RRU in the Media: Trump set to make history (Cascade Institute op-ed)

With the eyes of the world watching the next Trump presidency about to take shape, Thomas Homer-Dixon, executive director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads writes that we are about to experience a shift that will be recognized as a turning point in history.

In his op-ed in The Globe and Mail, Homer-Dixon calls Trump the "reconfigurer-in-chief" who is very likely to create circumstances that "will probably send humanity in an extraordinarily perilous direction":

"This contempt for expertise will do most harm when the Trump administration is obliged to make high-consequence decisions under extreme time pressure, as will inevitably happen. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, after U.S. intelligence agencies found that the Soviets were installing nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba, president John F. Kennedy drew on his cabinet and staff to create a small team of extraordinarily capable advisers (the “ExComm”). That team methodically searched for and weighed alternative U.S. responses. Kennedy, having learned from the Bay of Pigs disaster the year before, told some ExComm members to act as devil’s advocates; they were to deliberately challenge the group’s emerging consensus in order to fully test its final decisions. My brain breaks when I try to imagine Mr. Trump doing the same sort of thing."

Read the full op-ed in The Globe and Mail or the Cascade Institute News section.