Why Trump Will Never Make A Historic Speech

Donald Trump's Warsaw speech set off alarm bells in the foreign policy community. Former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski called it "Huntingtonian," a reference to scholar Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" hypothesis. Trump, he implies, has put down a civilizational marker. Peter Beinart, writing for the Atlantic, called it shockingly tribal. What they miss is that it's pointless to analyze the content of a Trump speech without taking into account the setting and the audience.

Trump said things like "The people of Poland, the people of America, and the people of Europe still cry out 'We want God!'" and "The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive." He used the word "civilization" 10 times, mostly in the context of defending it against enemies who aren't named but linked with the terrorist threat, and through it with radical Islam.