By DANIEL L. DAVIS
There is a narrative threading through Washington which smugly suggests that “instead of weakness, we now have strength” in the White House. After eight years of feckless “leading from behind,” President Trump has reasserted U.S. credibility, and as a result, our enemies fear and respect us again, resulting in a more secure global environment. In truth, current U.S. foreign policy is only accelerating the expanding use of force both of the previous two U.S. Administrations began – and the result is the accelerating decline of our national security.
There is a narrative threading through Washington which smugly suggests that “instead of weakness, we now have strength” in the White House. After eight years of feckless “leading from behind,” President Trump has reasserted U.S. credibility, and as a result, our enemies fear and respect us again, resulting in a more secure global environment. In truth, current U.S. foreign policy is only accelerating the expanding use of force both of the previous two U.S. Administrations began – and the result is the accelerating decline of our national security.
In just the past two weeks, President Trump has launched a military strike on a sovereign nation without authorization by the Congress or a U.N. Security Council resolution, allowed the dropping of the largest conventional bomb in U.S. inventories in Afghanistan, and ordered two aircraft carrier strike groups into the waters near North Korea. These actions are in addition to requests from military commanders for more military power – including thousands of ground troops – in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan. It is clear that these are not isolated events, but an expanding of a more militaristic foreign policy.
Trump sent a “message” with a 59-cruise missile strike on a Syrian airfield to dictator Basher al-Assad that he could not attack civilians with impunity, especially with chemical weapons. This message was answered 24 hours later with a message of Assad’s own when his troops used the same airfield to launch another air attack on the same area. His air force has not stopped operations since.
Read the full story at Breaking Defense