This is part of a series of posts on Election 2016.
If Donald Trump has a foreign policy, it seems to be to
praise our enemies, insults our allies, and move us closer to nuclear war. This
is all done while showing startling lapses in knowledge.
Let’s start with praising our enemies. Obviously Vladimir
Putin leads this list. “I’ve already said he is very much a leader. This man has very strong control over his country.” This has rightly drawn criticism from people such as (implicit) Paul Ryan and (explicit) Lindsey Graham.
What was worse – much worse – was when Trump suggested that Russian hackers of the DNC should find information about the “missing” emails
from Hillary Clinton’s server. Asking a foreign government involved in spying in our nation to help you in an
election is, to state it mildly, unprecedented. In the same speech, he
suggested that we should consider accepting Russia’s claims of annexing the
Crimean Peninsula. That stance on Russia is bizarre, especially coming from the
normally bellicose GOP, but really coming from anyone that has any knowledge of
current international politics, or historical international politics, or …
well, basically anyone.
But Putin isn’t the only dictator Trump has praised. He said
some remarks concerning Kim Jong Un that, were the about business, would seem
to be laudatory (“[H]e goes in, he takes over, he’s the boss… It’sincredible”). He re-tweeted a quote of Italian dictator Mussolini. He had business deals with Gadhafi and said (but later recanted) that it
was 100% certain Libya would have been better off with the dictator still in
power. And, of course, he thought Saddam
Hussein was a great killer of terrorists. Hussein “didn’t read them therights.” That is, again, bizarre.
And what about insulting allies? Mexico. Japan. NATO. And, though this isn’t insulting, what about neutrality with respect to Israel?
This behavior scares our allies, with good reason.
What is that good reason? Trump thinks more countries need nukes, and it was reported that he doesn’t understand why we can’t use them. He didn’t appear to understand that Russia had invaded Crimea: “He’s not going
into Ukraine, OK, just so you understand. He’s not going into Ukraine, all
right?” When questioned about whether he was already there, he responded, “OK –well, he’s there in a certain way.” Yes, and that certain way is already in
Crimea, which is part of Ukraine. It appears that he didn’t know, but maybe he
did and was saying that his policy is that Crimea isn’t part of Ukraine. Scary
either way, and much worse than Johnson’s Aleppo moment.
The rest of the world doesn’t know what is going on. They call Trump “the man who made us miss the Bush clan” and talk about how he
shows “the dark side of American Populism.” It is basically summed up this way:
“God help us all if Trump wins.”
Trump’s crazy foreign policy is completely unrecognizable by any party or expert, and it seems designed to push us toward an unstable period in the world. He wonders why we can’t drop nukes, and, if he wins, by law nobody can stop him from doing so. It’s horrifyingly scary, and it is by far one of the reasons that I cannot understand people choosing to vote for him.
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