Listen to his words, don’t be misled by his attitude.
It was hard to watch yesterday’s convention coverage. And not mainly because of Melania Trump’s alleged plagiarism or the Third World–style party governance used to suppress dissent. It was hard to watch American heroes endorse a man who will fail them. It was hard to watch American patriots fall hard for a man who promises a foreign policy every bit as bad as Obama’s and probably worse than Hillary Clinton’s.
To watch men and women such as Mark Geist, John Tiegen, and Pat Smith speak is to be reminded of the extraordinary costs of Clinton and Obama’s foreign policy, where “leading from behind” often meant “Let jihadists take charge.” The failure to exert American power not only left Americans exposed and vulnerable to attacks from two-bit Islamic militias, it had the staggering strategic consequence of squandering hard-fought American gains in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
But to listen to Donald Trump — to actually listen to his words, rather than be impressed by his attitude — is to realize that he stands to make things even worse. His foreign policy takes “leading from behind,” magnifies all its failures, and repackages it as “America first.” When you actually look at the details, his foreign policy stands to repeat Obama’s mistakes, compound them with new mistakes, then hide them all behind ignorant, belligerent posturing.
Let’s take, for example, Libya and Iraq. At the heart of the Obama–Clinton Libya failure was the desire to let American allies lead, combined with a deep reluctance to commit sufficient American force to guarantee a favorable outcome. When from the outset a leader vows no “boots on the ground,” he is declaring up front that he is abdicating ultimate strategic responsibility to those who are willing to put skin in the game.
Now look at Trump’s alleged ISIS strategy, just articulated on Sixty Minutes:
Donald Trump: I am going to have very few troops on the ground. We’re going to have unbelievable intelligence, which we need; which, right now, we don’t have. We don’t have the people over there. We are going to use —
Lesley Stahl: You want to send Americans —
Donald Trump: Excuse me — and we’re going to have surrounding states and, very importantly, get NATO involved because we support NATO far more than we should, frankly, because you have a lot of countries that aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing. And we have to wipe out ISIS. And speaking of Turkey, Turkey is an ally. Turkey can do it by themselves. But they have to be incentivized. For whatever reason, they’re not. So we have no choice.
Hillary Clinton called, she wants her Libya strategy back. The best that can be said for Trump’s “lead from behind” version 2.0 is that at least it’s a marginal improvement over his previous ISIS strategies — which included ordering American troops to commit war crimes, bombing oil fields (and have Exxon rebuild them in two months), and fantastical notions of calling Bill Gates for help in “closing up” parts of the Internet.
#share#But Trump isn’t content with simply repeating Obama–Clinton mistakes (and hiding them behind a cloud of WWE-style trash talk). His version of “leading from behind” threatens the very existence of alliances that have not just kept the peace but have helped guarantee American prosperity for generations. He actually said that NATO “may be obsolete” and encouraged nuclear proliferation even, potentially, by an Islamic power such as Saudi Arabia. Left unexplained is how diluting America’s nuclear hegemony would put “America first.”
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This is worse than leading from behind. It’s not leading at all. It’s guaranteeing the existence of security vacuums that would probably be filled by those who are hostile to American interests. Trump’s admiration for Vladimir Putin is well documented, and close adviser Paul Manafort lobbied for the Ukraine’s Russian-backed former president for a decade. Indeed, Trump loyalists helped strip from the Republican platform language that advocated providing “lethal defensive weapons” to Ukrainian forces in their fight against Russian invaders. (So much for letting allies take the lead.)
Even Trump’s much-vaunted love for “the vets” has its limits. He mocked veteran John McCain for being captured. He’ll threaten civil–military relations and slander the character of our warriors by claiming that troops would obey even his unlawful commands. And he’ll accuse American troops of corruption when it serves his purposes.
#related#Hillary Clinton’s foreign-policy record is appalling. Her Russian reset was a bad joke. The Libyan intervention was a disaster. And the Obama administration she defends is fighting a slow-motion war against ISIS that has allowed it to create and maintain vast terrorist safe havens.
American heroes have suffered because of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It’s impossible to read accounts of the Benghazi debacle without feeling rage and despair at the administration’s foolishness and betrayal. Clinton deserved every syllable of last night’s searing indictment, but Donald Trump does not merit a single word of praise.
A plurality of Republican voters and the majority of the Republican establishment have chosen to answer a disaster with a disaster. Behind the slogans and behind the belligerence there exists a singular and disturbing reality — a vote for Donald Trump is a vote for American retreat.