raised much emotion and many reactions in the West, and for good reasons.

Most people would much prefer that international conflicts between states be settled through diplomacy, or at the very least, through peaceful arbitration. Unfortunately for humanity, this is not yet the case. It is inadmissible that wars of aggression still rage today. In the end, it is ordinary people, the poor and the young, in particular, who end up paying, often with their lives, for the mistakes and failings of so called 'leaders'.

At a time when weapons are increasingly lethal and destructive, it would appear that there is no longer any credible arbiter in the world to avoid military conflicts. This makes for dangerous times.

Therefore, several questions come to mind.

Will Europe, which was a large battlefield in the first half of the 20th Century, become embroiled in military conflicts again, in the 21st Century? Has the United States, which controls NATO, pushed that alliance's expansion into Eastern Europe and Russia too far? Why do the institutions of peace that the world created after World War II seem to have withered away to the point of being incapable of preventing wars? Is it still possible to reform these institutions in order to prevent the world from falling back into the practices of past centuries?

Considering the complexity of today's world and the divergent interests involved, it could be useful to identify the main reasons for the deterioration of international order over more than the last quarter of a century, especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union, in December 1991.

• There is a clear danger of repeating the mistakes of the past in isolating countries from international life

The brinkmanship policy of isolating, humiliating and threatening foreign countries is a very dangerous approach in international relations. Such a policy, pursued against Germany by the French and other allied powers after World War I (1914-1918), through the imposition of heavy war reparation payments on Germany, is credited with having created the conditions that ultimately led to World War II (1939-1945).

Today, the world is again facing a European war between Russia and Ukraine, a war that should have been avoided, with a little more goodwill, leadership and perspicacity. Also, such a war of aggression illustrates very clearly how humanity risks returning to the geopolitical situation that prevailed before the Second World War.

It was a time when the League of Nations was paralyzed; much like the United Nations is today. It was also a time when major nations had been humiliated during the aftermath of World War I. They harbored resentment towards the victorious countries, which, in their eyes, only looked after their own narrow interests.

Let us remember that the United Nations was created in 1945 to prevent wars. But in the 21st Century, wars of aggression are still with us. Only during the past twenty years, the world has seen two major wars of aggression, both illegal under the U.N. Charter: the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, by the United States and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia on February 24 of this year.

This may be an indication that the politico-legal system put in place in 1945 to prevent war is not working, at a time in human history when a war involving nuclear weapons could be more than catastrophic.

• The dangerous mentality prevailing today at the State and Defense Departments in the U.S.

Analysts and decision makers at the U.S. State Department and at the Pentagon rely on war games with simulations of military strategies of action-reaction, using computers, as if foreign policy were a kind of video game. That leaves little space for rational thinking, human feelings and imagination.

Relying on such 'games' is very dangerous because such a use of programmed computers could lead to huge mistakes in real life, and because they can make destructive military hostilities seem trivial and inconsequential.

• NATO as a substitute to the United Nations

After the fall of the USSR, in 1991, some so-called 'planners' in the American government saw an opportunity to place the U.S. government as the sole arbiter of international foreign relations in the post-Cold War world. They viewed the United Nations as a cumbersome body where five countries (USA, Russia, China, U.K. and France) held sway over the U.N. Security Council with their veto.

The idea was to rely on the 'defensive' NATO, created in 1949 to secure peace in Europe, with the goal of countering the threat posed then by the Soviet Union. It was believed, no doubt rightly, that NATO would be more favorable than the U.N. to U.S. interventions in the world. However, contrary to the U.N., NATO is a war machine, which has no legitimate mechanism to bring about peace.

Even though in the past the U.S. government has often had the backing of the United Nations for its interventions abroad, humanitarian as well as military—the Korean War (1950-1953) was a good example of the latter—things changed in 1999. Then, under President Bill Clinton, U.S. Armed Forces started a bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, under the NATO flag, but without the authorization of the U.N. Security Council. This was a precedent.

Since that questionable decision, all U.S. military interventions abroad have been conducted under the cover of NATO, and not under the U.N. Charter. And that is where the world stands today.

• Why the beleaguered Russia is in a position similar to defeated Germany in the 1930's

The shock of the fall of the Soviet Union was to Russia what the shock suffered after its defeat in the First World War was for Germany. In both cases, these involved large populations subjected to foreign interference, lasting several years. The interests of these two countries were ignored in the new international order.

The fall of the Soviet Union raised two fundamental questions. The first: What would become of the two military defense alliances, the Warsaw Pact of 1955 and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of 1949? Both were organizations of mutual assistance, mainly military, against each other during a period of Cold War (1945-1989). The second: How to achieve the reunification of West Germany and the German Democratic Republic (GDR)?

From a geopolitical standpoint, these two questions were interrelated, especially from a Russian point of view. Russia conserves the historical memory of having been invaded by two great armies, by France under Napoleon, in 1812, and by Germany under Hitler, in 1941.

The fall of the Soviet Union meant the automatic dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. Would the same be true of NATO? Not necessarily.

Indeed, for the U.S. government, NATO was its main source of influence in Western Europe. Containing the Soviet Union was not the only objective in creating NATO. Therefore, the George H.W. Bush administration and its Secretary of State, James Baker, had no intention of dismantling NATO.

On the Russian side, the position was that if NATO continued to exist, either as a defensive or an offensive military alliance, it was essential that it commit to not expanding into Eastern Europe and not threaten Russia.

Declassified documents show that the government of George H.W. Bush, through his Secretary of State James Baker, and the governments of major member nations of the alliance, were willing to promise the Russian government that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe, as long as the Russian government accepted the reunification of the two Germanys (1990-1991). History has recorded the colorful expression of James Baker, on February 9, 1990, to the effect that NATO would not expand "one inch Eastward".

• The growing influence of neoconservatives (neocons) in U.S. foreign policy

American foreign policy changed dramatically in the 1990's, notably under the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton (1993-2001), and even more so under the Republican administration of George W. Bush (2001-2009).

Even though President George H.W. Bush used to dismiss the neocons, at least those working in the U.S. government, as "the crazies in the basement" a small group of them did succeed in dominating American foreign policy later on. Their ideas provided the foundations of 'The New American Empire', (which is also the title of a book I wrote in 2004).

The neocon hegemonic mantra was very simple: The United States should take advantage of the demise of the Soviet Union and of its unparalleled military power to impose a "Pax Americana" similar to the Pax Romana during the Roman Empire.

In short, the United States must take advantage of its status as the undisputed military superpower in a unipolar world and adopt a very interventionist foreign policy, while putting emphasis on "national greatness". And above all, they rejected any policy of accommodation or détente with Russia, just as they had done toward the USSR.

Armed with this doctrine, subsequent U.S. administrations, from the Bill Clinton administration on, have more or less followed its dictates. In particular, they have de facto abandoned the U.N. as the arbiter of world peace, and instead have increasingly relied on NATO to impose a Pax Americana.

• The coup that overthrew the Ukrainian government in 2014

There is an important event not to forget. In 2014, there was a coup in Ukraine that overthrew the pro-Russian government of President Viktor Yanukovych, elected four years earlier, with strong support from the Russian-speaking population in the eastern part of the country.

The above quote of American Under Secretary of State for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, would indicate that the U.S. government had spent billions of dollars to support various organizations in Ukraine.

In the fall of 2013, a protest movement called the 'Maidan Revolution' began peacefully in Kiev, the country's capital. The protestations were directed against the Ukrainian government and its refusal to sign a bilateral commercial trade agreement with the European Union. However, things escalated when initially peaceful protests turned violent, in February 2014. Then, despite elections being scheduled for May of the same year, the Ukrainian parliament summarily dismissed the incumbent president and formed a new government.

That episode may help in understanding the future turn of events in Ukraine.

• The war between Russia and Ukraine is to a large extent a response to the progressive military encirclement of Russia by NATO

Since 1991, Russia has opposed NATO's eastward expansion and has many times requested security guarantees that this would not happen.

Nevertheless, in spite of promises made by the George H.W. Bush administration and other governments, some subsequent U.S. administrations did go ahead and expand NATO eastward.

For instance, in 1999, the Clinton administration accepted that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic join NATO. In 2002, George W. Bush accepted seven more eastern countries (Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia) into NATO. In 2009, it was Albania and Croatia's turn to join. The most recent adhesions to NATO are Montenegro, in 2017, and North Macedonia, in 2020.

Things went even further when, in December 2014, the Ukrainian parliament voted to renounce its non-aligned status, a step harshly condemned by its neighbor Russia. Ukraine—a former Soviet republic, which became independent in 1991—has made it clear that it wishes to join NATO. And more recently, in 2021, Ukraine became an official candidate for NATO membership. The rest is history.

• Conclusion

In these troubled times, an outside and independent moral authority should perhaps intervene to prevent the world from falling into the abyss of military conflicts. Possibly, an invitation could be made to either the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, or to Pope Francis, to serve as conciliator, in order to stop the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, before the Ukrainian people suffer irreparable loses, and before other countries intervene and turn the conflict into a world war.

And afterwards, the world had better recapture the spirit of 1945 and set about reforming its international institutions so that they are truly capable of preventing destructive wars, not in theory but in practice.

International economist Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay is the author of the book about morals "The code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles" of the book about geopolitics "The New American Empire".

He holds a Ph.D. in international finance from Stanford University.

Please visit Dr. Tremblay's site or email to a friend here.

Posted Wednesday, October 22, 2025, (initially published on March 3, 2022.)

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Monday, August 4, 2025

The Moral Legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki / 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of August 6 and 9, 1945

By Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay, Emeritus professor of economics, Université de Montréal

"We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.... This weapon is to be used against Japan ... [We] will use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. ...  The target will be a purely military one... It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful." Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), 33rd U.S. President, (Diary, July 25, 1945)

"The World will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."

Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), 33rd U.S. President, (radio speech to the Nation, August 9, 1945)

".. In [July] 1945... Secretary of War [Henry L.] Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...The Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent. ...During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.

It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude."

General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and 34th U.S. President from 1952 to 1960, (Mandate For Change, p. 380)

"Mechanized civilization has just reached the ultimate stage of barbarism. In a near future, we will have to choose between mass suicide and intelligent use of scientific conquests [...] This can no longer be simply a prayer; it must become an order which goes upward from the peoples to the governments, an order to make a definitive choice between hell and reason."

Albert Camus (1913-1960), French philosopher and author, August 8, 1945"

As American Christians, we are deeply penitent for the irresponsible use already made of the atomic bomb. We are agreed that, whatever be one's judgment of the war in principle, the surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are morally indefensible."

The American Federal Council of Churches' Report on Atomic Warfare and the Christian Faith, 1946

"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan... The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages."

William Leahy, Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman (“I Was There”, p. 441).

Next Wednesday and Saturday will mark the 80th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. The following is a reproduction of an article originally published on August 12, 2010.

When U.S. President Harry S. Truman decided on his own to use the atom bomb, a barbarous weapon of mass destruction, against the Japanese civilian populations of the cities of Hiroshima and of Nagasaki on August 6 and on August 9, 1945, the United States sided officially on the wrong side of history. 

Indeed, U.S. President Harry S. Truman (1884-1972) gave the green light to drop the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, which then had a population of approximately 350,000. He also gave the order to repeat the carnage three days later and to drop a second atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki, a then population of 240,000. During these two attacks, more than 210,000 people died in horrific circumstances in these two Japanese cities.

It seems that no consideration of basic human morality entered into Truman's fateful decision, only military considerations and a geopolitical reason, i.e. to prevent the victorious Soviet Union in Europe from invading Japan and force a partition of the country, just as has happened in Europe with Nazi Germany.

General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and 34th U.S. President from 1952 to 1960, said it in so many words: "...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."  (Newsweek, November 11, 1963). It seems that military man Eisenhower was more ethical than Freemason small-town politician Harry S. Truman regarding the fateful decision.

In being the first country to use nuclear weapons against civilian populations, the United States was then in direct violation of internationally accepted principles of war with respect to the wholesale and indiscriminate destruction of populations. Thus, August 1945 is a most dangerous and ominous precedent that marked a new dismal beginning in the history of humanity, a big moral step backward.

In future generations, it most certainly will be considered that the use of the atom bomb against the Japanese civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a historic crime against humanity that will stain the reputation of the United States for centuries to come. It can also be said that President Harry S. Truman, besides lying to the American people about the whole sordid affair (see official quotes above), has left behind him a terrible moral legacy of incalculable consequences to future generations of Americans.

Many self-serving reasons have been advanced for justifying Truman's decision, such as the objective of saving the lives of American soldiers by shortening the war in the Pacific and avoiding a military invasion of Japan with a quick Japanese surrender. That surrender came on August 15, 1945 and it was made official on September 2 with the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, nearly one month after the bombing of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Nazi Germany had capitulated on May 8, 1945 and World War II was already over in Europe. There was also the diplomatic fear that the Soviet Red Army could have invaded Japan, as they had done in Berlin, thus depriving the United States of a hard fought clear-cut victory against Japan.

But by the end of July 1945, according to military experts, the Japanese military apparatus had de facto been defeated. It is also true that the militarist Japanese Supreme Council for the Direction of the War was stalling with the aim of getting better capitulation terms hoping for a negotiated settlement, especially regarding the future role of their Emperor Hirohito as formal head of state.

In Europe, the allies had caused a recalcitrant Nazi Germany to accept an unconditional surrender and there were other military means to force the Japanese government to surrender. The convenient pretext of rushing a surrender carries no weight compared to the enormity of using the nuclear weapon on two civilian targets. 

And even if President Truman was anxious to demonstrate the power of the atom bomb and impress Soviet allies—and possibly also assert himself as a political figure vis-à-vis previous President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had died a few months earlier, on April 12, 1945—this could have been done while targeting remote Japanese military targets, not on targeting entire cities. It seems that there were no moral considerations in this most inhuman decision.

Conclusion

Since that fateful month of August 1945, humanity has embarked upon a disastrous nuclear arms race and is rushing toward oblivion with its eyes open and its mind closed.

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International economist Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay is the author of the book about morals "The code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles" of the book about geopolitics "The New American Empire", and of his recent book, in French, "La régression tranquille du Québec, 1980-2018". 

He holds a Ph.D. in international finance from Stanford University.

Please visit Dr. Tremblay's site or email to a friend here.

Posted Monday, August 4, 2025. 

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