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Trump Foreign Policy (1 Viewer)

Sinn Fein

Footballguy
I saw a thread for Obama Foreign Policy, but I did not see a thread for Trump Foreign Policy :shrug:

I am not sure I really understand his policy, or its goals and objectives - outside of the slogan "America First".  I happened to be looking up the Mayflower speech, and it dawned on me, that might be his only foreign policy speech.

Here are the relevant excerpts:

In the Middle East our goals must be, and I mean must be, to defeat terrorists and promote regional stability, not radical change. 


I don't know what we are doing here - Jared has gone silent in recent months.  On the face of it - moving the embassy to Jerusalem does not seem to support this agenda.  We have been targeting ISIS to great effect, but I don't know that we are really promoting regional stability anywhere within the region.

We desire to live peacefully and in friendship with Russia and China. We have serious differences with these two nations, and must regard them with open eyes, but we are not bound to be adversaries. We should seek common ground based on shared interests.

Russia, for instance, has also seen the horror of Islamic terrorism. I believe an easing of tensions, and improved relations with Russia from a position of strength only is possible, absolutely possible. Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility must end and ideally will end soon. Good for both countries.

Some say the Russians won’t be reasonable. I intend to find out. If we can’t make a deal under my administration, a deal that’s great — not good, great — for America, but also good for Russia, then we will quickly walk from the table. It’s as simple as that. We’re going to find out.
Clearly, improving relations with Russia has been a cornerstone of the Trump campaign and presidency.  And, in theory - I agree with the goal, as an altruistic end.  But, as we will see, this flies in the face of America rewarding countries that do not share our western ideals.  We should have used our global standing to promote and enhance those ideals - rather than reward Russia for its misdeeds - election, Ukraine, Crimea, et al.  It is this policy - of rewarding Russia - that has called Trump's objectivity into play, imo.  Trump has failed to show how this policy fits with "America First" or what, if anything Russia can offer to the US.

Fixing our relations with China is another important step — and really toward creating an even more prosperous period of time. China respects strength and by letting them take advantage of us economically, which they are doing like never before, we have lost all of their respect.

We have a massive trade deficit with China, a deficit that we have to find a way quickly, and I mean quickly, to balance. A strong and smart America is an America that will find a better friend in China, better than we have right now. Look at what China is doing in the South China Sea. They’re not supposed to be doing it.
Two things to look at here - trade deficits - I have not seen any evidence that Trump is doing anything but exacerbating the trade balance.  (So far this year the deficit totals $152.2 billion, up 9.9 percent from the same period a year ago. As has been the case for decades, America's deficit with China is the largest imbalance with any country.)  Trump seems to think Trade wars are easy, and the right path to take here - time will tell, but the early returns do not look promising.

On the second issue - Trump notes China's buildup in the South China sea - as far as I know, the US has done nothing to slow down that expansion during Trump's tenure, and I have not heard of any plans or negotiations to rein in China's expansion.

Our goal is peace and prosperity, not war and destruction. The best way to achieve those goals is through a disciplined, deliberate and consistent foreign policy. With President Obama and Secretary Clinton we’ve had the exact opposite — a reckless, rudderless and aimless foreign policy, one that has blazed the path of destruction in its wake.
The irony is thick with this one.

Finally, I will work with our allies to reinvigorate Western values and institutions. Instead of trying to spread universal values that not everybody shares or wants, we should understand that strengthening and promoting Western civilization and its accomplishments will do more to inspire positive reforms around the world than military interventions.
I think we can all agree, that Trump has failed in his goal of working with our allies to reinvigorate Western values and institutions.  If anything, Trump has done the opposite.

 
This feels like trolling - and not serious discussion - and certainly could have been included in any number of existing Trump threads.
If I start a Trump related thread you call it trolling and say it could have been included in any number of existing threads. That may be true (the latter, not the former). However, arguably a thread about Trump Foreign Policy could also have been included in any number of existing Trump threads.

I don't think starting a thread about a particular newsworthy item (lead story on most newscasts except Fox and Giuliani top trending Twitter hashtag) or anything people want to seriously discuss is trolling (and there has been some serious discussion of issues raised in that thread)

I don't believe either thread is trolling and I have no problem with this thread, but I do find it amusing it was started less than 24 hours of your criticism of me.

 
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If I start a Trump related thread you call it trolling and say it could have been included in any number of existing threads. That may be true. However, arguably a thread about Trump Foreign Policy could also have been included in any number of existing Trump threads.

I don't think starting a thread about a particular newsworthy item (lead story on most newscasts except Fox and Giuliani top trending Twitter hashtag) or anything people want to seriously discuss is trolling (and there has been some serious discussion of issues raised in that thread)

I don't believe either thread is trolling and I have no problem with this thread, but I do find it amusing it was started less than 24 hours of your criticism of me.
You are a very interesting and rare breed of duck, water does not roll off of your back.

 
If I start a Trump related thread you call it trolling
You start too many threads, way too many. Sinn Fein has a good idea for a thread and you come in caterwauling and trolling , as usual by the way. 

A wide variety of thread starters is welcomed in my book

 
Yeah - this thread is ideally supposed to be a legitimate subject.  I agreed with some of Trump's goals, even though I question the execution of those goals.

The idea started as part part of a rabbit hole, where I was trying to better understand the relationship among  the Mayflower meetings, Mayflower speech, the Trump Tower meeting, and the cancelled speech that was to follow, and finally the GOP convention platform changes.  How did Russia fit into those plans - did that make sense?

And, I get that Trump's over-riding Foreign Policy is "America First" - from a political standpoint, I can understand the value, but from a diplomatic standpoint, I thought it would struggle - and evidence suggests that it has struggled to take foot with both ally and foe.

Going back to Trump though - I am somewhat struck by the tough talker, turning into the "do-nothing" president.  I expected that Trump would have been more assertive on the international stage.  That was part of the reason I wanted to see his policy goals, and how well his actions measured up to his goals.

Russia - On one hand, I agree that there is no reason why we have to be mortal enemies with Russia.  On the other hand, I struggle to understand what Russia brings to the table to entice us to be friendlier.  If Russia were to adopt more "Western" values, then I think it makes sense to provide economic benefits to support those changes - but friends without benefits = meh.

And, before we talk about a better relationship with Russia means a safer world - think about what that means.  Russia is not a direct threat to the US - Russia is a far greater threat to its neighbors.  And, Russia is effectively saying "Be nice to us, and we will be nice to our neighbors."  I prefer a different approach - "You be nice to your neighbors, and we will be nice to you."  I would also add, that Trump also touts an expanded military as part of his goals.  That seems to fly in the face of better relations with Russia and China - we don't need more military if there are fewer threats.  

Russian policy feels like it is being dictated by Russia - and that raises a lot of questions - even if you set aside and collusion.  How is this policy making "America First"?

China - reducing the trade deficit seems like a very worthwhile goal - I do not think we can sustain trade deficits over a long period, and China has the greatest deficit.  SO I think Trump is on the right path here - but again, I don't think he is executing very well.  Trump is attacking the demand side of the equation - while I think he should be focused on the supply side of the equation.  What can we be doing domestically, to create goods and services that the world wants to buy?  Instead of creating barriers to entry, which invite barriers to exit - we should put good old fashioned capitalism to work and figure out how to provide better/cheaper goods and services that the world is demanding.  that puts Americans back to work, and that bring foreign investments into the US.

Immigration fits into foreign policy, and i would say, Trump has made the most headway here - he is aggressively targeting non-white immigrants - and while I disagree with his policy, I think it is having the desired effect.  I would prefer that we acknowledge that immigration has been the backbone of this country for 200+ years.  Immigrants for generations have come here as unskilled laborers, and put down roots.  We don't need only the "best and brightest", we need a good mixture of everyone.

 
Trump handles others like a businessman, not a diplomat.

Russia: while appearing to cozy up to Russia by not criticizing them (which never did any good anyway), he also replaced the missiles in Eastern Europe that Obama removed and struck a deal with the EU on LNG (which will take a while to completely fulfill as the EU has to build LNG terminals.

He did a carrot and stick approach with the EU calling them names while at the same time reaching a deal to sell them LNG and soybeans in return for not putting a tariff on autos (which would have devastated EU automobile industry). This will be his blueprint for winning the trade war - buy American and I won't destroy your industry.

The jury remains out on North Korea, but I can't fault him for trying to make a deal. He got further with them than anyone else has.

I don't like the guy, but I can't fault his foreign policy. It does put America first, which is what a President should do IMO.

 
And, I am more concerned that he treats others like they are a sub-contractor who will be stiffed at some point.
That comes with being the biggest economy and largest importer in the world. Basically he seems to be acting from a position of perceived strength rather than from one of perceived weakness and he doesn't care if we are loved or not.

 
struck a deal with the EU on LNG (which will take a while to completely fulfill as the EU has to build LNG terminals
This is untrue

ETA: As requested in the other thread, do the math, show the math.

 
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That comes with being the biggest economy and largest importer in the world. Basically he seems to be acting from a position of perceived strength rather than from one of perceived weakness and he doesn't care if we are loved or not.
It is not about being loved, but understanding that we NEED allies and we need to respect our agreements both past and present.  We need to maintain an understanding that our word matters and that we have an intelligent foreign policy that reflects the ideals of the United States.

 
It is not about being loved, but understanding that we NEED allies and we need to respect our agreements both past and present.  We need to maintain an understanding that our word matters and that we have an intelligent foreign policy that reflects the ideals of the United States.
Trump and many others would put it the other way. Our allies need us. That puts us in the position of strength rather than putting the allies there.

 
Trump and many others would put it the other way. Our allies need us. That puts us in the position of strength rather than putting the allies there.
I agree they need us too.  But he is a complete idiot if he thinks we don't need them as well.

 
I agree they need us too.  But he is a complete idiot if he thinks we don't need them as well.
A very wise negotiator explained how to win a negotiation to me this way: "He who wants it least, wins." That's the strategy being adopted here.

 
Here's something new - 

Trump tells the State Department to withdraw $200 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority that was originally planned for programs in the West Bank and Gaza, a State Department official said

 
Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Armenia, EU caving to his tariffs, United Kingdom, pulled out of the Iran Deal and the disastrous TPP plus  Nafta renegotiations almost omplete.

Good relations with both China and Russia.

America respected around the world again.

He is doing a darn good job.

 
Imagine going to a football game. There’s a drunken loudmouth fan behind you, yelling at the team. He knows nothing about Xs and Os, but that doesn’t stop him from shouting his opinion. He wants them to be more aggressive. He calls for the bomb on every offensive play. He calls for a blitz on every defensive play. He always wants them to go for it on 4th Down. And he constantly yells for the QB on the bench to come in and replace the starter.  

Now imagine that guy was suddenly made head coach of the team. And there you have it. 

 
Imagine going to a football game. There’s a drunken loudmouth fan behind you, yelling at the team. He knows nothing about Xs and Os, but that doesn’t stop him from shouting his opinion. He wants them to be more aggressive. He calls for the bomb on every offensive play. He calls for a blitz on every defensive play. He always wants them to go for it on 4th Down. And he constantly yells for the QB on the bench to come in and replace the starter.  

Now imagine that guy was suddenly made head coach of the team. And there you have it. 
He’s also banging all the cheerleaders and paying them off with the concessions money.

 
Just to follow up on a point that MT made in the silver linings thread, yes, we are thankful that Trump has not entered any wars. Thank goodness.

However on the whole this is how I see things:

  • NK is riskier. It has expanded its weapons program and continues testing.
  • Palestine and Jordan are at risk of exploding from the one state solution proposal, it could be radicalizing for the whole Arab world.
  • Iran is on Israel's border, and if no one has noticed Israel has on occasion bombed their positions.
  • Iran is again expanding its missile program and is free to exit the JPOA if it wants to legally.
  • Europe has increased nationalist forces and gains in elections.
  • The UK's democracy is fracturing.
  • Russian bombers and paramilitary advisers are in Venezuela.
  • China is increasingly aggressive and has moved towards Russia.
  • Nuclear technology has been shipped to KSA.
  • KSA/UAE, Qatar and Iran are at greater risk of conflict.
  • Yemen is a humanitarian disaster.
  • Increased populism in Mexico.
  • Russia is out of the INF.
  • Russian aggression in Ukraine is unabated and RU has turned the Sea of Azov into a private lake and is now moving to essentially bring in the two provinces as essentially old school soviet style republics. Same thing is happening in Transdniestra in Moldova though it is hardly noticed.
  • The SOD and NSA leadership is now Shanahan and Bolton, whereas at one point it was Mattis and McMaster.
  • US leadership is viewed as bullying, risky and using disconnected demands - like tying trade and military domestic policy concerns - together, which is a diplomatic no-no.
It's true, no new wars, but our risk is way, way up.

 
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Trump handles others like a businessman, not a diplomat.

Russia: while appearing to cozy up to Russia by not criticizing them (which never did any good anyway), he also replaced the missiles in Eastern Europe that Obama removed and struck a deal with the EU on LNG (which will take a while to completely fulfill as the EU has to build LNG terminals.

He did a carrot and stick approach with the EU calling them names while at the same time reaching a deal to sell them LNG and soybeans in return for not putting a tariff on autos (which would have devastated EU automobile industry). This will be his blueprint for winning the trade war - buy American and I won't destroy your industry.

The jury remains out on North Korea, but I can't fault him for trying to make a deal. He got further with them than anyone else has.

I don't like the guy, but I can't fault his foreign policy. It does put America first, which is what a President should do IMO.
Trump is a one-trick pony and tariffs are his thing and foreign leaders have figured this out.  If you can wait him out or concede something trivial he will cave on the tariffs.   

 
'Trump thought I was a secretary': Fiona Hill on the president, Putin and populism

She was the White House’s top Russia expert catapulted to fame by Trump’s impeachment. She reflects on her journey from County Durham to Washington

In the last days before Washington was locked down, Fiona Hill was standing on the street on her phone dealing with a domestic crisis.

Hill’s daughter had become ill, it was unclear whether it was coronavirus (it later turned out to be regular flu) and the family had relatives flying in that weekend for a visit. As she paced up and down making contingency plans, passersby on Connecticut Avenue looked and looked again on recognising her. The British-born White House adviser had temporarily become one of the most famous faces in America after testifying in Donald Trump’s impeachment hearings in November.

As senior director for Europe and Russia in the national security council she had been an eyewitness to Trump’s encounters with Vladimir Putin, and to the White House machinations over Ukraine.

Her calm under pressure, her clarity of recall, and her evident expertise on all things Russian, confirmed what was already suspected: the president and his associates had conducted a parallel foreign policy towards Kyiv to further his political interests.

For many, Hill was a hero. The coalminer’s daughter from County Durham received offers of book contracts, requests for interviews and appearances.

For a few, however, she became a target because her testimony contradicted Trump. In the present era, that is enough. She sought police advice after receiving death threats, and this was one of her early sorties into public life after three months in seclusion. She was planning a cautious return to a normal existence at a Washington thinktank – a plan which was blown up with everyone else’s, by the looming pandemic and lockdown.

When we met in February, impeachment still felt the climactic drama of the Trump saga to date. After all, he was only the third president in US history to be impeached, and the details of his attempt to shake down the Ukrainian government by withholding US aid until it produced damaging information about Trump’s political rival, were stunning.

But a couple of months on, all this was a dim memory, and the Ukraine scandal appears trivial compared with what followed. More than 100,000 Americans had since died in a pandemic the administration was incapable of handling and unrest was spreading across the nation.

When we talked in May, Hill was back in seclusion but so was the rest of Washington. She was speaking from home, where she had an array of books spread around her feet. She had laid them out to try to piece together an explanation of why the three countries with which she was intimately familiar – the UK, where she was born; Russia, the country she had spent her life studying; and the US, where she has lived since 1989 and risen to the highest level of government – had all failed so spectacularly in handling the health crisis.

She is one of a handful of people to have stood at the nexus of these three disastrous governments, to have been in the room to witness Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Boris Johnson operate.

“It’s a story really about how the US, UK and Russia have all ended up in the same spot weirdly, not just in terms of Covid-19 but also populist politics and many of the same out-of-control inequalities,” Hill said.

******

Bishop Auckland voted 61% for Brexit. And just as people voted against the seemingly self-evident advantages of the European Union, Hill said they can vote away pillars of the liberal democracy and elect authoritarian narcissists in its place.

“Liberal democracy hasn’t been delivering,” she argued. “If I go back to my home town, it’s still no better than it was when I was growing up in terms of opportunity. The shops are boarded up in the main street. Nothing new is coming in. There’s just no kind of sense of optimism. And when I visit my relatives here in the US in Wisconsin and other places, there’s a lot of sense of: the rest of the world is kind of moving on and leaving us behind. People see that as being closely associated with liberal democracy.”

Given everything that Hill knew and understood about the threats to democracy from populism and Putin’s Russia, some of her friends and colleagues were astonished when she went to work for Trump in the early months of the administration, with one accusing her of “aiding and abetting a criminal enterprise”.

“That was the general thrust. They were telling me: You really shouldn’t do this,” she said. She says she felt obliged to do what she could to address the dangerous volatility of the relationship between two nuclear-armed states.

“What I was most worried about was the toxicity of the issue of Russia. I mean I really felt that actually that was one of the reasons why I should try to do something,” she said.

“You have to be able to balance off deterrence with some forms of engagement to be able to move things in a different direction.”

******

“I think honestly, they got this idea initially that I could sit down with the president and do a bit of a spiel on Putin but it just never worked out like that,” she said. “He just wanted to get on with it himself.”

Hill’s first Oval Office encounter with Trump was inauspicious. It was on 3 April 2017. She was on her first day of orientation, but there had been a terror attack on the St Petersburg metro and she was called in to brief the president.

She remembers only having her running shoes on, having left home in a rush, leaving her work shoes behind, and trying to hide her feet under her chair. She need not have worried.

“Trump didn’t look up when I came in and I don’t think he looked up the whole time I was giving my spiel about the terrorist attack,” Hill said. The president was busy writing something on a pad on his desk. “And then Ivanka came in and sat down next to me, the first thing she did was look at my shoes.”

The next meeting with Trump was even worse. McFarland tried to introduce her to the president in a crowded room and tell him she was his senior director for Russia, but Trump just waved towards the secretary of state.

“He said: Rex Tillerson is working on Russia, and I thought: this is not going to work,” she recalled. “I never really imprinted.”

That much was clear on her next visit to the Oval Office. Trump was making a call with Putin, and as is customary, relevant White House officials were sitting around the president’s desk.

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Hill had listened to what the Russian president had said and was preparing some notes of analysis, when she suddenly became aware everyone was looking at her. Trump had decided he wanted a press release and assumed Hill, one of the few women in the room, was there to type it up.

“The president thought I was part of the executive secretariat taking notes,” she said. “He was basically saying: ‘Can she go do this?’ and I had no idea what they’re talking about. I was like a deer in the headlights, and thinking: You’re talking to me?

“It’s not like the first time I’ve been mistaken for a secretary. I’ve been mistaken for many things, believe me,” she said.

*******

For the record, she is dismissive of the Manchurian Candidate theory that Trump was somehow controlled by Putin through the use of kompromat. She knew Christopher Steele, the former MI6 officer, from an earlier job in the national intelligence council. He was her counterpart, and she was taken by surprise when his dossier on Trump and Russia emerged.

She argues Trump’s desire to forge a personal relationship with Putin is no different from his approach to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, or the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, or Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

“He wants to be like he was as a CEO, he has all these discussions with people in private … He has a very informal style with everyone. Putin is similar. He just tries to engage with people in the way that he thinks kind of fits them best,” she said. “Boris is the same. It’s like the guy in the pub. It’s less getting into the weeds of the substance in some sort of formal way, and more two guys talking.

“Trump just wants to sit down with the guy, whoever it is, and create personal chemistry and then everyone else works out the details,” she said. “He wanted to treat Putin the same way he treated Xi or Netanyahu. He wanted to be able to pick up the phone and talk to them.”

But Putin could not be treated like the others. The Trump campaign had dozens of contacts with Russian officials or Kremlin intermediaries, and the candidate had appealed to Moscow to interfere in the election by hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Furthermore, as Hill made clear in her biography of him, Putin has taken all the skills of his long KGB career with him to the Russian presidency. And the Kremlin was constantly outmanoeuvring the White House, arranging events so that Trump would be alone with Putin with only the Russian president’s translator in the room. The state department, which stuck to rigid protocol rules on whose translator should be where and when, was being played.

“Putin doesn’t operate like that. Putin takes translators with him for every occasion,” she said. “The Russians are incredibly organized. They take advantage of every opportunity, every vulnerability, every open door they can walk through.”

In her efforts to have US career officials included in Trump’s meetings with Putin, she found herself facing determined resistance from inside the president’s entourage, as they became more and more distrustful of career officials as disloyal potential whistleblowers.

“I was saying to the people around him it’s the president’s own security here, because then they [the Russians] can say that he said things that he didn’t say. And they did that repeatedly,” she said. “They could be recording things in big meetings like the G20 where we don’t control the site. It gave Russians unnecessary leverage, and made it much more difficult for us to get ahead of things.”

In the end, events got ahead of Hill and many of the people she worked with at the national security council. As 2020 has shown, Trump has few if any advisers ready to push against his impulses. He has torn up one arms control agreement after another with the result that in less than a year’s time, there could be no limits left on the world’s major nuclear arsenals. And Trump’s politics of division have spilled out in the streets of US cities, where liberal democracy appears ever more in jeopardy.

Hill sees some hope for the future in citywide grassroots activism, to confront the climate crisis, the coronavirus, poverty and inequality. But those are more aspirations for the future. Right now, in Washington, London and Moscow, it is the populists who have the upper hand.

*******

 

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