What the Hell is Wrong with President Trump and His Foreign Policy?

Without a doubt, bombing the airfield in Syria and dropping the giant bomb on the I.S. stronghold in Afghanistan demonstrates to the world that with the new President in charge, the game has changed. Trump showed that he cannot be messed with and is determined to lead and to take action.

However, in a time of cyber manipulation, with mainstream media operating as ideological propaganda tools and politics deteriorating into a madhouse of hateful obstructionism and partisan malice, reality can only be grasped by sound intuition good judgment in combination with inclusive and critical reflection. 

The so-called facts presented by news outlets, intelligence services, and congressional investigative boards too often make up facts, intentionally distort, and tailor them to political expediency. Utilitarian convenience has created a climate that condones lying and cheating, the shirking of accountability, and the denunciation and demonization of political opponents, including their opinions. Certain media outlets, the CIA, the FBI, have all lost their credibility. Nothing they present can be taken cum grano salis anymore. The primary requirement for professionally operating government organizations - political impartiality and neutrality - is no longer a given. No doubt, in many respects, the political culture in the U.S. has deteriorated to alarming lows. 

In light of all this, one has to ask who is advising President Trump and what happened to Trump's pragmatic judgment? Rhetorical excellence is, for the most part, natural talent, and Trump's plain and straightforward language might serve him well in certain respects. But how is it possible that a sitting president calls the President of another country an animal and a butcher? Somebody should advise Mr. Trump that if he makes such statements, they ought to be put in a conditional form: "If President Assad has personally ordered the gas attack, we would certainly have to consider him to be a merciless butcher, a vile individual?" 

Yet, there is no evidence that Assad ordered the use of chemical weapons. There is not even clear evidence that Syrian government troops used those weapons. Instead, every reasonable calculus points to the fact that the rebels exploited an air attack by a Syrian government fighter jet to release chemical substances themselves to blame the government and, at the eleventh hour, reverse the fortunes of war. Everybody knew that the government forces, with Russian support, were winning and pushing the insurgents back. Everybody knew that it would be outright insane and counterproductive for the Assad regime to use chemical weapons at this point. Not only would it not serve any meaningful purpose as conventional warfare was doing the job, but it would also turn the public opinion against the government. Who would order such a stupid move, even at the chance that the public would blame the use of chemical weapons on the rebels? 

Undoubtedly, the ideas of neoconservative hawks, dangerous madmen like John McCain or Lindsay Graham, most likely pushed by lobbyists of the military-industrial complex, have somehow found their way into the White House and have clouded the judgment of advisers and the President himself. When an American Secretary of State shows up in Russia and, as far as the government of Syria and its support by Russia is concerned, stipulates an ultimatum of virtually unconditional surrender, he leaves the Russian counterparts no room for negotiations. Moreover, he also compromised the principles of diplomatic conduct.

Aside from demonstrating to the world that President Trump is a strong leader, the reaction to the use of chemical weapons in Syria has been an unjustifiable one, strategically as well as morally. 

One of the Pax Americana's pernicious errors attempted since the end of the Cold War was the disregard for international players' legitimate strategic interests. While other global players might pretend to bow in the face of the U.S.'s overwhelming military might, it certainly does not help establish a just and balanced world order. It only accomplishes further destabilization and weakening of international relations and increases the animosity toward the United States in many parts of the world. 

Trump raised hope and was elected not the least for the essential turnaround in U.S. foreign affairs policy after the dreadful Obama years. With Trumps premature and gullible reaction to the use of chemical weapons in Syria, his excessive interpretation of U.S. national security interests, and his further alienation of Russia, he is about to betray the expectations for the urgently needed change in U.S. foreign policy along the lines of stopping regime change and nation-building around the world. Instead, what he should pursue is cooperation with Russia and China and the partners in Europe and NATO to fight the real threat – radical Islam and its affiliated terrorist organizations. 

At this juncture of events and less than three months into Mr. Trump's presidency, the only hope remains that the President and his advisers and foreign affairs counselors come to their senses. Mr. Trump must live up to his campaign promises and disentangle the U.S. from the endless involvements in unjust wars in the Middle East, stop regime change interventions, and overcome the Russophobe stance in U.S. foreign affairs.

2016 U.S. Presidential Election and the Future of the West

The future of the United States and the future of the entire Western world are at stake with the U.S. presidential election outcome. The presidency of the incumbent B. Obama has been a sham throughout. A notorious liar (you can keep your doctor; Syrian red line; Russia's aggressions), political dilettante (caused unparalleled domestic and international damage), and incorrigible partisan politician (intolerant left-wing ideologue), he divided the country culturally as it has probably never been the case since the Vietnam War.

Although being a Democrat, he has persecuted a neo-conservative foreign policy of interventionism, supported by Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and quite a few out-of-their-minds Republican senators and congress members, like John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Marco Rubio. He urged interventions where none were necessary or legitimate, which caused chaos in Libya, Syria, and Iraq, fostered the emergence of ISIS, and further deteriorated relations with Russia and Europe.

At this juncture, toward the end of Obama's tenure, one can predict that Hillary Clinton as president would continue the pernicious path of US-American politics, both domestically and internationally. Her Supreme Court judges' appointments would push American society's cultural decline and moral nihilism further. Indifferent immigration and open borders will advance the dissolution of the proper structure of a healthy nation-state as the only guarantor for sound legal and social policies.  Europe will be brought closer to a military conflict with Russia by advancing the destructive policies of NATO in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States and American power projection into the South China Sea. It is to expect that the overstretch of U.S. foreign policy and the American military forces will continue and drive Russia, China, and Iran closer together to ally against what they rightfully may consider excessive imperialism.

As the White House run unfolded, there was one candidate who gave hope that if he got elected, we could expect an overdue turn-around of U.S. policies; Rand Paul. With his dropping out, only one candidate remains, who, despite his deficits, could ensure us of policies that might save the U.S. and the West if it is not already much too late. This candidate is Donald Trump.

Yet, the moral nihilism that has taken hold in American politics might make his success impossible. The way his opponents and even members of his party treated him was so shameful that one has to ask if the U.S. has already degenerated into a banana republic. The dumbing down of the U.S. and its citizens has dwindled to an alarming low. Driven to accept the ideology of affirmative action and political correctness, neither reality nor truth matter anymore. Despite his first term's dismal record, the American people reelected a half-black guy because of the color of his skin and the fact that he carried a "D" in front of his name. The next president might be elected because of her gender and having a "D" in front of her name.

If that happens, the U.S., as well as the West, will be finished.

Disastrous Foreign Policy Failures Continue in Syria

The United Nations has estimated that the two years of civil war in Syria generated about 15,000 casualties among the military and security forces and 10,000 insurgent casualties. Civilian casualties numbered 45,000. 

 

In light of what had happened previously in Egypt and Libya, where weak and divided governments came to power, a prediction for Syria would have come easy. Any objective observer could have foreseen that the opposition to Bashar al-Assad's autocratic regime in Syria would soon be hijacked by Islamic extremism, leading to uncontrolled violence. While the demonstrations in Syria in 2011 might have been peaceful and moderate in their initial stages, extremist forces linked to Al-Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood soon infiltrated the movement. They began to utilize it for their purposes. Lakdhar Brahimi, the Special Envoy to Syria for the UN and the Arab League, reports that the rebel forces comprise individuals of some 38 different nationalities, among them Muslims from the United Kingdom and continental Europe. 

 

The Supreme Military Council set up by the opposition shows overwhelmingly Islamist tendencies, and the opposition-controlled areas of Syria are already subject to Sharia Law. Meanwhile, the United Nations and the UK are confident that it was the jihadist rebels, not government forces, who fired a chemical weapons grenade into Khan-al-Assal. 

 

Against this backdrop, it appears absurd that the US and other Western governments are contemplating supplying arms and weaponry to the rebel forces. There is no way to discern pro-western opposition forces from Muslim extremists and channel armament accordingly. In their desperation over the chaos that evolved over the past two years, the US, France, the UK, and Turkey recognized the Syrian National Coalition as Syria's interim government, even though heavily dominated by members linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. 

  

In commenting on the Libyan situation (see respective essays from March 2011 https://www.edwinseditorial.com/2011/03/us-and-european-foreign-policy-blunder.html and October 2011 https://www.edwinseditorial.com/2011/10/lessons-from-muammar-gadhafis-demise. html), I warned about politically and militarily supporting dubious insurgent radicals in Egypt and Libya. In analogy, the warnings correspondingly apply to the Syrian case as well. 

I argued that transatlantic foreign policy, led and dominated by the United States, is politically short-sighted, unethical in principle, and ideologically driven. The sheer irrational belief in democracy as the panacea for all problems is devoid of deeper considerations of sound political philosophy. The West keeps waging an unjust and meaningless war in Afghanistan, continues to back insurgents in Egypt and Libya, and now lends support to Syria's unjust, violent campaign.  

 

Instead of supporting established political leaders in Egypt, Libya, and now Syria, dubious insurgent forces, pretending democratic goals while pursuing radical objectives, receive political, diplomatic, and even military support. We are facing the results of these failed policies in the whole region: Loss of human life and the amount of human suffering far outweigh the practicality of the conflict; affected nations are worse off than before; radical Muslim forces gain influence; Al-Qaeda is on the rise; Iran feels emboldened; Western power diminishes. 

 

Whether we can ever neutralize the past years' foreign policy failures is doubtful, yet remains to be seen. For now, it appears more likely that particularly the mishandling of the case of Syria will entail the most hurtful consequences as the country is a significant landmark where strategic interests of East and West collide.

US and European Foreign Policy – the Blunder of Liberal Interventionism continues with Libya

Peoples have a moral right to political self-determination; (nation-) States have a juridical right to sovereignty and territorial integrity. 

 

The political mistake of consistently violating this main idea continues now, after the surge of international military interventions into sovereign nations' internal affairs in the 1990s, with Libya. Apart from the unwise decision to commit to intervening in Libya, the decision to intervene by establishing a no-fly zone came too late; the objective is unclear; the conduct of the operation is flawed. The Western coalition is neglecting a fundamental principle of the philosophy of just war – war should be waged only be waged if there is proportionality between objectives and cost. In other words, the damage and suffering the war causes should not be more significant than the hurt and suffering it aims to avert.

 

To prevent interventions by the international community into sovereign nations' domestic affairs, the United Nations Charter introduced and acknowledged the sovereign equality of all nations. The United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2131 of December 21, 1965, reemphasizes this principle once again: "No state has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatsoever, in the internal or external affairs of another State. Consequently, armed intervention and all other forms of interference or attempted threats against the personality of the State or against its political, economic, or cultural elements are condemned." 

 

This stipulation is a morally valid norm in a global society. As is currently the case in Libya, a government quelling violent political uprisings or revolutionary attempts that aim at its overthrow does not constitute a justifiable cause for intervention. A State can only lose the fundamental State right of sovereignty if a government commits crimes against humanity in the sense of religious or ethnic cleansing or pogroms on certain parts of its population. Cracking down on insurgents and revolutionaries does not fall under this category. 

 

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, Western powers have begun to violate this principle profoundly. National uprisings received support by outright forceful intervention in some countries, but not in others. Apart from military feasibility considerations, ideological bias was the primary incentive for interventions.

Western powers began to breach the principle of national sovereignty during Yugoslavia's disintegration in the early 1990s. After they prematurely acknowledged the former Yugoslav provinces as independent nation-states, the subsequently fledgling states that had just seceded from the former Yugoslav Republic needed help. Thus was the NATO 1995 bombing in Bosnia and Herzegovina vindicated in the wake of the Srebrenica Massacre's apparent horrors. In the two years prior, despite an imposed no-flight zone by NATO, the war had raged on unrestrictedly on the ground before American and NATO airstrikes of Operation Deliberate Force finally paved the way for the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord. 

A few years later, Liberal Interventionism continued, as always for allegedly humanitarian reasons, in Kosovo. After Serbian police and military forces cracked down on Albanian freedom fighters (the Kosovo Liberation Army/KLA), the Euro-Atlantic alliance suddenly felt compelled to embark upon an air-campaign to prevent a humanitarian disaster and take out Serbian forces. Nobody mentioned that the KLA had advanced their case in Kosovo with violent means. Their acts of cruelties underlined the KLA's unjustifiable use of violent means. The reversal of cause and effect, in both ethical as well as political terms, was palpable. There is a good reason and evidence to believe that intervention caused increased bloodshed and intensified ethnic cleansing in both instances, at least in the short term, thus aggravating the humanitarian crisis it intended to prevent in the first place.

 

The same appears to be happening in Libya now. Encouraged by events in Egypt, a dubious group of insurgents, yet to be defined in their ethnic, religious, and political composition, seek to oust Muammar Qaddafi's regime. The callous Qaddafi did not kill his people before the uprising broke out. And he did not attack another country or neglect UN-resolutions over years and years. He crushed an uprising which every political leader – authoritarian or otherwise – would have done. There are no national interests at stake for the US and the EU. There is no humanitarian necessity for intervention, and there is no need to establish a no-fly zone. 

 

The reason for this ignorance in security matters owes to an unbearable unawareness about political theory, international affairs, and the nature of the armed conflict. Neither liberal left nor libertarian right, on both sides of the Atlantic, has ever understood the business of war. When dealing with political violence and armed struggle, they either do too much or too little. In the case of the current political administration in the US, this ignorance manifests itself in a lack of a consistent foreign policy strategy, exacerbated by an astonishing lack of leadership capability on the part of the president. 

 

If it consoles Mr. Obama or anybody, I shall mention that he is not alone. Some heads of government in the European Union contend for the number one ranking in committing foreign policy blunder.