Trump Was Never 'Pragmatic'
The Soleimani assassination was a foreshadowing of the reckless aggression that we have seen in the last year.
Gerard Baker mourns a “pragmatic” Trump who never really existed:
More surprising has been Mr. Trump’s conversion to the failed dogma of America as global regime-change agent. He better than anyone seemed to have understood the lessons of this hubristic concept after two decades of failure. But the current Iran misadventure is precisely the kind of faith-based exercise he had so studiously avoided.
Pragmatism has been supplanted also by an increasingly fanatical devotion to the pursuit of personal causes and sentiments. His unorthodox approach to America’s allies was once effective—getting them to contribute more to collective defense. Now it is divorced from practical motivation and driven entirely by emotion and personal pique.
Many of Trump’s first-term decisions were likewise driven by emotion and pique. The decision to renege on the nuclear deal had nothing to do with the merits of the agreement or any rational assessment of costs and benefits. Trump reneged on the agreement because it was Obama’s main foreign policy legacy, and he was determined to erase it. A genuinely pragmatic president would have left the nuclear deal alone and reaped the benefits from it without having to lift a finger. Trump chose mindless hostility instead.
