3 Comments

Shield is great, but lately has not been providing as much perspective on current events as it used to. I like a deep dive into 20th century East/West machinations as any foreign policy egghead, but the current level of global chaos demands more analysis and less historic nostalgia.

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I found Eliot Cohen’s article in the Atlantic, that Trump’s foreign policy wouldn’t be much different than Biden’s, completely off base. Trump knows nothing, is corrupt, has a narcissistic personality disorder, and kisses up to Putin and other dictators. That is a recipe for disaster and the end of the liberal international order established after WW II that has kept America safe. I can’t listen to your show anymore your judgment is so flawed.

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Biden carried out Trump's withdrawal from Afghanistan. His advisers told him it would be a disaster, but he remained just as committed to the policy as Trump was. Trump and Biden squandered everything we had fought for in Afghanistan, giving it up for nothing but small political gains with small factions of voters.

The Democrats have always been divided internally on foreign policy. The party's left wing has always hated NATO and seen Russia as an ally against "US imperialism". Obama was certainly of that school of thought, at least initially. Centrists, by contrast, have favored the old bipartisan consensus of international engagement and promotion of the democratic world order. In every respect, President Biden has tried to be the mean Democrat, positioning himself in the middle of the party, and foreign policy is no exception. Biden has refused to commit himself to Ukrainian victory over Russia. His policy has, effectively, been to promote a draw, preventing either side from gaining a decisive victory. It might be less bad than the policy of Obama and Trump in the short term, but it is not sustainable.

From the PoV of us old-fashioned Reagan conservatives, Trump and Biden look like two different sorts of 1970s anti-anti-communists, with Trump corresponding to the communist sympathizers and Biden corresponding to the compromisers who feared confronting the enemy too aggressively.

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