UPDATED (11/15): A Trump Foreign-Policy Doctrine Must Put ‘America First’

Constitution, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Neoconservatism

Too many Republicans cozying up to President-elect Donald Trump, or orbiting him for positions in his administration, are talking up an interventionist foreign policy. You hear non-stop chatter about, and I paraphrase, “How Trump understands that a peaceful world is contingent on America’s active role in the world.” However, “the foreign policy views [Trump] espoused,” warns Pat Buchanan, “were as crucial to his election as his views on trade and the border”:

The opportunity is at hand for Trump to reconfigure U.S. foreign policy to the world we now inhabit, and to the vital interests of the United States.

What should Trump say?

“As our Cold War presidents from Truman to Reagan avoided World War III, I intend to avert Cold War II. We do not regard Russia or the Russian people as enemies of the United States, and we will work with President Putin to ease the tensions that have arisen between us.

“For our part, NATO expansion is over, and U.S. forces will not be deployed in any former republic of the Soviet Union.

“While Article 5 of NATO imposes an obligation to regard an attack upon any one of 28 nations as an attack on us all, in our Constitution, Congress, not some treaty dating back to before most Americans were even born, decides whether we go to war.

“The compulsive interventionism of recent decades is history. How nations govern themselves is their own business. While, as JFK said, we prefer democracies and republics to autocrats and dictators, we will base our attitude toward other nations upon their attitude toward us.

“No other nation’s internal affairs are a vital interest of ours.

“Europeans have to be awakened to reality. We are not going to be forever committed to fighting their wars. They are going to have to defend themselves, and that transition begins now.

“In Syria and Iraq, our enemies are al-Qaida and ISIS. We have no intention of bringing down the Assad regime, as that would open the door to Islamic terrorists. We have learned from Iraq and Libya.”

THE REST: “A Trump Doctrine — ‘America First’”

UPDATE (11/15): Rand Paul is on it, too.

Post-Election Round Up

Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Elections, Hillary Clinton, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Multiculturalism, Neoconservatism, Republicans

‘Inclusion’ never included the Right or the religious:

A familiar love scene: The White House press-corp and their honey:

Divisive Obama preaches unity:

One of the questions posed to Barack Obama by the adoring press corp: How long before you were at ease on the job?

Media: We’re so virtuous:

The New York Slimes’ mea culpa:

The honest media is incarcerated by the statists: “Assange is Us”:

Yours truly gets a shout-out from the UK:

Hillary offers to help Trump. Please no.

Hungary is on-board the Trump train:

‘Deplorables’ reshape the GOP. Yippee:

Endurance test ends on November 8:

It won’t last unless …

Alas, GOP media are off suicide watch, but should still be expunged:

When they’re not liberals; winners must reach across the aisle:

Hillary, listen to your husband; he’s the smart one in the family:

The more the diversity; the more the misery; the larger the Trump Factor:

The country united over Gary Johnson:

Another poll that lies:

Jewish Progressives Petrified Of … Ann Coulter And Donald Trump

Ann Coulter, Anti-Semitism, Donald Trump, Elections, Judaism & Jews, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim

Forward Magazine, a progressive Jewish publication, is petrified not of Muslim immigration (which has seen European Jews come under siege), but of … Ann Coulter and Donald Trump (whose son-in-law is an orthodox Jew). Phoebe Maltz Bovy claims to speak for us “Jews” in “Why Ann Coulter’s Pro-Trump ‘4 Grandparents’ Tweet Is So Scary for Jews”:

Right-wing personality-shall-we-say Ann Coulter tweeted her wishes that “only people with at least 4 grandparents born in America” could vote, because then, Trump would, she believes, win the election. Coulter, who I will confess I’d mostly lost track of, in the blur of 2016 horribleness and 1990s revivalism, has evidently — see Cathy Young — reinvented herself as an alt-right anti-Semite.
The “grandparents” remark — apart from the strangeness of assuming the typical person has more than four grandparents — offers an explicitly exclusionary definition of American national identity. It doesn’t take years’ worth of seminars on Vichy France to see that this is full-on, red-alert we’ve-seen-this-before xenophobia. But if you have studied modern European history, as I have, it’s like, huh, I guess I’m going to be one of those faceless The Jews studied years from now, by doctoral students contemplating whatever happened to America’s Jewish population, which was, they have read, very vibrant at one point. …

Nothing has changed since I wrote the 2004 column, “MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TIME BOMB IGNORED BY AMERICAN JEWS”:

… In Canada, Muslims now greatly outnumber Jews. What remains of a European Jewry devastated by the Holocaust comes under daily assaults and threats, mostly from the 20-million strong Muslim community.
American Jewry is next. Second only to another immigrant constituency—Latinos—the relatively new (roughly 30-year-old) Muslim community is the most anti-Semitic community in the U.S. But its exponential growth through immigration has failed to alarm Jewish leaders. Listening to them, you would think that the chief dangers to Jewish continuity are marauding Mormons (their sin is converting dead Jews) or Mel Gibson, whose movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” they predicted, would unleash “pogroms in Pittsburgh.”

MORE in “MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TIME BOMB IGNORED BY AMERICAN JEWS.”

A President Who Doesn’t Hate Those People Clinging To Guns & God

America, Britain, Donald Trump, Elections, History

“A President Who Doesn’t Hate Those People Clinging To Guns & God” is the current column, now on The Unz Review. An excerpt:

Did Donald Trump unite the American Silent Marjory behind things true and shared?

These are economic prosperity, national pride and unity, recognizable neighborhoods—a yen that demands an end to the transformation of neighborhoods through centrally planned, mass immigration—and an end to gratuitous wars.

Those were the questions asked in “The Trump Revolution The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June 29, 2016), and answered in the affirmative.

Unlike America’s self-anointed cognoscenti, some of us saw this coming. The former recognize truth only once card-carrying members arrive at it independently, grasp and broadcast it, sometimes years too late. Not so America’s marginalized writers. Not in 2012, but in 2002 did we pinpoint the wrongness of the Iraq War. And not in 2016, but in July of 2015 did some of us, not fortuitously, finger Trump as “a candidate to ‘kick the crap out of all the politicians’” and “send the system’s sycophants scattering” (August 14, 2015). His appeal, as this writer has contended since late in 2015, transcended left and right.

Conversely, vaunted statistician Nate Silver “calculated, last November, that Trump’s support was ‘about the same share of people who think the Apollo moon landings were faked.’” (Professor Tyler Cowen of George Mason University properly downgraded wonder boy Silver’s intellectual prowess. His prose, wrote the good teacher, was a sprawl that “evinces a greater affiliation to rigor with data analysis than to rigor with philosophy of science or, for that matter, rigor with rhetoric.”)

Given the disparate groups that rooted for Mr. Trump’s candidacy, it would appear that he did in fact awaken a historic majority. You could say Mr. Trump was an “omnibus candidate,” a concept floated by historian David Hackett Fischer …

… Read the rest. “A President Who Doesn’t Hate Those People Clinging To Guns & God” is now on The Unz Review.

UPDATE: An interesting perspective on “The Trump Revolution” from a betting man: “I thought this was an interesting read last summer,” writes David Taggart at Amazon.com, “now I realize it was a work of genius. Wish I’d paid closer attention and bet when the bookies were offering 7-2.”