Not being a big fan of the elequent both-sider Mr. Todd, I will still note when he focuses attention on an under-reported aspect of Trump’s venality and incompetence. At the same time, I have had and expressed frustration that Americans were under-observing the importance of Trumpf’s foreign policy failures and incompetencies. Well, today Todd got a whopper, in a list of some of Trumpf’s key foreign policy failures—which Todd listed, not-so-coincidentally, just as the stock market collapsed, badly damaging one of Trumpf’s protections. To wit:
www.alternet.org/…
“There are clashes in Hong Kong between pro-democracy protesters and riot police. There are decades-old tensions re-emerging between Japan and South Korea, at a moment they should be focused on North Korea. There are populist, nativist, and xenophobic movements roiling the globe. Thre is escalating conflict between two nuclear powers, India and Paktisan. Russia’s testing nuclear-powered missiles. There is now Russian missile technology inside Turkey, a key NATO ally,” Todd said. “And I haven’t even mentioned your sort of run-of-the-mill, sort of, walking away from certain things, when it comes to whether it’s Middle East peace, parts of Latin America and things like that.”
He continued: “Folks, any other modern president would be at least voicing support from pro-democracy movements, especially ones where some demonstrators are singing our national anthem, like we’ve seen in Hong Kong. By the way, I didn’t even bring up the democracy movements we have nothing to say about in Russia. But President Trump is keeping his distance.”
Trump promised to be a different kind of president, and one of his biggest innovations on the world stage has been his complete lack of interest in defending democracy and even peace abroad.
“Any other modern president would also be strenuously opposing disinformation campaigns, or condemning missile launches, or rebuking allies for weakening the NATO alliance, or trying to ease tensions in Kashmir, or trying to ease tensions between Japan and South Korea, tamping down xenophobic movements,” Todd said.
This is all really encouraging to me—not because it is Todd, but because it is anybody with a loud voice and familiar face, after too much time when Trumpf’s foreign policy failures have been ignored in the face of, among other things, a strong stock market and the growing variety of domestic squabbles.
As some here have probably read, I have been a strong proponent of what I call the Trumpian positive feedback loop, in which his failures lead to criticism which leads to more disrupted thinking and behavior and more failures—and more criticism. We are getting more deeply into that pattern, and Trumpf’s utter lack of foreign policy competence is part of that pattern that is finally getting some of the notice it deserves.
This is all good news for Ms. Pelosi, of course: If the stock market is a mess, and the economy is a mess, and competency issues are getting deserved notice, and Trumpf continues to deteriorate, then impeachment will become a much less difficult sell, and her congresspeople have less to fear by participating in it.