Donald John Trump

The Case for Trump’s Foreign Policy
The Right People, the Right Positions
In Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, Obama left behind a far more dangerous world than the one he inherited in 2009
by Matthew Kroenig

Media coverage of U.S. President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has been overwhelmingly negative. Analysts have seized on early policy missteps, a supposed slowness in staffing the national security bureaucracy, and controversial statements and actions as evidence that Trump’s foreign policy is already failing.

But the critics have gotten a lot wrong and failed to give credit where credit is due. The Trump administration has left behind the rhetoric of the campaign trail and has begun to adopt foreign policies that are, for the most part, well suited to the challenges ahead. Trump inherited a crumbling international order from President Barack Obama, but he has assembled a highly capable national security team to help him update and revitalize it. Many of the controversial foreign policy statements that Trump has made as president have, in fact, been consistent with established U.S. policy. Where he has broken with tradition, it has often been to embrace much-needed change.


It is too early to pass definitive judgment on the Trump administration. But its rapid improvement, combined with Trump’s own willingness to take bold action, suggests that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger may have been right when he told CBS News last December that Trump’s presidency could present “an extraordinary opportunity” for U.S. foreign policy.

 

If only he wasn't such a liar. I'm not sure that fantasy land is a good place for the POTUS to live.

 

Trump's lies pale in significance when you compare him to Obama and Hillary.

Recently Trump was vilified for some remarks about the beginning of the Civil War and Andrew Jackson .
It was implied that he thought mistakenly Jackson was alive in 1860, but that is not what he said. While his statement was somewhat inarticulate, he was referring to the fact that Jackson had acted derisively to avoided Civil War when he was President (Nullification Crisis). President James Buchanan did not act decisively in the lead up to the Civil War. When Lincoln took office it was too late. Trump was speculating that a President like Jackson could have prevented the war.

Trump showed a better knowledge of history than his critics.

 

He said that he could have worked out a deal to prevent the civil war. A deal how? Did he support slavery, or only partial slavery? A deal to keep slavery as semi-policy? He has good things to say about the dictators around the world, and he himself is proto-fascist, so I guess anything is possible. With Trump the truth and facts don't matter, only what he believes. He is waging a war against the media, seems to be against free press or any press that doesn't float his way of thinking. He has his own propaganda ministry (Fox News), and he installed all big money, Wall street execs into top positions, with goes along with the corporatism aspect of fascism.

 

OK, sure. The guy is sick.

 

Regretfully, this is true for almost all of Trump's statements.

I think you mean decisively...

Still, the statement is in error, as there are a great many pro-confederate sources that will tell you that the Civil War was over tariffs. Thus, Jackson did not avoid Civil War, he merely postponed it.

Not really, no, he did not. Trump has a better knowledge of "History According to Donald Trump," however, this rarely coincides with "History as the Rest of the World Knows It."

 

Basically...Foreign countries have called the vast majority of Trump's bluffs, for what the are, bluffs. This has forced Trump to "flip-flop" on most of his foreign policy rhetoric of the campaign trail. Failure to follow through on your foreign policy campaign promises is just that, failure.

Proof please.

If Trump's "controversial foreign policy statements" are consistent with established U.S. policy...Then how is Trump embracing much needed change?

Read...Rapid failure.

Read...Trump has been forced to "eat crow", as he has been forced to "flip-flop" on almost all of his foreign policy.

 

You are correct, I meant decisively.

I doubt most Americans including the critics of Trump had heard of the Nullification Crisis or know much if anything about Jackson and his administration. That is the due to the state of American education going back many years. Trump apparently knows the history of the period.

Trumps point: Had a decisive action been taken during the Buchanan administration as it had during the Jackson administration the war might have been adverted.

There were a number of issues of contention between the North and the South. Slavery was an important one and the one best remembered today.

Did Slavery Make Economic Sense http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/09/economic-history-2
The conclusion of this article is that while slave owners benefited, overall slavery hurt the economy of the South and impeded innovation and economic development. Slavery in South actually boosted the economy of other regions because of the Souths need to buy food and manufactured goods from them.

 

I would disagree. Trump is making assumptions on what he, or his speech writers, know of history. The political landscape of 1832, was not the political landscape of the late 1850's or 1860. Thus, Jackson's "decisive action" in 1832, could very well have blown up in his face in 1860. This is the point that Trump's "point" misses or otherwise ignores.

Slavery is the one best remembered today...As to it's importance, well, that is another matter.
Protective tariffs: Primary cause of the Civil War
Tariffs and the American Civil War
American Civil War : High Tariffs
Jefferson Davis Posthumously Responds to Our Readers’ Reactions | Marotta On Money

Yes, a short list of the many causes of the Civil War, from a Southern Perspective.
Causes of the Civil War - A Southern Perspective

 

It wasn't written by me.
As indicated, it was written by Matthew Kroenig - Associate Professor of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a Senior Fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council for Foreign Affairs.

Foreign Affairs magazine, founded in 1922, is considered one of America's most influential foreign policy magazines.
It's certainly not the usual clickbaiting, sensationalist, "fake news" mainstream media.

 

Vintage Donald Trump interview from 1990 shows him calling out the Fake News channel CNN and then he literally drops his mic and walks off.
By Mark Dice

 

Donald Trump throws a tantrum back in 1990...I see he still has not grown up.

What were the supposed "inaccuracies"?

I am not sure what the reporter got "schooled" in...How to act like a spoiled brat?

 

No, but you copied and pasted it...Therefore, you agree with it.

So, I ask you again...Proof, please?

Isn't this the same arse that says we should be building more nuclear warheads, because of a gap between us and the Russians? Yes, yes it is.
Trump Said the U.S. Should Expand Nuclear Weapons. He’s Right.
As if another 450 nuclear warheads, given that the US now has around 6,800, will some how make us more secure.

 

Posting someone's words is not endorsing, otherwise posting excerpts from Mein Kampf would be impossible, nor proving someone's opinions is required by the rules of this forum.
It would be reasonable to demand to prove that:
Foreign countries have called the vast majority of Trump's bluffs
he has been forced to "flip-flop" on almost all of his foreign policy
and show American presidents that kept their campaign trail promises faithfully.

But anyway:
Barack Obama Was a Foreign-Policy Failure
The 44th president of the United States promised to bring change but mostly drove the country deeper into a ditch
by Stephen Walt

In foreign policy Obama’s record was mostly one of failure. Neither the state of the world nor America’s position in it is stronger today than they were when he took office. The outcome in Iraq and Afghanistan may not be his fault, as those wars were failures even before he took office, but some of his decisions compounded the mistakes he inherited.

In both foreign and domestic policy, therefore, this administration notched some genuine wins. And throughout his presidency, Obama conducted himself with the same dignity, humor, grace, intelligence, forbearance, respect for American values and traditions, and above all class that were on display in his farewell speech.
[...]
Yet Obama’s presidency is in other respects a tragedy — and especially when it comes to foreign policy. It is a tragedy because Obama had the opportunity to refashion America’s role in the world, and at times he seemed to want to do just that. The crisis of 2008-2009 was the ideal moment to abandon the failed strategy of liberal hegemony that the United States had been pursuing since the end of the Cold War, but in the end Obama never broke with that familiar but failed approach. The result was a legacy of foreign-policy missteps that helped propel Donald Trump into the White House.
[...]
For starters, Obama was persuaded to escalate the war in Afghanistan in 2009, in a pointless “surge” that was doomed to fail and did. Instead of acknowledging that U.S. interests were minimal and the war was unwinnable, his policies prolonged U.S. involvement to no good purpose and ate up a lot of his time and attention. He also decided to embrace and expand many aspects of the Bush administration’s approach to the “war on terror,” especially the use of drones and special operations forces to chase down suspected terrorists all over the world. He rightly banned torture — which is both ineffective and illegal — but otherwise let U.S. intelligence agencies off the hook for their past excesses and did little to rein them in when they overstepped on his watch, as the CIA did when it repeatedly tried to interfere with Senate investigations of the so-called torture regime. Meanwhile, his administration prosecuted whistleblowers and journalists with more vigor than any of his predecessors. The result? The United States is conducting counterterrorism operations in more places than ever before, albeit without apparent success, and Donald Trump has inherited a set of tools he can use to suppress honest reporting if he wishes.
[...]
Second, Obama and his team misread and mishandled the Arab Spring. As Joshua Landis explains in a remarkable, must-read interview, the U.S. response to these events — and especially Syria — was ill-conceived from the very start. In particular, Obama and his team mistakenly viewed the Arab Spring as a large-scale, grass-roots uprising clamoring for liberal democracy and embraced it too quickly. They also underestimated the ability of violent extremists to exploit power vacuums in failed states and the resilience of authoritarian regimes in places like Syria or Egypt. These misunderstandings led to Obama’s disastrous intervention in Libya, his inept diplomatic interference in Yemen, and the premature demand that “Assad must go” in Syria.
[...]
Regarding Israel-Palestine, Obama took office vowing to achieve a two-state solution by the end of his first term, and he and his second-term secretary of state, John Kerry, devoted endless hours to this quixotic quest. Unfortunately, they followed the standard “peace process” playbook and got the same results their predecessors did. A two-state solution is further away than ever and probably impossible, in part because Obama never seemed to grasp that relying on pro-Israel advisors with a long track record of not producing an agreement was a pretty good way to guarantee failure again.
[...]
Obama’s handling of Russia deserves no plaudits either. The early attempt at a “reset” made sense, but Obama and his advisors never understood that what they regarded as innocent and legitimate efforts to strengthen democracy in Eastern Europe or in Russia itself were not going to be viewed as benign by Moscow. Even worse, the White House appears to have been asleep at the switch in the months preceding the crisis in Ukraine and ended up blindsided by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to annex Crimea.
[...]
Obama’s desire to “rebalance” U.S. attention toward Asia was sound, and his administration did make important progress toward that goal. But the failure to set clearer priorities or liquidate losing positions faster undermined the effort. Managing relations in Asia is complex, challenging, and time-consuming, and the United States will not be able to manage its Asian alliances and counter a rising China if it is constantly being distracted by events in places of far less strategic importance. The administration also blundered when it decided not to participate in China’s new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and then found that even close allies like Britain and Israel were ignoring U.S. pressure and eager to join.
[...]
Like Bill Clinton, Obama tried to address a vast array of global problems as cheaply as possible (and without “boots on the ground”), but he never told the American people what their vital interests actually were. Equally important, this most eloquent of presidents never gave voters a simple template to help them distinguish between the places where the United States should stand ready to fight and regions it could safely leave to others. Instead, almost any part of the world could suddenly become a “vital interest” for which Washington was supposed to have a solution, and failure to act immediately in a crisis anywhere exposed him to charges that he was squandering U.S. credibility or leaving the country vulnerable to some shadowy danger.

 

U.S. nuclear strategy cannot be static, but must take into account the nuclear strategy and capabilities of its adversaries. For decades, the United States was able to reduce its nuclear arsenal from Cold War highs because it did not face any plausible nuclear challengers. But great power political competition has returned and it has brought nuclear weapons, the ultimate instrument of military force, along for the ride.

The United States needs a robust nuclear force, therefore, not because anyone wants to fight a nuclear war, but rather, the opposite: to deter potential adversaries from attacking or coercing the United States and its allies with nuclear weapons of their own.

Under President Barack Obama, the United States mindlessly reduced its nuclear arsenal even as other nuclear powers went in the opposite direction, expanding and modernizing their nuclear forces. Such a path was unsustainable and Trump is correct to recognize that America’s aging nuclear arsenal is in need of some long overdue upgrades.

His words above are reasonable and I agree with them.

 

It's not about inaccuracies, it's about the power of main stream media to destroy people by publishing fake, badly researched, or sensationalist information.
It's something even rich people like him were powerless against, because they didn't have easy access to millions of readers or viewers as the mainstream media had.
This changed only lately thanks to Internet, but mainstream media still are destroying people with their clickbaiting and fake news as they did then.

 

Analysis | President Trump, the king of flip-flops
Analysis | President Trump, king of flip-flops (continued)
Trump, Then And Now: What His Shifting Positions Say About What He Believes
All the President's Flip-Flops
Donald Trump Gets a ‘Globalist’ Makeover
Trump launches Syria flip-flops
15 Trump Flip-Flops in 15 Days
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/slideshows/donald-trumps-10-flip-flops
Donald Trump flip-flops, then flips and flops more on H-1B visas
Donald Trump’s Greatest Self-Contradictions

There are a ton more if you so need.

Except, we are not talking about other American Presidents are we.