Trump Foreign Policy
January 2, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
Fox News reports that Iranian Gen. Qassim Soleimani has been killed in a rocket attack at Baghdad International Airport. Soleimani was the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force. President Trump ordered the attack and our military carried it out. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had said that Soleimani is as dangerous as the late ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was killed by a U.S. strike
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January 1, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
This front page Washington Post story about the siege by pro-Iran militias of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, now ended, is an attempt to score points against President Trump. The subtitle of the story (paper edition) is “Trump warns Iran but shows little appetite for deeper involvement.” Trump responded to the siege by deploying troops to the region. A president with an “appetite” for a “deeper involvement” than that would
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December 12, 2019 — John Hinderaker
The Trump administration negotiated the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), an important update and revision to NAFTA, a year ago, but House Democrats have refused, until now, to bring it up for a vote. Democrats have been focused exclusively on impeachment and other means of undermining the Trump administration, and didn’t want to give President Trump an important victory. Happily, that opposition has now collapsed, and Nancy Pelosi announced on Tuesday that
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December 9, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
These days, Rudy Giuliani wears two main hats. He runs a foreign consulting and legal practice and he advises President Trump. These dual roles raise the possibility that Giuliani’s advice to Trump is influenced by his work for foreigners. Indeed, according to this report in the Washington Post, Giuliani touts his closeness with Trump when pitching his services to foreigners. For example, says the Post: In one meeting with a
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December 4, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Victor Davis Hanson surveys President Trump’s foreign policy, focusing on China, Iran, and North Korea. Hanson argues that Trump’s recalibration of our policy towards these three nations has succeeded in placing maximum pressure on each to alter its policies. He warns, however, that as the pressure mounts, so does the prospect of dangerous provocations. Trump’s policies towards China, Iran, and North Korea are improvements over President Obama’s. As Hanson observes,
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November 27, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Iran has been roiled by demonstrations against the dramatic increase in the price of gasoline that was dictated by the government earlier this month. The demonstrations have been brutally suppressed, with somewhere between 100 and several hundred protesters killed by police. For several days, the mullahs pulled the plug on internet service to prevent videos of the protests and police brutality to be seen by the outside world. Totalitarian governments
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November 18, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared today that the U.S. does not regard Israeli settlements on the West Bank as illegal. He thus reversed the position taken by former Secretary of State John Kerry in the dying days of the Obama administration. Pompeo explained that, after carefully studying the issue, he concluded that President Reagan got it right when he found that the settlements are not illegal. Reagan had reversed
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November 13, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
According to the Washington Post, Nikki Haley claims in her new book that Rex Tillerson and Gen. John Kelly tried to recruit her to undermine President Trump in an effort to “save the country.” President Trump has tweeted an endorsement of Haley’s book and urged his followers to order a copy or attend her book tour. Has Trump read the book or is he relying on the “fake news Washington
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November 12, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
David Ignatius of the Washington Post instructs us to remember that “while Trump was playing politics on Ukraine, people who depended on U.S. military aid were getting killed and wounded.” Quite possibly, but Ignatius doesn’t present evidence that this is so. Instead, he cites casualties that occurred after Trump released the military aid: On Oct. 5, a man and a woman died after a grenade exploded in their apartment in
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November 11, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
This week, President Trump will welcome Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan to the White House. The visit is a coup for Erdogan. It enables him to show that he got his way in Syria at the expense of America’s main partner in the fight against ISIS, yet remains in Trump’s good graces. Thus, there is no doubt as to why Erdogan agreed to come here. But why did Trump reward Erdogan
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November 10, 2019 — Scott Johnson
On the FOX News Sunday gabfest this morning, Karl Rove made the salient point that I highlighted here, quoting Byron York. Rove put it this way (my transcription): I love, I love the fact that the Democrats are now decrying the president’s decision not to move aid, lethal aid, rapidly to Ukraine. After all, the previous administration, a Democratic administration, did nothing to send lethal aid to Ukraine — and
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November 8, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
I have tried to provide some coverage of the mass anti-Iran protests in Iraq and the anti-Hezbollah protests in Lebanon. Taken together, they can plausibly be viewed as a “revolt against Iran.” Caroline Glick argues that the mass protests are the product of President Trump’s tough economic sanctions against Iran. She writes: The sanctions are one of the causes of the protests in both Lebanon and Iraq. Due to the
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November 8, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Byron York has a valuable column that in its own way exposes the malicious duplicity behind the Democrats’ current impeachment initiative. It appears under the headline “Testimony: How Trump helped Ukraine.” This is the opening: One notable and little-reported conclusion emerging from the House Democratic impeachment proceedings is a consensus among some foreign policy professionals that President Trump’s Ukraine policy has been an improvement over President Barack Obama’s. Ukraine was
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October 31, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Forget the photoshopped medal of honor for the Hero Dog: When the media takes in the conversation below between President Trump and Nigel Farage, they are going to flip out more than a Sea World dolphin on cocaine. I ran into Farage once very early in the morning when we were both checking out of the discreet Washington hotel that we both like to frequent, and although we had a
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October 28, 2019 — John Hinderaker
The London Times is a liberal and virulently anti-Trump newspaper. But its obituary of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi stands in sharp contrast to the ridiculous product of the Washington Post, which we and pretty much everyone else have ridiculed. The London Times obituary is a good reminder of how evil al-Baghdadi was. It begins: The catalogue of car bombs, shooting and suicide attacks wreaked over recent years in the name of
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October 17, 2019 — John Hinderaker
I don’t pretend to understand what has been going on in northern Syria in the last week or so. My understanding is that Turkey has limited objectives in the area that are not entirely illegitimate, that the handful of troops that we had in the area couldn’t have stopped the Turkish advance, and that President Trump pulled our troops out of harm’s way in recognition of the inevitable. But that
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October 15, 2019 — Paul Mirengoff
President Trump says he will raise tariffs on Turkish steel due to Turkey’s invasion of Syria. He will also halt negotiations on a trade deal. In addition, certain Turkish ministers associated with the invasion will be sanctioned. Trump notes that “Turkey’s military offensive is endangering civilians and threatens peace, security and stability in the region.” The result, he adds, is a “humanitarian crisis” that “Turkey does not seem to be
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