In a previous post I mentioned one reason that President Trump is despised by others was his unorthodox approach to governance … a visceral threat to the elite establishment. His different treatment of Kim Jong-Un worked in that we didn’t go to war with North Korea during his tenure. His approach to China started to look like it was working until Xi unleashed his pandemic on the world. His demands of NATO may not have made friends … but they worked. And his approach to solving the Afghanistan 20-year problem was certainly different in that he sat down with the Taliban to negotiate terms before the fact.
The unanswered questions remain: How would Trump have managed the actual Afghan pullout differently from Biden? Would he have completed it by May 1st? Would he have decided to hold onto the Bagram base? If not, would he have destroyed it? He certainly would not have ceded $85 billion of military gear to our enemies. Would he have taken our soldiers out first and panicked the Afghan loyalists? Would he have recognized the Taliban if it kept up its ends of the bargain?
All these things we may never know … but we do know how our current president bungled things. History books are seldom written about might-have-beens.
STAND UP FOR UNORTHOdOXY!
2 comments:
In what administration in the last 75 years have we been at war with NK? I'd like to see some of those love letters between Trump and Lil' Rocket Boy.
The doublecross Don pulled on the Kurds was cold but not as bizarro as the strange handoff agreement last year with the Taliban that could have been wrapped up before the election.
Unorthodoxy to the max is being a commentator at a prizefight on the anniversary of 9/11.
Classy.
Truman and Eisenhower. And Obama told Trump as they switched administrations that NK was his biggest worry for war. It could be that Kim just wanted to be noticed. Trump did that.
I’m not sure the Kurds were betrayed by Trump. I haven’t heard of their massacre … have you?
And you have no idea, nor do I … how the Afghanistan withdrawal would have developed under Trump. It could not have been any worse.
As far as I am concerned unorthodoxy means listening to common sense … something most pols have a great deal doing.
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