Trump foreign policy: One-up Obama
Trump foreign policy: One-up Obama
NYT via Indiana Gazette
June 20, 2019
Thomas Friedman
...For (Trump) it was obvious that Barack Obama did not have what it takes to push back Iran and North Korea, and Trump would show everyone how it’s done. ..In the case of Iran, Trump and his team have been all over the place. After Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal — even though Iran was abiding by its terms — his ambitious, sycophantic secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, gave a speech listing the 12 ways Iran had to change at home and abroad — demands that were tantamount to regime change.
Obama, by contrast, made no bones about the nature of his deal with Iran in 2015. It was purely transactional, limited almost entirely to securing a 15-year ban on Iran’s ability to build a nuclear weapon. Iran became a more aggressive regional actor against the Sunni Arab states around it. But it did nothing to threaten the U.S. and was really a tacit U.S. ally in defeating ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
So Trump tried to one-up Obama with Pompeo’s 12-step program. But it has not worked. And now Iran’s countermove — in response to the U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal and reimposition of sanctions designed to drive Iran’s oil sales to zero — has reportedly been to deploy proxies and covert operatives to attack oil and gas tankers passing through the Persian Gulf, forcing the U.S. to protect those shipping lanes. That is hugely expensive for the U.S. and overstretches the Navy. We need allies to confront this Iranian strategy successfully. But Trump has alienated our allies by his incessant lying, his tariffs on their products and his rejection of their willingness to try to renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal in a limited way.
This is what you get, folks, when you have a president who acts from the gut, not with well-thought-out plans, who is enamored with strongmen dictators more than our democratic allies, who is backed by a party and a TV network that simply parrot everything he says and never call him out, who thinks the enemy has no vote and who doesn’t understand ...Middle East politics.
https://www.indianagazette.com/opinion/trump-foreign-policy-one-up-obama/article_745714c2-92a8-11e9-86be-cbfc62b73ef3.html
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