It looks like Donald Trump is going to be the anti-war candidate this election:
Donald Trump derided Hillary Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy record over the weekend, a glimpse into a potential general election strategy of casting Clinton as the more likely of the two to take the nation to war.
Just moments after maligning Syrian refugees at a rally in Lynden, Washington, Trump pivoted into a tirade against Clinton as a warmonger.
“On foreign policy, Hillary is trigger happy,” Trump told the crowd. “She is, she’s trigger happy. She’s got a bad temperament,” he said. “Her decisions in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya have cost trillions of dollars, thousands of lives and have totally unleashed ISIS.”
And he expressed a rarely heard appreciation for the “other side to this story,” noting: “Thousands of lives yes, for us, but probably millions of lives in all fairness, folks” for the people of the Middle East.
Trump implied that casualties inflicted by the U.S. military were far higher than reported. “They bomb a city” and “it’s obliterated, obliterated,” he said. “They’ll say nobody was killed. I’ll bet you thousands and thousands of people were killed every time you see that television set.”
I think that Trump is an isolationist, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.
When you look at the history of US military and diplomatic interventions over the past 60 years, overthrowing a democratically elected government in Iran as well as any number of Latin American nations (Chile, Argentina, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, etc), and interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq (1963, 1990, 2003), Lebanon, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), Cambodia, Angola, Grenada, Kuwait, Somalia, Libya, the Ukraine, and Syria, you have a poor record.
At best (Kuwait) you have us propping up a corrupt, reactionary, and totalitarian state.
At worst, you have the effective destruction of a country and its society, particularly in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, and Cambodia, and the death toll is in the tens of millions.
The only post Korea success that I can think of is in the former Yugoslavia.
The world would be better off if we were more isolationist.
Here is a suggestion for Hillary: If you are making Donald Trump sound sane about anything, you are on the wrong side of history.