Trump’s World

Donald Trump wants you to think he’s considering running for president. I say “wants you to think” since Trump has no intention of actually running for president – that would mean too close of a look into his murky finances than The Donald would ever be comfortable with, but maintaining the image of being a possible, legitimate candidate allows him a no-cost way of building awareness of the Trump brand, along with giving his massive ego a healthy stroke. So far would-be candidate Trump has mostly kept his pseudo-political speeches to the confines of Republican-style Obama-bashing, though he has made a couple of forays into international affairs. For example, Trump said that he could solve the problem of Somali piracy with a good admiral and a couple of ships, similarly he said a few days ago that he could solve the Gadhafi problem in Libya with “a cruise missile.” Wow, who knew international affairs was so easy? And here all those eggheads in the State Dept. had us convinced that the world was a complex place… Of course the world is a complex place and Trump’s “solutions” aren’t just simplistic, they’re insultingly simplistic. I talked about his Somali solution already here, but just to recap why he’s wrong – there already are two-dozen warships patrolling the waters, the Indian Ocean is a big place, and the real solution to piracy lies ashore. As for his Libyan solution - setting aside the ethical debate about assassinating a world leader, even one as odorous as Gadhafi - shooting off a cruise missile at him both assumes that you know where he is every moment of every day and that he is even in a place where could be hit by a cruise missile and not say in a bunker somewhere (I assume this is also Trump’s solution to finally getting Osama bin Laden). The real problem with Trump’s foreign policy ramblings though is that so long as he is considered to be a legitimate, potential presidential candidate comments like these will help to shape the debate on the Republican side among a field of candidates that already includes such intellectual lowlights as Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin, people happy to flaunt their ignorance of the wider world. To a fair number of people across America, the world is a black-and-white place where simple solutions are stymied by wusses in the State Department and the Pentagon ham-strung by wimpy politicians from “solving problems”; and of course there’s the plot between Barack Obama and George Soros to impose the New World Order upon America… The reality is that the world is a complex place where a host of new and rising powers have replaced the old Cold War US-Soviet power paradigm; it is a place that will require deft policy moves by the United States to maintain its position in the world. The feel-good foreign policy simplicity peddled by Trump and Co. certainly isn’t helpful.