Trump Foreign Policy

[Danny Bateman]

BRB... One quick point:

 

Obama and W both tried to pressure Pakistan to knock off the shenanigans. Neither were successful, though defining success in this instance is rather vague and may be a shifting definition. But saying you want to pressure Pakistan is the easy part. Doing it successfully is the hard part.

 

We can't let Trump sucker people into believing his predecessors turned a blind eye to Pakistan, because as with most thing he asserts, that is not the reality.

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-22/trump-leans-on-afghanistan-tactics-that-failed-under-bush-obama

 

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/21/politics/trump-afghanistan-pakistan-india/index.html
 

[knapplc]

I don't fault Trump for ramping up the Afghan war. That's on the Pentagon, who should have told Bush, Obama & now Trump that we cannot win a war there.

 

Nobody can.  Not us, not the Soviets, not the British, not the Mongols, not the Arabs, not the Persians, not even Alexander the Great could conquer Afghanistan. 

 

It cannot be done.  We need to find a way to exit that conflict now.  All we're going to do is spend a lot of money, get a lot of people killed, and stir up even more resentment against America.

 

That is not Trump's fault, or Obama's, or Bush's.  It's on our military "experts" who ignore history.

[BigRedBuster]

30 minutes ago, dudeguyy said:

BRB... One quick point:

 

Obama and W both tried to pressure Pakistan to knock off the shenanigans. Neither were successful, though defining success in this instance is rather vague and may be a shifting definition. But saying you want to pressure Pakistan is the easy part. Doing it successfully is the hard part.

 

We can't let Trump sucker people into believing his predecessors turned a blind eye to Pakistan, because as with most thing he asserts, that is not the reality.

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-22/trump-leans-on-afghanistan-tactics-that-failed-under-bush-obama

 

http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/21/politics/trump-afghanistan-pakistan-india/index.html
 

 

I stand corrected.

[BigRedBuster]

20 minutes ago, knapplc said:

I don't fault Trump for ramping up the Afghan war. That's on the Pentagon, who should have told Bush, Obama & now Trump that we cannot win a war there.

 

Nobody can.  Not us, not the Soviets, not the British, not the Mongols, not the Arabs, not the Persians, not even Alexander the Great could conquer Afghanistan. 

 

It cannot be done.  We need to find a way to exit that conflict now.  All we're going to do is spend a lot of money, get a lot of people killed, and stir up even more resentment against America.

 

That is not Trump's fault, or Obama's, or Bush's.  It's on our military "experts" who ignore history.

I can't disagree with that.

[BigRedBuster]

 

[BigRedBuster]

The one line in the speech that just sends my blood boiling is....something like.....

"All my life, I've been told making decisions are much more difficult when you are sitting behind the desk in the oval office"

 

NO sh#t!!!!!

 

This idiot has been such a blow hard for so long against every President.  On the campaign trail, he constantly told everyone how much SMARTER he is.....even than the Generals.

 

This type of crap just pisses me off and so many Presidential candidates do it.  He just took it to a whole other level.

[zoogs]

The #Failing fake president needs to rally his troops by waging moar wars. Sad!

 

 

[Danny Bateman]

1 hour ago, BigRedBuster said:

 

 

I guess nobody wants to be the guy who looks incompetent by saying "This isn't working; we can't do this."

I could see why the military wouldn't train you to have that mindset.

[TGHusker]

OPEd says Trump policy is 'a loser'.    Afgan, as Knapp noted, is the place where armies go to die.  They are a tribal society and have no loyalty to a puppet gov't we put in place.  We may push down the current generation but a next one will rise up and fight against any gains we may make.   Pakistan/Afgan boarder is a lawless area governed by no govt. 

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-generals-talked-another-president-into-losing-strategy/

The American people don’t like long wars with uncertain outcomes—and never have. That was true in 1953, when the U.S. accepted a stalemate and armistice with the Chinese-backed North Koreans, and it was true again in 1975, when the U.S. suffered an ignominious defeat and 58,000 dead at the hands of pajama-clad guerrillas and the North Vietnamese army. “Never fight a land war in Asia,” General Douglas MacArthur famously said, and for good reason: in both Korea and Vietnam, the enemy could be endlessly supplied and reinforced.

The solution, in both cases, was to either widen the war or leave. In Korea, MacArthur proposed expanding the war by taking on Chinese military sanctuaries in China (which got him fired), while in Vietnam, Richard Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia and mined North Vietnam’s harbors, an expansion of the war that sparked a genocide and merely postponed the inevitable. America’s adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have been as unsatisfying. A troop surge retrieved America’s position in Iraq, though most military officers now view Baghdad as “a suburb of Tehran” (as a currently serving Army officer phrased it), while the U.S. has spent over $800 billion on a Kabul government whose writ extends to sixty percent of the country—or less.

Given this, it’s not surprising that opinion surveys showed that the majority of the U.S. military supported Donald Trump in the last election; Trump promised a rethink of America’s Iraq and Afghanistan’s adventures, while Clinton was derided as an interventionist, or in Pentagon parlance, “cruise missile liberal.” Trump had the edge over his opponent among both military voters and veterans, especially when it came to ISIS: “I would bomb the sh#t out of them” he said, a statement translated in the military community as “I would bomb the sh#t out of them—and get out.” A headline in The Military Times two months before the election said it all: “After 15 years of war, America’s military has about had it with ‘nation building.’”

As it turned out, the military weren’t the only ones who’d “had it with nation building”—so too did Donald Trump. Back in January 2013, two years before he was a candidate for president, Trump made it clear what he would do if he ever occupied the White House. “Let’s get out of Afghanistan,” he tweeted. “Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.” Three days later, Trump was even more outspoken, explicitly endorsing Barack Obama’s Afghanistan strategy—which amounted to a troops surge, followed by a troop drawdown. “I agree with Pres. Obama on Afghanistan,” he wrote. “We should have a speedy withdrawal. Why should we keep wasting our money – rebuild the U.S.!”

[TGHusker]

McCain  a neocon comes out and supports Trump

http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/john-mccain-praises-donald-trump-afghanistan/2017/08/22/id/809023/

 

Rand Paul - not so much

http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/rand-paul-terrible-idea-send-more/2017/08/22/id/809036/

[Danny Bateman]

Hmmmm....

 

 

[BigRedBuster]

[commando]

pay to play

[NM11046]

I know I shouldn't be, but i continue to be amazed at how little he works to disguise the favors he does.

[zoogs]

Quote

The first time it happened was bewildering. Rex Tillerson, on his maiden voyage to Beijing as secretary of state, with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at his side,  parroted a series of Communist Party slogans that are well-known shorthand for U.S. accommodation to China. Less than two months into the Trump zdministration, this could have been forgiven as a rookie mistake, rather than an intentional decision by the State Department to be submissive toward Beijing.

But then it happened again. And again. And again. Away from the limelight of North Korea and trade policy, the State Department has persisted throughout the summer with inexplicable deference to China.

 

Hard to be "tough on ____" when you're this incompetent. Limitations of political rhetoric. Trump was way more fiery on "CHINA", China, China. Hillary, and Obama before her, would have been far more effective in countering them. Under Trump, we've ceded the trade zone to China, ceded environmental leadership to China, ceded *moral authority* to China for chrissake    and whatever this flip-flopping on North Korea is. China's an indisputable power and adversary. You can't simply want to take it to them. If you flail around, you'll get taken to the cleaners instead.