Many are now demanding that Trump act abroad in the way they think he had promised and campaigned–which can be mostly defined as how closely he should parallel their own version of MAGA.
But Trump’s past shows that he never claimed that he was either an ideological isolationist or an interventionist.
He was and is clearly a populist-nationalist: i.e., what in a cost-to-benefit analysis is in the best interests of the U.S. at home and its own particular agendas abroad?
Trump did not like neo-conservatism because he never felt it was in our interests to spend blood and treasure on those who either did not deserve such largess, or who would never evolve in ways we thought they should, or whose fates were not central to our national interests.
So-called, optional, bad-deal, and forever wars in the Middle East and their multitrillion-dollar costs would come ultimately at the expense of shorting Middle America back home.
However, Trump’s first-term bombing of ISIS, standing down “little rocket man”, warning Putin not to invade Ukraine between 2017-21, and killing off Qasem Soleimani, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and many of the attacking Russian Wagner Group in Syria were certainly not Charles Lindberg isolationism but a sort of Jacksonian—something summed up perhaps as the Gadsen “Don’t tread on me”/ or Lucius Sulla’s “No better friend, no worse enemy” .
Trump’s much critiqued references to Putin—most recently during the G7, and his negotiations with him over Ukraine—were never, as alleged, appeasement (he was harder in his first term on Putin than was either Obama or Biden), but art-of-the-deal/transactional (e.g., you don’t gratuitously insult or ostracize your formidable rival in possible deal-making, but seek simultaneously to praise—and beat—him.)
Similarly, Churchill initially saw the mass-murdering, treacherous Stalin in the way Trump perhaps sees Putin, someone dangerous and evil, but who if handled carefully, occasionally granted his due, and approached with eyes wide open, could be useful in advancing a country’s realist interests—which for Britain in 1941 was for Russia to kill three-quarters of Nazi Germany’s soldiers, and, mutatis mutandis, for the U.S. in 2025 to cease the mass killing near Europe, save most of an autonomous Ukraine, keep Russia back eastward as far as feasible, and in Kissingerian-style derail the developing Chinese and Russian anti-American axis.
Trump was never anti-Ukraine, but rather against a seemingly endless Verdun-like war in which after three years neither side had found a pathway to strategic resolution—a war from the distance fought between two like peoples, one with nuclear weapons, and on the doorstep of Europe.
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Author: Ruth King
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