That we have to take Donald Trump seriously confirms my longstanding
prognosis that we’ve entered another dimension in which up is down, black is
white, and reason is dethroned: in short, we’re living in BizarroWorld, and
the landscape is not very inviting. Yet explore it I must, since the reality
TV star and professional self-promoter is rising in the polls, and garnering
an inordinate amount of media attention — and whether the latter is responsible
for the former is something I’ll get into later, but for now let us focus on
what practically no one else is paying much attention to, the Trumpian foreign
policy.
Right off the bat, we run into trouble, however, since the signature sound-bites
that characterize the Trump style don’t really qualify as anything close to
a “policy.” Yet his various effusions on this topic do indeed translate into
a mindset, which one might call blowhard-ism. And as much as it resembles
the semi-coherent rantings of a drunk loudly pontificating in the dark recesses
of some hotel bar at a Rotarians convention, it does reflect some “serious”
trends to be found in the high-toned precincts of the foreign policy Establishment,
not to mention among Trump’s fellow presidential aspirants in the GOP clown
show.
On Iraq, The Donald makes much of his alleged opposition to the Iraq war —
a position no one has documented to my satisfaction — but now that we’re back
there, what’s Trump’s plan? “We shouldn’t have been there,” he opines,
and yet “once we were there, we probably should have stayed.” While this may
sound bafflingly counterintuitive, not to mention flat out contradictory, you
have to remember two things: 1) In Bizarro World, contradictions do exist,
A is B, and the sensible is the impossible, and 2) Similar things were said
about the Vietnam war by politicians less obviously nutso than The Donald. As
Murray Rothbard put it in a 1968 newspaper column he wrote for the Freedom
Newspapers chain: