These proposals are coming from completely different places. It’s literally possible to remove the US ground troops who are in Syria to fight ISIS while continuing to bomb Assad-related targets from the air, but the two approaches reflect contradictory impulses to somehow end US military involvement in Syria while simultaneously threatening to bomb the country into the indefinite future. Trump’s first comments suggest the US will be heading for the exits; the second that the US is always a single chemical attack away from getting pulled in deeper. [...]
On Sunday, Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley publicly announced that the US would impose new sanctions on Russia, only to be overruled by the president; the sanctions are still in limbo. On Monday, Trump sent a tweet blasting China for keeping its currency artificially cheap to boost exports — contradicting his own announcement just a few months ago that China was not a currency manipulator. [...]
It’s not that Trump has absolutely no ideas about foreign policy. He does. He has a strong sense that, for example, foreign civil wars aren’t America’s problems. But some of his other impulses, like his visceral emotional reaction to photographs of gassed Syrian children, push him in opposite directions on the exact same policy issue. The result is the kind of public ping-ponging that you saw in the past two weeks of Syria debates. [...]
The high level of staff turnover, as well as the sharply divergent worldviews among the foreign policy principals, pushes the president in all sorts of different directions. This is especially true given his demonstrably limited interest in wonky, detail-oriented policy thinking, as this leaves a lot of the specific policy development to Cabinet members and their staff. So Mattis, a Russia hawk, can send several hundred US troops to Poland on a NATO mission specifically designed to challenge Russia even as the president is talking about how he wants to improve US-Russia relations.
No comments:
Post a Comment