Well, you won’t, Dan. Just because I’m painfully slow and stumbling off the mark, and not much better down the stretch, you thought you could slip a few fast ones by me, but nuh-uh. I’m onto your game, and you’ll pay the price. The first of Dan’s “curve balls” (to vary the metaphor) came a…
Tag: foreign policy
Donald Trump’s Syrian “policy”: At least it’s good for a laugh!
That seems to be the reaction of the great Dan Drezner over at the Washington Post. Ole Dan feels he just has to chuckle at the consternation of his “realist” colleagues, who find that you should be careful what you wish for, a problem, Dan tells us, for all foreign policy mavens. This [the consternation…
Shorter Trump “Doctrine”: Ain’t nobody here but us Caucasians
Fareed Zakaria, attempting to suss out a Trump foreign policy “doctrine” other than the obvious “Don’t Fuck with US”, comes up with a reality as predictable as it is unappetizing—it’s all about the racism. Fareed sees no point in attempting to dissect the “thought” of President Trump himself, aka “Mr. Malaprop”, passing him up in…
Go Donald! Go Donald! (Some of the time)
Yes, it has come to this: the American “Establishment” is so blind, benighted, and beggared that it takes the installation of a complete mountebank1 in the White House to save that Establishment, and the United States as well, from that Establishment’s ever-compounding follies. I refer, of course, to Donald Trump’s precipitous withdrawal of a relative…
Donald Trump, president of peace?
Amusing, not to mention welcome, if true. My bête noire di tutti bêtes noires has set the Acela world on its collective ear if not its collective rear by his sudden decision to pull all American troops out of Syria, where they never should have been in the first place. You don’t get it, Donald!…
Peter Beinart: Cogent, with a caveat
Actually, more than cogent. Beinart, a chastened former liberal hawk who supported George’s W. Bush’s massively flawed and fraudulent invasion of Iraq, has learned his lesson pretty well, setting forth his conviction that “America Needs an Entirely New Foreign Policy for the Trump Age”, though I would much prefer another term for “the present” than…
Donald Trump is sort of doing what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama should have done. Sort of.
Well, he is. Sort of. President Trump is recognizing that NATO has outlived its usefulness, seeing as the “Soviet Menace”, as we used to call it, disappeared, you know, almost thirty years ago, so we don’t have keep paying to defend Europe from a “threat” that doesn’t exist. Of course, cool, calm reflection and “reason’…
Hey, Alan Vanneman! The U.S. had TWO debates on foreign policy, while you weren’t listening!
Well, indeed we did. I recently complained, rather at length, at the failure of the U.S. political system to generate a meaningful discussion of U.S. foreign policy, noting that, for the past several decades, we’ve been allowed to choose between “idealistic” hawks like Hillary Clinton and, well, shotgun-wielding freaks. But just before the holidays, both…
The foreign policy debate: Wouldn’t it be nice if we had one?
I realize that the recent terrorist attack in San Bernardino may forbid rational discussion of any topic for the next six months, or even longer. Still, wouldn’t be nice to have foreign policy discussion that consisted of more than a choice between Tweedle-Dick and Tweedle-Hillary? I mean, I’m not asking for six degrees of separation,…
Donald Trump or Donald Paul?
Lately, a few percipient observers, including myself have remarked that Bernie Sanders has been sounding just a bit Trumpy on the subjects of immigration and international competitiveness. Now, it seems, Donald Trump has been sounding a bit Rand Pauly on the Middle East. Bloomberg Politic’s Melinda Henneberger reports on the scene with the Donald at…