Grading Trump on Foreign Policy
Huge Military Budgets, Covert Operations, Drones and Assassinations—but hey, at least he didn’t start another major war
By any objective measure, Donald Trump has been one of the worst presidents in American history.
His administration exacerbated inequalities, fomented social divisions, encouraged nativist and white supremacist groups, gutted environmental protections, mishandled the Covid-19 crisis, and tarnished the office of the presidency in a way that no president ever has or probably ever will.
On foreign policy, Trump’s legacy is just as bad as in every other area.
His administration shamefully (1) pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreement and Paris climate change accords, (2) expanded the drone war, (3) dropped the mother of all bombs on Afghanistan, (4) loosened restrictions on air strikes in the Middle East, causing a spike in civilian casualties, (5) pardoned a Navy Seal (Eddie Gallagher) who posed with the mutilated body of an Islamic state captive and four Blackwater mercenaries who killed seventeen civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, (6) supported right-wing coups in Bolivia and Venezuela, (7) restored the cruel Cold War policy towards Cuba, (8) unveiled more than 3,900 sanctions actions including against the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in a blatant attempt to protect U.S. government officials, (9) expanded arms sales to Saudi Arabia, which totaled $3.35 billion in 2018, (10) vetoed measures to end U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen, (11) unfroze military aid to Egypt despite the massive human rights abuses of General Fatah-al-Sissi, and (12) pulled out of the Inter-Nuclear Forces (INF) arms control treaty with Russia on spurious pretexts.
In one respect, though, Trump may have been better than most of his predecessors—he did not start any major new wars.
Also on the positive side, Trump (1) withdrew troops and took some steps to end the Afghanistan War, (2) raised questions about the purpose of NATO, (3) cut funding for Pakistan because it subsidized the Taliban, (4) pushed for cuts to the African military command (AFRICOM), (5) withdrew U.S. troops from Somalia, and (6) made efforts at diplomatic engagement with North Korea and Russia, which did not sit well with the traditional foreign policy establishment.
Record Military Budgets
Trump was different from all other presidents in his candor: He openly advocated for the U.S. to “take the oil” from Middle-Eastern countries, and when asked about whether Russian leader Vladimir Putin had ever killed anybody, responded: “What, you think we’re so innocent.”
During the 2020 election campaign, Trump said that all Pentagon leaders “want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”
However, in 2020 Trump signed off on a $721.5 billion Pentagon budget—the largest in its history—and military spending totals of around $934 billion.
His first three defense secretaries had deep ties to military defense contractors and his fourth, Christopher Miller, served as a Special Forces assassin in Afghanistan and Iraq.[1]
For 2018, Trump approved more than $55.6 billion in foreign weapons sales, compared to $33.6 billion in foreign military sales in fiscal 2016, the last year of the Obama administration.
In a book by former family friend Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, Trump is said to have wanted his inauguration to look more like Pyongyang than Washington.
“I want tanks and choppers. Make it look like North Korea,” he said, according to the author.
Beyond the parades, Trump also regularly speaks in front of military equipment, using fighter planes, ships and ground vehicles as backdrops. The F-35 is a standard part of his rally speeches.
Fake Dove
Before he became president, Trump never took any principled stands on foreign policy. As a youth, he had attended the New York Military Academy but gained a deferment from the Vietnam-era draft on medical grounds by claiming that he had bone spurs. Trump said that he was against the Vietnam War, which he called “ridiculous,” but also said that he never attended any protests, as he “had better things to do.”
Trump paradoxically tried to capitalize on a mood of disillusionment with “forever wars” by invoking the name America First, which harked back to a major right-wing antiwar organization of the 1930s, and criticized rivals like Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton for supporting the Iraq War.
Trump’s insincerity was reflected in his choice of Zalmay Khalilzadto introduce him at one of his major foreign policy campaign speeches during the 2016 campaign.
A chief planner of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan during the 1980s, Khalilzad served as George W. Bush’s ambassador to Afghanistan (2003-2005) and Iraq (2005-2007) and was part of the Project for a New American Century, a group of neoconservatives who pushed for the war in Iraq.
The choice of Khalilzad foreshadowed his appointment of Bush-era retreads and foreign policy hawks like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo to top foreign policy posts.
Trump and his vice president, Mike Pence, were especially close to Erik Prince, the former head of Blackwater, who offered to build Trump a private covert action army.
According to a New York Times investigation, Prince helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operationsthat included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda. These actions exemplify how the adoption of illiberal methods overseas helped to compromise democracy at home during the Trump years.
“As Supportive as any President:” Trump and Israel
During the 2020 election, Trump was favored by Israelis by almost 45 percentage points. He had been “as supportive of Israel as any president since 1945,” one analyst wrote.
In 2018, Congress codified into law an Obama-era memorandum of understanding for defense aid to Israel in which the U.S. committed to providing Israel $38 billion over ten years—the largest-ever defense-related transfer to Israel. Trump supplemented this aid with $705 million in support for Israeli missile defense systems.
In December 2017, Trump extended official U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, which struck a blow against the Palestinians who want to establish East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.
When a new U.S. embassy was unveiled six months later, Israeli soldiers killed dozens of Palestinian protesters on the Gaza border.
In 2019, Trump signed a presidential proclamation affording recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which had been seized from Syria following the 1967 six-day war. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also signed a declaration that the “establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not per se inconsistent with international law.”
In a final gratuitous gift to the right-wing Netanyahu government, Pompeo in November visited the annexed Golan Heights and a settlement in the occupied West Bank. These moves, unprecedented for a sitting Secretary of State, were designed to legitimate Israeli claims to these territories while emphasizing how little the U.S. is interested in Palestinian statehood or basic rights.
Trump and Russia
During the 2016 campaign, Trump brought some hope for better relations between the U.S and Russia which had deteriorated during President Obama’s second term. However, Trump was mercilessly attacked when he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and accused of being a Russian agent, without foundation.
The Russophobic climate pushed Trump to adopt a hard-line policy that extended the new Cold War. In 2019, the Trump administration pulled out of the INF agreement and insinuated that it would not renew the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), another nuclear arms reduction treaty, which expires in 2021.
Trump also extended economic sanctions directed against Russia, in some instances in response to accusations that had not been verified, such as Russia’s alleged poisoning of ex-military intelligence officer Sergei Skirpal, which was never established.
Trump angered Russia further by providing lethal military aid—including Javelin antitank rocket launchers—to Ukraine, which was fighting a dirty war in its eastern provinces against Russian proxies, and by participating in military training activities with the Ukrainians, such as the September 2017 Rapid Trident air exercise and the October 2018 Clear Sky exercise.
Some 13,000 people have been killed in the war in Eastern Ukraine, the majority by the Ukrainian military, which includes neo-Nazi battalions.
If Trump was a Russian agent, he certainly did not act like one.
Intermarium and the Move Away from Old Europe
This past summer, Trump rankled the foreign policy establishment when he announced the withdrawal of 12,000 U.S. troops from Germany.
However, one thousand of those troops were redeployed to Poland as part of a new defense cooperation agreement signed in August 2020 on the anniversary of the victory of Poland in the Polish-Soviet war of 1920.
The new troops in Poland added to the 4,500 that were previously deployed by President Barack Obama following the 2014 Western-backed coup d’état in Ukraine and the Russian takeover of Crimea.
They reflected a strategic shift of U.S. administrations moving the core of NATO from Paris and Bonn—what Donald Rumsfeld famously termed “old Europe”—to the East, as part of an aggressive drive to control former parts of the Soviet Union and Central Asia.
As CAM reported, a central goal was to resurrect the Intermarium—a geopolitical concept originating in the post-World War I era that envisages an alliance of countries reaching from the Baltic Sea over the Black Sea to the Aegean Sea that would serve as an alternative power bloc between Germany and Russia.
In March 2018, Poland signed a $4.75 billion deal to purchase U.S. Patriot missile defense systems from Raytheon, the largest arms procurement deal in Polish history.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Titov told Sputnik News that the Patriot deployments were “part of a U.S. plot to surround Russia with missile defense systems under the pretext of mythical threats to security.”
These comments epitomize how Trump’s military buildups and expansion of arms sales in Eastern Europe were helping to inflame tensions with Russia as part of the new Cold War.
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2020/12/30/grading-trump-on-foreign-policy/
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