The View from Right Field

A Few Random Thoughts on Donald Trump – And Others

• Perhaps the thing that most explains the difference between how Donald Trump views the world, the economy, etc., and how I view them, is that President Trump thinks of pretty much everything as a zero sum game.  In every deal, maybe even in every interaction, there is a winner and a loser; and the amount the winner gains is pretty much equal to what the other side loses.  I don’t believe that.  President Trump does.
• If you are in a fight, it’s nice to have friends.  The United States no longer has as many friends it can count on in a fight – because if they can’t count on us, we can’t count on them.  We used to have lots of those kinds of friends, and we were safer because of it.  Now we don’t, so in order to have even close to the same level of safety, we are going to have to spend more money on defense, and we still may not be as safe.
• To the extent Americans, and some of our leaders, think (and have thought) we have been getting taken advantage of because we were spending a lot of money on defense, which allowed other countries to not spend their fair share on defense, some part of the blame for that rests on those other countries and their leaders for not spending on their own defense.  Here’s looking, for example, at you, Angela Merkel.¹  Even Barack Obama, the U.S. president that Chancellor Merkel liked the most, thought allies were free-riding on America and American defense expenditures.  Germany was happy to rely on America for defense and not spend much itself.  That has not worked out well for either of us.
  Germany was also willing to rely on Vladimir Putin not being Vladimir Putin.  That has not worked out well, either.
• Tariffs are a bad idea.  But then so are other trade barriers.  If we would all get rid of trade barriers, we would all be richer.  Unfortunately, American leaders have not believed in getting rid of trade barriers, i.e., free trade, for a long time.  It is a bipartisan problem.  But President Trump is making it worse.  Wars are bad; so are trade wars.
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  ¹ There are lots of others, too.

The West’s Race to the Bottom in Ukraine – For Worst Policy

We have what looks like a race to the bottom for worst Ukraine policy among Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.  After almost 1,000 days of war, President Biden finally gave Ukraine permission to use US weapons, including ATACMS, to actually attack Russian targets in Russia.  The story is that Biden was worried about Putin escalating (how about worrying about Putin winning) and about the US not having enough ATACMS for ourselves (how about ordering a lot more of them on an emergency basis, starting like almost 1,000 days ago).¹

Trump people are saying the Russians pushing the Ukrainians back might be good because it would make the Ukrainians more willing to negotiate.¹  Huh?  The problem is not the Ukrainians being willing to negotiate.  The problem is Putin being willing to negotiate when he is winning.  Why should he? 

Harris? Trump? A Depressing Foreign Policy Election

We’re back from a trip to Berlin and Hamburg, and the Presidential race is as bad as when we left.  Actually, I think it may be worse because the Biden administration is doing even worse in foreign policy now than before we left – and there is no reason to think Kamala Harris will be any different than the Biden administration. 

But first, Donald Trump still doesn’t have the character to be President and that is not going to change. 

On the other side, Joe Biden, and the Biden administration, is still getting it wrong.  In 2014, Robert Gates wrote, of Joe Biden, “I think he's been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."  He reaffirmed that statement in 2019.  Since Joe Biden became President, he has continued to get these things wrong on foreign policy and national security.

The Coming Isolationism of the Progressive Left

Constanze Stelzenmuller wrote in the Financial Times this past Tuesday, in an article entitled “Don’t relax. Europe – the US hard right isn’t finished yet,” that the isolationist Republican right is not going away just because Congress has finally has approved more aid to  Ukraine.  However, in warning Europe about the staying power of so-called “national conservatives” on the Republican right, Ms. Stelzenmuller fails to mention the risks from the progressive left of the Democratic Party.

While almost all Democrats in Congress supported aid to Ukraine, one wonders how many would have done so if a Republican, like one of the Bushes, had been president.  Without a Democratic president leading the way, especially an old-style Democrat like Joe Biden, lots of Democrats in the future will prefer to focus on social problems at home, instead of military and defense matters abroad.

Joe Biden: Getting Foreign Policy Wrong for 50 Years

In 2014, a former cabinet official from both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations wrote that Joe Biden had "been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades."¹  Even though this official likes President Biden as a person and has said President Biden “a man of integrity,” he reaffirmed his statement in an interview in May of 2019. 

And President Biden has continued his string of mistakes and bad decisions since he got into office.  The withdrawal from Afghanistan was a disaster.  President Biden was left with a terrible situation by Donald Trump.  The Trump administration signed what was basically a surrender agreement with the Taliban on February 29, 2020.  While President Biden has said the Trump agreement left him no choice but to go forward with the withdrawal/surrender, that’s not true.  President Biden reversed all kinds of Trump administration decisions.  He could have changed this one, too, but he didn’t want to.  He wanted to get out of Afghanistan, and so we did.  It was the Biden administration that organized, or rather didn’t organize, the withdrawal.  If the withdrawal was a disaster, and if it has damaged the United States’ reputation for reliability and competence abroad, then that was on President Biden and his administration.

Who Lost Ukraine? While Biden Isn’t Good, Republicans Seem to Be Worse.

Back in the 1950s, one of the big political issues was “Who Lost China?”  The Chinese Communists had won the civil war against the Nationalists in 1949 (Chiang Kai-shek retreating to Taiwan), and then North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950.  The Republicans spent a good part of the 1950s accusing Harry Truman (and Dean Acheson, George Marshall, et al) of “losing China”. 

I am not going to go into that debate.  What I am going to do is suggest we think about what the answer to “Who lost Ukraine” might be if we don’t start getting weapons and ammunition to Ukraine and, ultimately, they can’t hold on.  President Biden started out pretty good, but he hasn’t been nearly as good as he could have been.  We have wrung our hands about fears of escalation way too much,\; we have not delivered the weapons we needed to as quickly as we should have; and we have put too many limits on the use of the weapons we have delivered.

Biden’s Foreign Policy Just Isn’t Working – And It’s Not Deterring Anybody

At one point during the first Trump administration¹, I gave up (or at least cut back) on complaining about what he was doing both because it was becoming too time consuming and because the Democratic alternatives weren’t any better.  Well, I think I am just about there on Joe Biden’s foreign policy.  It’s bad, and I have no reason to think Trump 2.0 would be any better.

It has now been four days since an Iran proxy group killed three U.S. soldiers with a drone attack on a base we have in Jordan.  It may be that the Biden administration already has an appropriate response in process, and we don’t know about it yet.  I hope so.²  Because, if we want these attacks to stop, we need to respond in a really big way.  Iranian proxies, and others, have been attacking us for months.  Before Sunday, we were able to knock the drones or missiles down or they only injured people, they didn’t kill them.  So we didn’t respond (at least very much).  We just said: (i) if you kill any of our people (as opposed to merely injuring them), we’ll respond; (ii) we don’t want to escalate or to widen the war/conflict/tensions; and (iii) we don’t want World War III.  Which apparently didn’t scare anybody and probably encouraged some groups to keep attacking us  - because they did.

If We Really Care About Ukraine, Why Not Do What Teddy Roosevelt Did

According to last Monday’s Wall Street Journal:

“The Washington stalemate over U.S. policy at the southern border is beginning to reverberate on the Ukraine battlefield, where Kyiv’s troops are running out of ammunition and the Pentagon says it can’t provide more without emptying its own arsenal. …

Short of congressional approval of more funding, the White House can either dip into the Pentagon’s arsenal with no guarantee the gear will be replaced, or leave Ukraine to rely on its own growing but still small arms industry and European allies.”

When Joe Met Xi

The press reports of Joe Biden’s meeting with Xi Jinping in San Francisco were reasonably positive.  I hope they are right.  It never hurts to be able to talk with a country as big as China, especially when they have nuclear weapons.  But, while reports are that the meeting was good, who knows for sure what the Chinese are really thinking.

One of the results of the meeting that the White House, et al, touted the most was China’s agreement to resume contacts between their military and ours.  China cut off these contacts in August, 2022, when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took a big trip to Taiwan before she left office as Speaker.  It was sort of a farewell tour for her.  But China was upset, so they, among other things, discontinued regular contacts between their military and ours.¹  And they wouldn’t restart them even though we asked; more than once, I think.  Which was scary.  It increased the chance some small issue, something that could be easily taken care of if the two sides were regularly talking, could wind up becoming a big problem. 

“A Trump win would change the world” – and Not for the Better.

Martin Wolf wrote in Wednesday’s Financial Times about his concerns, both for U.S. domestic policy and for the world as a whole, with respect to a second Donald Trump administration.¹  For example:

“[E]mbrace by the US of a man … that [has] repudiated the central norm of liberal democracy would dishearten those who believe in it and encourage despots and their lackeys everywhere. …

The mixture of this despair with Trumps’s avowedly transactional approach would weaken, if not destroy, the trust on which current US alliances are based.”

 I understand Mr. Wolf’s concerns.²  He is right that, in his first term, former President Trump initially picked traditional Republicans as advisers for foreign policy and defense, which slowed former President Trump down.  A Trump 2.0 administration would start with Trumpian true-believers, a scary thought.