One of the main strands of destructive criticism of Donald Trump’s newly launched presidency is that the President is volatile, inconsistent and rambling all over the place. Since the mainstream media are indeed the Opposition, as presidential strategist Stephen Bannon has correctly if indiscreetly called out, The New York Times or The Washington Post are not concerned about the truth of such allegations when they insert them in front page coverage of most any word or action coming from the Trump White House.
However, the reality is great coherency in Donald Trump’s vision of both the domestic and foreign policies he has begun to implement, as well as clear understanding of how both fit together....
Conceptually this all makes great sense. It throws out entirely the wrongheaded ideological preoccupations with democracy promotion and regime change abroad that both Democratic and Republican administrations have pursued these past 25 years to the detriment of the homeland. Trump rejects the American Empire and is seeking to revive the American Republic. Hoorah, indeed....
In a word, the enactment of the foreign policy revolution that Donald Trump has invited will require the intellectual inputs from a great many thinkers who have been on the outs and who hold different viewpoints among themselves. Only such a free and public exchange of ideas can ensure high quality foreign….and domestic policies from what promises to be a much needed recalibration of national interest.Doctrow makes some good points with which I am in basic agreement.
It's not all good, however. President Trump's confrontational rhetoric directed toward China and Iran is misguided and his remarks about Iraq and taking the oil are inflammatory. Then president's position on torture is in violation of US law, and the insertion of US ground troops into Syria and the creation of a US-controlled safe space there is particularly stupid in that it constitutes an act of aggression against a sovereign nation, a war crime. Not a good way to begin your administration.
This strikes me as shooting from the hip. The president needs to take Gilbert Doctrow's advice and assemble a foreign policy team and group of advisers from the realist school and jettison the idealists, whether they be liberal interventionists, neocons, or war hawks intent on imposing "American values" on the world. Imposing liberalism is illiberal.
Une parole franche
Towards a New Foreign Policy that is Both Coherent and Informed
Gilbert Doctorow | European Coordinator of The American Committee for East West Accord Ltd.
Maybe somebody there knows the jig is up wrt oil (Tillerson?) and the row better figure it out quick or they are going to stop being able to buy food and other necessities to feed themselves as the west will not accept their currencies in payment and we have a mass starvation situation on our hands...
ReplyDeleteSo Trump is putting them on cold turkey...
Successful rent seeking/extraction always leads to atrophy... they better figure it out quick we are sealing the borders...
ReplyDelete(they can do it if they want to...)
Iran is being integrated into the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and is cooperating with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Iran and Russia are major oil and gas exporters to energy-hungry China.
ReplyDeleteStrategically Iran is to Asia what Turkey is NATO/Europe. It's absolutely critical.
ReplyDeleteChina and Russia can't allow the US government to dominate Iran, and to a lesser extent Georgia or Azerbaijan.
It's the easiest place to draw a line culturally, strategically, economically, etc on The West.
After enumerating all the incoherent policies, the result is total incoherence, not outliers to a coherent policy. Whatever presidential honeymoon period that is the norm is going to be discarded by the powers that be, and all the Trumpistas who smile knowingly and propagandise that there is a method to the madness will look like the kooks they are. There is no method, just madness to the madness, incoherence piled on top of incoherence. Trying to disentangle the incoherence will result in more incoherence because Trump and his team are incapable of thinking out a coherent strategy that is workable and effective. A strategy for Trump is a new tweet, which is then touted as the work of a brilliant communicator. When Dubya or Nixon were digging graves for themselves, it was spun as the work of near unique political genius, with their PR and media gophers smiling as they repeated this glaring gibberish. It was thought that Dubya and his team of full retards made so many strategic blunders nobody could emulate them, but Trump's already dislodged a grubby Dubya finger on the title of prize chump. No wonder the senior management (not the political appointees), the career foreign service officials who effectively run the State Department have resigned en masse.
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