President Obama: “We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people,” Obama told reporters at the White House. “We have been very clear to the Assad regime — but also to other players on the ground — that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.”
“That would change my calculus; that would change my equation.”
* Barack Obama from Aug. 20, 2012 press conference as reported by CNN.
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Here we go again down the same road paved by Obama. On Thursday Iran shoots down one of our drones. Trump threatens action, speculates that the action might have been that of a lone wolf officer, issues the threat of retaliation, then couples the threat with a request for talks, and finally announces that he’ll do … nothing. What does this sound like to you? It’s worse than an unenforced red line. It’s open season on American surveillance of the Persian Gulf.
What accounts for the spastic reply to an Iranian provocation? I may be way off base but I think that he has a kitchen cabinet of a couple of Fox News celebrities: Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. Both make noises that they would like the U.S. to return to being a regional power. In broadcasts after the shootdown, Carlson and Ingraham rhetorically questioned the vital U.S. interest at stake in the Middle East. Call them the Rand Paul wing of cable news. The result is that the rest of Trump’s foreign policy team is left to compete with flashy cable TV personalities for influence.
Tonight, Tucker was at it again. A fire hose of hyperbole ensued about the evil influence of “neocons”, meaning John Bolton, who in Tucker’s mind, along with Bill Kristol, “planned” the Iraq invasion. Leaving aside the insult to fact and logic, Tucker appears to be channeling Charles Lindbergh and his America First Committee of 1940-1. Lindbergh fit into the overall climate of revulsion after World War I just like Tucker and a few others in the neo-isolationist right were repulsed by Bush’s messy Iraq adventure. Lindbergh and his group lasted until Japanese bombs starting dropping on our servicemen in Hawaii. What’ll happen to Tucker and Laura if American blood is shed because we failed to act when it was a drone?
Oh, I forgot. These types always have an easy out. They will claim that we should have never been there in the first place. Of course, the same logic would hold true wherever in the world that we happen to plant the flag. Soon our navy will be relegated to coastal patrol duty. Only in those places will neo-isolationists accept our interests to be “vital”.
Is this any way to run a foreign policy? You’ve got to wonder. At times, Trump’s foreign policy path resembles a user of LSD.
First, Trump thought he could charm the leader of a brutal thugocracy – North Korea – and came away with __?__ . He probably thought that he was engaging the equivalent of a city planning commission. The Kim clan, like many littering the world since the dawn of hominids, has so much blood on their hands that you’d mistake their fiefdom for the old Union Stockyards in Chicago. Underlings who fail Kim die, which was the fate of the unlucky chap who was Kim’s main functionary at the Hanoi soiree. Apparently, there’s no such thing as severance pay in North Korea.
And Trump actually thought that he was going to charm this guy?
Trump came out of both meetings talking up North Korea’s prospects as something like the next Atlantic City. Come to think of it, the current reality of Atlantic City comes close to matching the current reality of North Korea.
Trump campaigned as the anti-Bush and the anti-Obama. Trump personalizes issues such that policies and actions taken by these two bogeymen must be bad because … Bush and Obama did them. It’s not due to some grand strategic vision. Vision shmavision. His comes close to the hallucinations of the aforementioned LSD user. It took TV images of children being gassed to force Trump into his anti-Obama personality and enforce Obama’s rhetorical red line. TV works for Trump when “peace through strength” doesn’t. Absent a TV image for Trump, “peace through strength” has all the wallop of wet toilet paper.
Now we’re back to TV taking center stage with “sage” advice on dealing with Iran offered up by the Tucker and Laura gang. For them, so what if Iran’s proxies are tramping all over the Middle East firing rockets into Israel, propping up thugs, threatening our alliances, and turning the Persian Gulf into a minefield. For them, so what if the Middle East is a crescent of terror that’ll make another part of the world off limits to the United States, and a staging base for crazies with box cutters and pressure-cooker bombs. For them, so what if our regional allies feel abandoned and look elsewhere. China and Russia are waiting in the wings. For Tucker and Laura, so what.
For the rest of us, it smells like Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy of the 1970’s, or maybe Lindbergh’s of 1940-1, or the fallout of Obama’s apology tour. Are you sure we didn’t elect Barack Hussein Trump in 2016?
RogerG