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The Problem With Donald Trump’s Version of “America First”

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English: Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in...
English: Donald Trump speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In March, an open letter from 121 Republican “national security leaders” characterized GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s foreign policy vision as “wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle,” swinging “from isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence.”

While it’s always wise to take proclamations from the people who brought us the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with a grain of salt, in this case they were right — and Trump himself proved it with his speech before the Center for National Interest on April 27.

“America First,” says Trump,  “will be the major and overriding theme of my administration.”

Some non-interventionists, especially those of a libertarian bent, cheer the use of that phrase, thinking back to the movement to keep the US out of World War II and even to Thomas Jefferson’s proclaimed policy of “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

But neither of those remotely resemble Trump’s position, to the extent that he has a coherent position at all. Only two sentences after dropping the America First name, he lauds US interventionism in World War II and 45 years of  Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Later in the speech Trump condemns open trade lanes with other nations, complaining about a “manufacturing trade deficit” and  China’s “economic assault on America’s jobs and wealth” and proposing the most damaging version of international trade war since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act helped crash the US economy and usher in the Great Depression. So much for commerce and honest friendship.

And what about peace? Trump calls for US allies to increase their military spending while claiming that America’s own military — still by far the most expensive and powerful in the history of the world and the single largest line item in the federal budget — has been “weakened” and must be rebuilt.  This is not a proposal that NATO stand up while the US stands down — he calls for an escalation, not a drawdown, of military force.

Trump supports continued US intervention in the Middle East, including an obligatory tip of the hat to America’s “special relationship” with Israel, but he doesn’t support “nation-building.” In English that means he isn’t giving up on having the US armed forces run around the world killing people and breaking things; he’s only against trying to put the victim nations back together again afterward.

“Wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle” indeed. But it’s a heck of a personal branding escapade. Trump is just a run of the mill — if visibly unstable and irrational —  hawk trying to pass himself as the peace candidate. And it’s working, at least among people who believe me when I tell them the word “gullible” is written on the ceiling.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Let’s Let Veterans Be Regular Americans Again

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Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower in his jeep in t...
Eisenhower in the American sector during the liberation of Lower Normandy in the summer of 1944. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Between 1952 and 1992, every president of the United States was a veteran of World War Two. Eisenhower commanded Allied forces in Europe. JFK, LBJ, Nixon and Ford served in the Navy in the Pacific. Jimmy Carter entered the Naval Academy in 1943, graduating too late to see combat. Ronald Reagan joined the US Army Reserve in 1937; due his fame as an actor he was kept out of combat, instead heading up War Bond drives and producing more than 400 training films. George H.W. Bush was the youngest US Navy pilot in the war.

Then the worm turned. In 1992, Bush was defeated by alleged Vietnam draft dodger Bill Clinton, who also defeated wounded World War Two vet Bob Dole in 1996. In 2000 and 2004, alleged Air National Guard deserter George W. Bush defeated Vietnam veterans Al Gore and John Kerry. In 2008, Barack Obama defeated Vietnam veteran and former prisoner of war John McCain.

In the two election cycles since then, neither major party has seriously considered nominating a military veteran. Rather odd, since exaltation of the US armed forces and veterans began a resurgence from post-Vietnam lows in 1991 with Desert Storm and has been the de facto national religion since 9/11.

America has a complicated relationship with its veterans. Those of us who served in the military sport a suicide rate more than twice that of the civilian population. We’re 10% of the population and 16% of the homeless. Apparently we’re a pretty screwed up demographic.  Yet our opinions, especially on politics, enjoy a measure of nearly automatic respect. I often see news stories in which veterans are specifically identified as such to bolster their credibility when they express positions or register complaints (janitors, truck drivers and cooks rarely enjoy such  deference).

This bothers me, in part because it tempts me. Anecdotally, it seems to me that veterans are over-represented in my own political ponds, the libertarian movement and the Libertarian Party. It’s tempting to assume that that’s because, like me, many other veterans see how wasteful and deadly big government can be and perhaps want to do penance for the body counts we’ve contributed to. But then there are lots of veterans who ardently support big government as well. What gives?

The temptation to ascribe special status to the opinions of veterans is something I think we should resist. Opinions may be right or they may be wrong. That the person expressing them once wore a uniform and collected a government paycheck doesn’t, at least in cases not directly related to military matters, seem like a good indicator of which.

If you really want to honor veterans, treat us like you treat everyone else. That means requiring us to prove, rather than merely assert, our political arguments.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Bernie Sanders Won’t Drop Out. Here’s Why.

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Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Bernie Sanders says he’s taking the Democratic presidential nomination contest all the way to the party’s national convention in Philadelphia at the end of July. Believe it.

With increasing intensity after each primary or caucus he loses — and for that matter after each primary or caucus he wins — party big-wigs call on him to concede the race and get out of Hillary Clinton’s way. Politico‘s informal April survey of anonymous Democratic “insiders” has nearly 90% wanting Sanders out no later than the DC primary in mid-June and only 10% urging him to hold out to the bitter end.

Why isn’t he listening to the 90%? As a Florida Democrat told Politico, “[t]here is no path, and there is no math.” Actually there are at least four paths.

Path #1: Clinton’s health fails in a very big and very public way. She’s had multiple public fainting spells since 2005, including one resulting in a broken elbow in 2009. In 2012, she suffered a concussion and was hospitalized with cerebral venous thrombosis, a life-threatening blood clot condition. Her campaign health statement acknowledges these problems and throws in hypothyroidism to boot, although characterizing the 67-year-old as enjoying “excellent” health.

Path #2:  Clinton is indicted in, or otherwise dragged down over, the “Servergate” affair, in which she appears to have illegally mishandled classified information while Secretary of State.

Path #3: Clinton comes to big legal or political grief over apparent connections between large donations to her family’s foundation on one hand and her actions as Secretary of State on the other. For example, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia donated $10 million to the Clinton Foundation and Boeing donated $900,000. Later, Secretary Clinton cleared a $29 billion arms deal involving the two parties. You can see how that kind of thing looks. There may be some “there” there.

Path #4: The texts of Clinton’s Wall Street speeches, for which she received millions of dollars in honoraria, are leaked. Clinton’s refusal to release those texts tells us that their release would be politically damaging. Everything comes to light sooner or later. If it’s sooner — that is, before July —  we may find out how just how damaging.

Any of these four scenarios might result in Hillary Clinton’s ignominious withdrawal from the presidential race and release of her delegates, followed by the party’s scramble for an alternative nominee. If Bernie Sanders doesn’t quit, he becomes the odds-on favorite for the job.

So he won’t quit. And now you know why.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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