France's President Emmanuel Macron and Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel look on as U.S. President Donald Trump and Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan walk during a photo opportunity at the NATO leaders summit, December 4, 2019. REUTERS/Christian Hartmann/Pool
Julian Borger, The Guardian: 2019: the year US foreign policy fell apart
Donald Trump’s approach to the world is little more than a tangle of personal interests, narcissism and Twitter outbursts
Donald Trump meets the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, at the border village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone, South Korea, on 30 June. Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP
The new decade is about to start under many shadows, but none is more ominous than North Korea’s threat to return to nuclear and long-range missile tests after a two-year lull.
Pyongyang’s pendulum swing from enthusiastic summit diplomacy back to name-calling and threats comes as Donald Trump is increasingly focused on his re-election campaign.
That may be a good thing, as the US president will be wary of provoking a crisis to spoil his narrative of peace and prosperity.
Or it could be a very bad thing: Kim Jong-un could seek to exploit a moment of maximum leverage and miscalculate.
Read more ....
Update: Trump faces raft of foreign policy challenges in new year (AP)
WNU Editor: Almost all of the news commentary and pundit opinions that I read today on US foreign policy are negative. The above post by Julian Borger from the Guardian is one of the mild ones. As to what is my view .... it is different. The U.S. is slowly disengaging from the wars that it has been involved in for almost two decades, and it is also restoring some of the trade imbalances that have favoured China. A new NAFTA trade deal with Mexico and Canada is also moving forward, and it will be probably be finally signed in 2020. Just those three points by themselves is why I will say that the past year has been a foreign policy win for the Trump administration, even though everyone else has a different point of view.
A criticism on the GWOT, O'Bumble, and others.
ReplyDeleteLooking Back at Afghanistan, the War of Necessity
In most cases, poor foreign policy coincides with poor domestic policy Which generally speaking, produces poor results, both in geopolitical and economic terms.
ReplyDeleteEmpirical data clearly shows the US on an upward swing economically. Foreign policy success can be measured more subjectively depending on what your foreign policy goals/views are. Of your goals are to involve in more foreign regime change wars, expand the ones we’re already in and keep the US subservient to global competitors US FP would be a failure.
If your FP goals are to reduce the foreign war signature and recalibrate US global trade relations to our favor, it would be a success.
It pretty much comes down to your idea of the US and what it should be. And of course your view on President Trump. The left will never accept or admit a success by the U S as long as Trump is president.
I’d say US foreign policy and domestic policy are both a success right now.
A nation has no permanent friends or permanent enemies, only permanent interests.
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ReplyDeleteAnd yet it moves.
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