Monday, March 21, 2016

Trump and foreign policy

According to the front page of this afternoon's (digital edition) WaPo, Trump has announced a team of five foreign-policy advisers, a group apparently chaired by Sen. Sessions (R-Alabama), who has endorsed Trump.  Because I'm too cheap to take a WaPo sub, I haven't read the article.  The headline refers to a 'non-interventionist' foreign policy, which could mean a number of different things, and of course what looks like 'non-interventionism' to the WaPo might be anything that deviates from the quasi-messianic tradition in U.S. foreign policy that the newspaper's editorial board has been, with occasional exceptions, a fan of for the last, hmm, let's say 60 years (give or take).

ETA: More on this at some later point. There'll be plenty of time to discuss Trump's positions between now and the general election (assuming he's the Repub nominee).  For now I'll just say that even if particular Trump foreign-policy positions, e.g. on the disposition of U.S. forces abroad, should turn out to be closer to my views than certain of Clinton's foreign-policy positions, the way Trump has campaigned and what he has said about (among others) Muslims and Mexicans completely disqualifies him, imo.  So at this point if he adopted, say, Posen's Restraint word-for-word and made it his foreign-policy platform it wouldn't matter, from my standpoint.  (There is of course a long Repub tradition, albeit lately mostly submerged, of skepticism about and opposition to the U.S.-as-world-orderer, going back at least to the '30s and the America Firsters and the TaftitesIn the opening of Before the Storm, which I've begun to read, Perlstein calls Taft's foreign-policy approach "anticommunism for isolationists.")         

2 comments:

Peter T said...

The Trump team looks like Bush 2 leftovers plus a few millionaires. So not expecting competence, or even understanding. Trump is, in this as in much else, sui generis (he has precedents, but not ancestors). An era has passed - buckle in.

LFC said...

still looking for my seat belt...