Trump’s Critics Show Their Own Sterile Thinking about Foreign Policy
And one recent book might serve as the best example.
January 23, 2020
by Ted Galen Carpenter
Most members of the mainstream media have bought into the conventional wisdom about U.S. foreign policy—so much so, that they regard individuals who dispute the dominant narrative as being guilty of sacrilege. Indeed, much of the anger that journalists direct against President Donald Trump is because he expressed heretical views about America’s military alliances, free trade, regime-change wars, and other components of the globalist-interventionist orthodoxy that has governed Washington’s approach to world affairs since World War II.
Media assessments of Trump’s foreign policy competence and performance are laced with contempt. A prominent example is a new book, A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America, written by Washington Post reporters Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker. In a pre-publication article (based on the book) that appeared in the Post on January 17, the authors’ reverence for establishment foreign policy and military professionals, and the views they embody, oozes from nearly every paragraph.
Leonnig and Rucker contend that barely six months into Trump’s administration, “Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had grown alarmed by gaping holes in Trump’s knowledge of history, especially the key alliances forged following World War II. Trump had dismissed allies as worthless, cozied up to authoritarian regimes in Russia and elsewhere, and advocated withdrawing troops from strategic outposts and active theaters alike.”
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