WhatFinger


"My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people first."

VIDEO: See Trump's foreign policy speech here



Most of this is hard to argue with. I don't really care much about whether we got the Olympics, but for the most part Trump has Obama dead-on right. He does pick fights with our friends while bowing to our enemies. He does make horrible deals that are not in our own best interests. He does inspire no fear whatsoever on the part of adversaries. He does absolutely nothing meaningful to make anyone pay a price when they harm us. "We've let our rivals think they can get away with anything. And they do."
How can any sane person disagree with that statement? He's also correct when he says we've lacked a coherent foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, although I'm not sure he's entirely correct in assessing the reasons. Here's the whole thing, 38 minutes' worth: I'm going to disagree strongly with Trump on Iraq. The problem was not that we tried to "nation-build." The problem was that with victory in our grasp in 2011, Obama decided to choose his ideological vanity over America's strategic interests and walked away from the status of forces agreement that would have kept U.S. forces in place and prevented ISIS from overrunning the country. We didn't go into Iraq because we disregarded American interests. We went in because we believed the spread of democracy in the region was the best way to cut off terrorism at the roots.

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That said, he's certainly right that the rise of ISIS has been aided greatly by our lack of resolve to stop them. I like his take on Russia too. I think Trump understands that Russia sees its geopolitical interests as at odds with those of the U.S. (or at least Putin sees it that way), and Trump sees the potential to change the dynamic with Russia not by just flat-out trusting them, and not with dumbass "reset" buttons, but by having a serious conversation about how the two nations' interests might be more mutual than Putin now believes. Any president needs to have a very sober view of such an effort, because Putin might not be open to it no matter what. Then again, Trump of all people seems to understand as most politicians don't that sometimes you just have to walk away with no deal. Finally, Trump has little patience for all the obsession with global warming while we're refusing to fund the military as we should. By the way, Fareed Zakaria seems to think there's an inherent contradiction between rebuilding the military and balancing the budget. No. There's not. You balance the budget by prioritizing. If there's something you should do - and national defense is something you should do - then you do it well. If there's something you shouldn't do, you stop spending money on those things. That's how you balance the budget. He is not experienced and he would certainly make mistakes, but as for his primary instincts . . . well, I'd like to know how the #NeverTrump people would justify letting Hillary become president instead of the man who thinks like Trump does here.


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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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