Trump’s Conservative Internationalism

[Draggingtree]

National Review

Trump’s Conservative Internationalism

The president’s foreign policy aims for a globalism rooted in nationalism. Does Trump have a foreign policy? You know the old saw: No one knows what Donald Trump thinks, even if his name is “Donald Trump.” True, but let’s try. If we can get beyond the man’s personality, we see that Trump’s foreign policy is actually very conservative and deserves more support from conservatives of all stripes.

Despite the ridicule it has received, “America first” is a good starting principle for American foreign policy. At the Center for the National Interest in April 2016, Trump said, echoing Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher before him, that “the nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony.” It is the only building block of a truly free — that is, decentralized — international system that accommodates genuine multicultural diversity. In America, Europe, and elsewhere, it is also the incubator of freedom. As Walter Russell Mead writes in the Wall Street Journal, “nationalism — the sense that Americans are bound together into a single people with a common destiny — is a noble and necessary force without which American democracy would fail.”     

[Valin]

Donald In the Great Game

Column: Try as it might, America cannot abandon its international role

Matthew Continetti
August 25, 2017

 

(Snip)

 

With his speech Monday, then, Donald Trump became the fourth post-Cold War president to have campaigned as a dove and governed as a hawk. Bill Clinton hemmed and hawed over the Balkans at the start of his presidency, but championed America as the indispensable nation by its end. George W. Bush eschewed nation building as a candidate, and wound up embroiled in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Barack Obama pledged to withdraw troops from both theaters of war, and removed U.S. soldiers from Iraq, but the ensuing disaster forced him to recommit Americans to the Middle East and to pause the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Candidate Trump said Iraq was a catastrophe, and had sharp words for Afghanistan. But President Trump has accelerated the campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and said we won't leave Afghanistan until conditions permit. That won't be the case for a long time.

As a democratic and commercial people, Americans are uncomfortable with our preeminent global role. We would prefer to focus on private and parochial concerns. What business is it of ours who rules Afghanistan? We feel guilty, too, for placing an immense burden on the shoulders of our overstretched and under-resourced volunteer military. Rather than commit to expanding the ranks or recapitalizing the fleet, however, we daydream that we can get by with less, or that we can shirk responsibility altogether and lead from behind.

But we can't. For the simple reason that our absence invites hostile powers not only to play and to win the great game, but also to rewrite the rules for their own benefit.  That is what we witnessed during the second Obama administration. Assad of Syria flagrantly gassed his own people. Russia illegally annexed territory and waged war in Ukraine, committed ground forces to the Middle East for the first time in decades, and violated agreements with the United States. The Chinese expanded their military reach by building islands in the sea. The North Korean missile program continued unabated, ISIS sprang into being in Iraq and Syria, and Iranian malfeasance spread from Tehran to Baghdad to Beirut to Damascus. By the time President Obama left office, American global leadership was in doubt. That made the world neither safer nor more secure.

 

(Snip)

 

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Bold Mine In Other Words Someone Has To Be The Most Powerful Nation, I Think It Should Be America.

 

I return once again to my 3 small simple questions for those who want us to withdraw from the world..and I mean Pat Buchanan and his ilk

 

1. What do you want?

2.How do you get it?

 

 

3. And Then What Happens?

I suspect nothing good.