Donald Trump’s most recent foreign policy speech,
in which he explained how he would deal with the Islamic State (ISIL) and the
Middle East in general, contained multitudes – everything good and everything
questionable about his brand of “America First” nationalism. Here is Trumpism
on full display, the common-sensical and the nonsensical intertwined. While
I realize a presidential election campaign is not the time for nuance, it behooves
us to pull apart these disparate strands if we want to understand this moment
in our history.
He starts out by defining the problem: the series of attacks that have horrified
the world and flummoxed our law enforcement agencies. And what’s notable here
is that he just doesn’t talk about what’s going on overseas, as you might expect
in a speech ostensibly about foreign policy: he talks about San Bernardino and
Orlando alongside Paris and Brussels. In short, he brings it all home.
This underscores his entire orientation: it’s what “America First” is all about.
Why should Americans care about ISIL? Well, folks, says Trump, it’s because
they’re attacking us right here on the home front. Contrast this with the usual
neocon-Hillaryite politically correct gobbledygook: we have to spread Democracy
and Goodness throughout the Middle East! They don’t have gay rights in Afghanistan!
We must defend the “international order”!
There’s the problem: ISIL. So what caused it? Trump’s answer:
“The rise of ISIS is the direct
result of policy decisions made by President Obama and Secretary Clinton.”
What? I seem to remember some guy named George W. Bush – didn’t he invade
Iraq or something? – who vowed
to pursue the goal of “ending tyranny in our world.” Why, as I recall, he even
invoked Doestoevsky’s novel about revolutionary nihilism, The Possessed,
and pledged to ignite “a fire in the mind” throughout the Middle East – and
the world! And the fire is still burning….
In fairness, Trump gets to the Iraq war later
on in the speech, but this omission is telling, although it probably says more
about who’s advising him than it does about the candidate himself.
In any case, Trump goes on to denounce the disastrous military interventions
that empowered ISIL in Syria and Libya: so far so good. He also notes US support
for the Muslim Brotherhood’s revolution in Egypt, another aspect of the post-“Arab
Spring” turn in US policy that ended badly. Then we get the Fox News version
of history: the Iran deal put Tehran “in a dominant position of regional power
and, in fact, aspiring to be a dominant world power.”
This makes zero sense, especially after his
long peroration about the horrors of ISIL: does he not know that Iran
is fighting ISIL in Syria? Does he not realize that
Iranian-backed militias in Iraq are fighting…