The treatment of the Trump foreign policy in the July-August issue of the National Interest by Dimitri Simes and Dov S. Zakheim was a remarkable contrast between, in the first case, a thoughtful analysis with valuable insights into the current president’s thinking and, in the second, an almost inexpressibly implausible effort to find some resemblance between President Trump and his distant and relatively undistinguished predecessors, Millard Fillmore and James Buchanan.

Mr. Simes notes that President Trump sees the possibility of settling differences with Russia, which seems to be based on acknowledging that country’s repossession of the Crimea, which was only awarded to Ukraine by the Ukrainian Khrushchev, in 1955, by Russia desisting in its incursions in Ukraine, and by a partition of Syria between sponsored groups-Assad remains in half the country, especially the Alawites, and the western-supported secular factions co-exist in their cantons.

The combined opposition to ISIS and other theocratic extremists continues, and refugees will eventually be encouraged to return with prospects of relative calm and more generous international assistance. No more of the former Soviet republics are likely to be admitted to NATO, but nor will they be forcefully reintegrated into the Russian state or orbit. Though not mentioned, there would be reciprocal pledges of political non-intervention. Sanctions, in these circumstances, could be relaxed in stages.

Though Mr. Simes did not put it in precisely these terms, Russia, with a GDP smaller than Canada’s and serious social, economic, and demographic problems, though a great and distinguished nationality and civilization, is not a threat or rival to the United States, despite the frenzied efforts of the American Democrats to represent it as one. The emerging rival to the U.S., replacing the USSR and before it, Nazi Germany, is China, as the American consensus agreed before domestic political skullduggery and esoterica distracted the Democrats and their echo chamber in the national political media, in desperate search for a no-fault explanation for their 2016 electoral defeat.

The real danger Russia could present, though, again, Mr. Simes isn’t explicit about this, is that if the United States rebuffs Russia too vigorously, it will have the effect of driving Russian leader Vladimir Putin into the arms of the Chinese, where the mischief and damage Russia could do would be seriously escalated. Dmitri Simes recognizes the astute political instincts of President Trump and his grasp of the ambitions and vulnerabilities of statesmen with whom he deals, however clouded they may be at times with polemical flourishes and indiscretions.

Mr Zackheim benefits from no such insight. All he sees in Trump is bluster, philistinism, reaction, xenophobia, and the bumbling of the ancient, isolationist, unworldly American humbug and, literally, Know Nothing. This was the popular name for the anti-immigration American Party that Millard Fillmore, as a rejected and accidental ex-president, shamefully led in 1856, splitting the anti-Democratic vote with the newly founded Republicans and electing a doughface (slavery-appeaser) Democrat for the last time, James Buchanan.

President Fillmore was elected vice president with General Zachary Taylor, as Mr. Zakheim writes, and succeeded on Taylor’s death in 1850. He had been a Whig senator from upstate New York and was a follower of Henry Clay, Whig leader in the Congress and three times candidate for president, and Fillmore naturally supported the Compromise of 1850 which Clay, Daniel Webster (the other great Whig), and Stephen A. Douglas, Democrat of Illinois, in particular, worked out.

It restricted slavery’s expansion geographically and provided for relentless hunting down of fugitive slaves, of whom more than 40,000 had fled to Canada and were beyond retrieval. It was a justifiable, measure at the time, as it bought the Union another decade before the Civil War, in which the free states grew much more quickly than the South, and in which the Republican Party was founded out of the detritus of the Whigs and the growing abolitionist faction, and brought forward Abraham Lincoln as their presidential candidate.

Fillmore was an unpretentious little man, and he made himself the figurehead for a party of red necks who tried to make hostility to foreign immigration and the Roman Catholic Church a substitute for dissent over slavery.

It was a time of great strains on the traditional parties. Taylor and Fillmore were only elected when the former President Martin van Buren, disgruntled at not being nominated for the third time, ran as an anti-slavery Democrat. Fillmore’s third party candidacy secured Buchanan’s election, and Lincoln was elected in 1860 over three other national candidates.

To compare Fillmore’s presidency to that of Donald Trump, who became only the second person in American history to win the nomination of a major party without ever having sought or held any public office, elected or appointed, or a military command (Wendell Willkie in 1940 was the only other one), is absurd. Trump is the only such person to be elected president. He is conducting a partial revolution against the elites of both parties, not just clinging to the furniture and appeasing anyone with a loud voice, as Fillmore and Buchanan did.

Buchanan was only nominated because the Democrats could not unite behind either a pro-slavery southerner of greater stature, or Douglas, who, as he was forced by Lincoln in the senatorial election of 1858 to admit, had a distaste for slavery unacceptable to the South. He had no authority from the beginning and a few days after his inauguration was overshadowed by the shameful Dred Scott Supreme Court decision that effectively declared the Compromises of 1820 and 1850 to be illegal, approved slavery everywhere in the country and found that slaves could not, in any practical terms, be emancipated.

Mr. Zakheim mentions Dred Scott with appropriate contempt, but persists in the absurdity of the comparison with Trump, who unlike Fillmore and Buchanan, has an assertive personality, was anything but a compromise or fluke president, and has an ambitious and radical program that he is enacting. Buchanan was helpless against the forces tearing the Union apart and sat by passively as the Union disintegrated. His secretary of State, General Lewis Cass (who had been deprived of election as president by Van Buren’s vote-splitting in 1848), resigned in disgust at Buchanan’s weakness in 1860. States were seceding each week as Lincoln’s inauguration approached.

Donald Trump artfully seized control of a political party, ran an astonishingly successful campaign, has put together, with some months of trial and error, a talented senior administration, has passed one of the most comprehensive and successful tax reforms in the country’s history, and has made considerable progress in most of his major initiatives, especially reduction of illegal immigration, and of the trade deficit, deterring the deployment of nuclear-tipped Intercontinental missiles by North Korea, securing greater financial participation by NATO member states, and confirming a more conservative judiciary.

Comparison of Donald Trump with these trivia question-nonentities of 150 years ago is fatuous. It is a bit rich for someone as identified as Mr. Zakheim was with the monstrous fiasco of the Iraq War to carp that Trump is “harming America’s image in the region” (Middle East). The closest any 19th Century president of the United States got to the Middle East was Jefferson’s attack on the Tripoli pirates and his administration’s free trade agreement with Morocco.

It is scandalous that Mr. Zakheim would compare this sometimes rather outlandish but activist and consequential presidency with the purposeless blundering of two of the country’s least successful presidents. It is Mr. Zakheim who seems a “Know Nothing” (so named because members of Fillmore’s American Party met in local gatherings where the pass-words for entry were “I know nothing”). On the basis of his nonsense in the last issue of the National Interest, Mr. Zakheim would certainly gain admission, and perhaps even distinction, in such a group.

CBLetters@gmail.com. From the National Review. Image: The Fillmore dollar (United States Mint via Wikipedia).