Trump's Reckless Foreign Policy Record Makes Him Vulnerable

That is the record that Harris could attack with some success during the debate, but all indications are that she and her party want to hit Trump for being too “soft” on U.S. adversaries.

Judah Grunstein discusses what we might learn about the candidates’ foreign policy views during the debate tonight, and he makes a good observation about Trump’s first term:

Moreover, besides the COVID-19 pandemic, which Trump catastrophically bungled, his first term was uneventful—even historically so—when it comes to external crises not of his own making. So while we can assume his approach to managing a geopolitical crisis will be dangerously amateurish, we really have little precedent to go on.

Trump is fortunate that many voters seem to have limited or blurry memories of his time in office, and this seems to be why he enjoys relatively good approval ratings after the fact. He doesn’t deserve those good ratings. For example, his conduct of foreign policy really was abysmal and nearly got us into two major armed conflicts in four years.