Thursday, April 19, 2018

Trump Vastly Better than Obama at Foreign Policy





Now that we have learned CIA director and secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo met with Kim Jung Un over Easter, it is time to acknowledge the obvious: the foreign policy of political novice Donald Trump has been vastly more successful that that of the supposedly experienced Barack Obama.

And vastly is an understatement. Obama's foreign policy was a disaster, beginning with the peculiar apology tour that mystified much of its Middle Eastern audience, through the yet more peculiar (misspelled) reset button with Russia that further mystified Sergei Lavrov, on to Obama's overheard whisper to Medvedev telling Putin he would be more accommodating on missile defense after the election (imagine the apoplectic reaction of our media if Trump did that!), to the Libyan war leading to the assassination of Qaddafi (the only Arab leader to voluntarily denuclearize) that created a failed state and a raft of refugees to Italy and elsewhere, and, of course, the rapid exit from Iraq that gave rise to ISIS.

And this omits the equally egregious examples -- the failure to enforce the red line on Assad's use of chemical weapons, about which he naively believed Putin, and the never-signed, never-published Iran Deal itself, which has done nothing but enrich the mullahs who wreak havoc from Venezuela to Yemen. This duplicitous and unverifiable non-agreement prolonged the monstrous Syrian civil war, causing the greatest refugee crisis since World War II and changing the character of Europe possibly forever.

There's more but you get the point. Not even Jimmy Carter had that bad a record. And this is without Obama's sickening lack of response to the freedom demonstrators in Iran. ("Obama, Obama, are you with us or are you with them?" Well, we know.)

And Trump? ...