Was President Trump's Foreign Policy Really That Great?
Watching the disastrous Biden Presidency makes almost anything look good in comparison.
There was a lot to like about President Trump’s foreign policy. From withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, the Iran Nuclear Deal and the UN Human Rights Council to ending America’s disastrous approach to trade with China. Plus he moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem and wiped out ISIS in a matter of months.
However, President Trump’s foreign policy record gets whitewashed because he was a one term president and Biden’s has been so much worse. While there’s no question that the magnitude of the foreign policy wins of the Trump Administration tended to be much greater than the magnitude of the failures, it’s also true that the failures were numerous and have exacted significant costs on the United States.
President Trump legitimized North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un on the world stage, with the promise that this new, bold strategy would work to achieve the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Ultimately, North Korea never turned over a single nuclear weapon and their strategic weapons programs continued to advance, even managing to develop reliable submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Today, with Biden’s weaker presence in the White House, North Korea’s missile tests are more frequent than ever.
Throughout his presidency, Trump was, simply put, walked like a dog by “the generals”—failing to keep his promise to end the Afghanistan scam. And it was Trump and Pompeo who signed the deal with the Taliban that Biden was pilloried by Republicans for sticking to during the deadly and humiliating 2021 withdrawal.
President Trump bombed Syria twice based on a chemical weapons false flag, because he believed faulty intel and media reports from publications he insisted were “fake news.”
When Iran shot down a $220M American drone, President Trump canceled his promised counter-attack as the American pilots positioned for takeoff. Later, Trump threatened to destroy “52 sites” across Iran if the Islamic Republic launched any retaliation for the US-Israeli assassination of terror kingpin Qasem Soleimani. Iran called Trump’s bluff and hit America’s al-Asad airbase with dozens of ballistic missiles, causing permanent brain damage and other injuries to 110 US service members. After this Iranian attack, Trump responded only with some strongly worded tweets.
President Trump’s foreign policy towards Latin America was an embarrassing disaster. Remember that botched “invasion” of Venezuela? And maybe worst of all, Trump did not build the wall on the US-Mexico border, signing one massive spending bill after another that had zero dollars in wall funding.
President Trump’s Department of Justice, led by his hand picked Attorney General Bill Barr, indicted Julian Assange under a vague claim of “national security.” President Trump, facing threats from the likes of Lindsey Graham, never included a pardon for Assange to correct this injustice with the many pardons he signed for serial criminal rappers and fraudster friends of Jared Kushner.
More than any other, there is one foreign policy mistake by President Trump that reverberates strongly, even today. Trump was tired of being called a Russian stooge by the mainstream media, so in an effort to prove them wrong, he departed from pervious US policy and began providing lethal aide to Ukrainian nazis. This move was cheered on by the many neocons that Trump brought into his administration, like Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and Fiona Hill. This major escalation by the United States was a massive contributor to the escalatory cascade that led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
President Trump shined when the barrier to entry for carrying out a good foreign policy decision was low, like sending out a tweet and signing a one-sheeter to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement. But when following through on his foreign policy promise required wielding the massive machine of government, as was necessary to end the war in Afghanistan, it rarely ended up getting done.
President Trump’s major foreign policy successes were the result of following through on his own instincts and delivering on his campaign promises. President Trump’s foreign policy failures were the result of his apparent total inability to hire competent people who share his vision for the country, along with his extreme sense of vanity that led him to make terrible foreign policy decisions in an effort to win praise from members of the mainstream media like Maggie Haberman and Bob Woodward, who he very frequently invited to lunch.
As recently highlighted in the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago, in a most petty insult to his most loyal supporters, when President Trump did receive rare paise from the Washington Post or Time Magazine for carrying out a terrible foreign policy action, like bombing Syria, he would order a staffer to have the press clipping printed out and framed, to hang on his wall.
About the author: Jacob Wohl is the creator of Predator DC and host of The Jacob Wohl Show.
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