Publius was expecting a lot from well-travelled Don Trump’s April 27, 2016 foreign policy speech. He got a big shock. It would not have passed muster in Publius’ high school. Yep. It was that bad. Full of mistakes, rambling non sequitors and ignorance. Reads like baby babble. The New York Military Academy should rescind Don’s graduation.
The weirdest part is Don’s inability to distinguish our foreign policy during 1945-2008 from Obama’s hard-nosed American Realism. Don rightly said that after the Cold War, American foreign policy “veered badly off course.” Indeed, George W. Bush will go to his grave without explaining what we were doing in Iraq. No historian will ever figure it out. Even Don says that this was nuts.
Obama, by contrast, recognized the obvious: the numbers say that we are self-sufficient in oil and gas and have no further interest in the Middle East. Roosevelt’s 1944 deal with the Saudis is dead letter. Sorry folks, he’s saying, but it’s just the math. This has driven both the Saudis and Israelis nuts. But the numbers are just the numbers. Today the Nine Dash Line is foreign policy problem 1, 2, 3 and 4. The rest is irrelevant. Obama gets this. Don, not so much.
In putting his American Realism policy in place, Obama struggled with four things, none of which have been easy or entirely successful.
One, getting the U.S. foreign policy and military establishments to accept what the numbers tell them.
Two, extricating the U.S. from the Middle East with minimal disruption to our economy and core interests.
Three, passing management of the Middle East onto the Euros whose concern geographically, militarily and economically it is.
Four, focusing all Americans to the greatest existential crisis in our history, the Nine Dash Line.
Don, who wants to take on the Presidency and inherit Obama’s huge break with the past, is really confused by all this. To Iraq, which is our mess, he added Libya where Obama tried to get the Euros to do what Don says he wants them to do—take responsibility for their own sphere of influence—and came up with a muddle. He then tried to make sense of his bewilderment, which is impossible.
How about this? Don labels the Euros’ failure Libya as our failure, saying “One day we’re bombing Libya.” But Don knows that the Euros bombed Libya, not us. Why would he accept responsibility for the Euros’ Libyan misfire? And then complain about it?
In another strange assertion, the master of business and finance asserts that “Obama has weakened our military by weakening our economy.” So, having the fastest growing economy in the industrial world is Obama’s attempt at weakening us. Taking the Dow from 7,600 when he took office to 18,000 today is making us weaker. Rescuing the banking and auto sectors from dissolution when he became President and restoring them to robust health is a weakness? Having the fastest number of housing starts in a decade is weakness? Cutting the unemployment rate from roughly 10% to bleow 5% is weakness? Driving the federal budget deficit from nearly 10% of GDP to 2.4% while adding Obama Care is a weakness? Amazing. These numbers dominate Don’s business life. He is supposed to know this.
What gives with Don’s numberless foreign policy? If Don can’t get basic numbers straight, what can he get? Sure enough, because Don cannot anchor his policy on the numbers all businesses all live and breath, his foreign policy lecture wanders all over the place like that of some untutored kid. Gideon Rachman, whose articles in the Financial Times you miss at your peril, calls this a “retreat.”
Don talks about our manufacturing trade deficit without talking about our balance of payments. Oops. Our balance of payments deficit has dropped about a third under Obama. So why is Don focused on the wrong data set? Where did he go to college? And who taught him? Time for some resignations.
It gets weirder. Don says that our allies must pay for the cost of their own defense. In the next paragraph he says that America will do this. Don calls the deal with Iran, which does exactly what he says it must do, “disastrous.”
Then, having agreed with Obama’s American Realism that we must disengage from our Middle Eastern misadventures, he asserts that we must stay in the Middle East for good to support our allies there. Huh? And this without saying, now that we are self-sufficient in oil, what our interests are there or who our allies are.
He calls Israel the “one true democracy in the Middle East.” Fifty years ago, of course, he was right. But, nearly half a century past, Israel absorbed what are now 4.2 million Palestinians, about a third of its population, and they don’t get to vote. Kind of like saying that all Americans west of the Mississippi can’t vote but we are a democracy nonetheless. And Don had no idea. Hmmm…
Don knows that we tried for most of his adult life to get Israel to demerge this lot into a separate state. It didn’t work and now our oil numbers say that the clock has run out. How Don thinks that he can better Obama’s last gasp efforts long after time is anybody’s guess.
Don also says that Obama’s cynical, Roosevelt-like manipulation of Xi Jinping over North Korea and equally ruthless manipulation of Kim Jong Un is the U.S. watching “helplessly.” What planet is Don on?
Publius’ favorite is the assertion that 9-11 was the worst military catastrophe in the history of the country, “worse than Pearl Harbor”. Say again? Don is in real estate. He also went to the New York Military Academy. So he knows that the worst military catastrophe in U.S. history was Chrysler’s Farm. Had the U.S. won at Chrysler’s Farm, today we would have the world’s largest oil and gas reserves, all the clean hydro power we could ever ask for, endless supplies of fresh water for our drought-prone West and a level of global power of which we can only dream. Kaiser Wilhelm II would never have sent the Zimmerman Telegram. The Japanese would have hesitated over Pearl Harbor. Even if they hadn’t, Hitler, who could read a map, would not have dared to join them. Stalin, who could read maps too, would have thought twice about the Cold War. No Korean war and no Vietnam. We would never have had the slightest interest in the Middle East and no entanglements there. And on and on. You can just imagine. Now THAT was a military disaster.
Don goes on to talk of the imploding Russia with its flailing leader Vladimir Putin as a major power. What?
Finally, he says, “I challenge anyone to explain the strategic vision of Obama.” No problem Don. Here it is in 30 words. Our self-sufficiency in hydrocarbons has eliminated our post 1945 interests. Our focus today is the Nine Dash Line, a threat to every American household the way Pearl Harbor never was.
The NDL appears nowhere in your speech. Shame on you! This one’s easy Don. You’re fired.
July 24, 2016
Don has taken his foreign policy to new level of cost. Yesterday, Le Monde reported, he demanded limited access by the French to the U.S. This means that, because of the Schengen Agreement, the U.S. will be off limits for most of Europe except for the U.K. Equally, almost all of Europe will be off limits to Americans who do not apply for special visas and pass costly and time consuming security clearances. These visas will take weeks, if not months to secure.
Since New York, Don's home town, accounts for a third of all international travel to the U.S., a huge chunk of which is from Europe, and sends staggering numbers of American tourists and business people to Europe every year, the city and airlines will go nuts. Major gateways in Florida and Texas will be clobbered as will Atlanta, Georgia. Indeed, it is hard to imagine which major airports and cities in the country will not be hurt badly.
A Trump presidency means that several of our largest airlines may be forced into Chapter 11 as traffic implodes. New York City hotels will be kicked right in the head and the value of city real estate will go off a cliff. Trump Math is good news for the Trump Organization and the value of its properties and brands!!
May 22, 2018
The Dumb Dude's attempt to work out a trade deal with China ended up being as incoherent as his 12-mistake Trumplish sentence in Dumb Don. His staggering intellectual insufficiencies sabotaged his trade negotiations with China in a way that China can see see how to play Don's mental limitations to its benefit.
Critically, the members of Don's negotiating team fell out with each other publicly in China as if they were all separate parts of Don's illiterate sentence.
This is the cost of Don's Trumplish. No one on Don's team speaks Trumplish -- only Don does this -- so that everyone on his team has a different understanding of what Don says and follows it. And Don cannot tell any of them what he means, because he doesn't know what he means.
For China ("The Center of Everything "in Chinese ), this is money in the bank.
For us?
We just pay.