Trump's Foreign Policy Heresy

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian 
 

As Donald Trump vies for the Republican Party’s nomination for president, the foreign policy establishment, and especially its neoconservative hawks, grow ever more frenzied in their denunciations of him.

What are Trump’s foreign policy sins?  “Instead of denouncing President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Trump proposes to treat him as a reasonable negotiating partner,” observes Stephen Kinzer of Brown University, in “Trump’s Refreshing Foreign Policy Heresy,” in the April 14 Boston Globe. 

Trump has dared to suggest that the United States should be neutral between Israel and the Palestinians. Asked about Washington’s commitment to defend Japan and South Korea against all threats forever, he replied that it “could not go on forever.”

Trump has also remarked that “We spend billions of dollars on Saudi Arabia, and they have nothing but money. And I say, why?”

As for NATO, “It was really designed for the Soviet Union, which doesn’t exist anymore,” Trump remarked. “It wasn’t designed for terrorism.”

Of course this “apostasy” cannot go unchallenged! 

So Yale University historian Timothy Snyder, in “Trump’s Putin Fantasy,” NYR Daily of April 21, paints a picture of a Trump being taken in by a devious Putin.

Because Trump has praised Putin’s “strong” leadership and has called NATO “obsolete and expensive,” writes Snyder, the Russian president sees Trump as a potential “Kremlin client.

For good measure, he also labels Trump an “oligarch who enjoys the backing of American neo-Nazis.”

Robert Zubin, in “Trump: The Kremlin’s Candidate,” published April 4 in the influential National Review, notes that Trump has “the enthusiastic endorsement of the Putin chorus because he promises to gut NATO, thereby enabling Russian domination of Europe.” 

In a follow-up piece on April 14, Zubin developed an even more apocalyptic scenario. Putin wants to restore the Soviet bloc, according to Zubin. This means that “Polish independence must be crushed.” 

He also asserts that Russia’s Middle East strategy “is centered on building up an Iranian empire” as a “powerful junior partner to Moscow.” 

So a pro-Putin Trump administration “offers Israel the terrifying prospect of a nuclear-armed Iranian regional hegemon.” It “could lead to the end of Poland’s independence and Israel’s existence.”

But consider this: I’m sure Trump would not have bombed Belgrade on behalf of the Kosovar Liberation Army in 1999 to set up another Albanian state in the Balkans. 

He would not have invaded Iraq in 2003 and destroyed thousands of lives and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars on what has become an Iranian vassal state. 

He wouldn’t have first warned Syria’s Bashar al-Assad about “red lines” and then turned tail when the dictator used chemical weapons, as Barack Obama did in 2013. 

He wouldn’t have signed the nuclear deal with Iran last year. And he wouldn’t be antagonizing Russia in the Baltic Sea on behalf of corrupt oligarchs in places like Georgia and Ukraine.

On the other hand, according to Mark Lander, White House correspondent for The New York Times, Hillary Clinton is “the last true hawk left in the race.”

In “How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk,” in the April 24, 2016 New York Times Magazine, he contends that she has displayed instincts on foreign policy that are more aggressive than those of most Democrats. It’s why so many neoconservatives support her. 

The ultra right-wing Republican super-donor Charles Koch, one of the two billionaire Koch brothers regularly painted by Democrats as ogres, in an interview which aired on ABC Television’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on April 24, said he could imagine Clinton as preferable to Trump or Ted Cruz.

“Let me put it that way,” he remarked. “It’s possible.”

So who’s the scary one?