Vance's Weak and Misleading Foreign Policy Case for Trump

Celebrating Trump for not starting wars is like praising someone for playing Russian roulette because the gun didn’t fire yet.

J.D. Vance tries to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear:

In Mr. Trump’s four years in office, he started no wars despite enormous pressure from his own party and even members of his own administration. Not starting wars is perhaps a low bar, but that’s a reflection of the hawkishness of Mr. Trump’s predecessors and the foreign-policy establishment they slavishly followed. But Mr. Trump did more than simply keep the peace. He brokered the Abraham Accords, a historic agreement between Israel and Sunni Arab states providing the best hope of a long-term counterbalance to Iran. He began the long, slow process of decoupling the U.S. from its economic reliance on China. He opened diplomatic talks with North Korea after a half century of stagnation. And he pushed hard—to much derision—for Europe to take more responsibility for its own defense, precisely so that the U.S. wouldn’t be drawn so deeply and dangerously into a conflict like the one in Ukraine.

This is an incomplete and mostly misleading account of Trump’s foreign policy record, to put it mildly. The U.S. came dangerously close to wars with North Korea and Iran, and it went to the brink with these states because of Trump’s own policies and decisions. Trump escalated every war he inherited, including U.S. backing for the atrocious Saudi coalition war on Yemen. He ordered illegal attacks on Syria twice. Given the opportunity to end U.S. involvement in Yemen simply by doing nothing and letting Congress put a stop to it, Trump refused and chose to veto the measure instead. Given the opportunity to end the illegal U.S. military presence in Syria, he settled for half a loaf of a partial withdrawal and redeployment that still left U.S. troops in harm’s way. Having escalated the war in Afghanistan, Trump failed to bring it to a prompt conclusion and left it for his successor to do what he could not. Hell, he even played around with the idea of invading Venezuela.

Celebrating Trump for not starting wars is like praising someone for playing Russian roulette because the gun didn’t fire yet. The U.S. was extremely lucky between 2017 and 2021, and you would have to be out of your mind to want to play the same game again. Trump has demonstrated many times that he has terrible judgment and a lousy temperament to be president, and his corruption and ignorance made him an easy mark for the hardliners that he appointed to run his foreign policy. Get behind the man who put Pompeo and Bolton in charge of U.S. foreign policy? You must be joking.