Short analysis….it sucks!

When Trump was running in 2016 I will admit that there were a few things that he said about international relations that I, a hard core progressive, could agree with…..But then he was elected president and everything he said went out the window…..let us be honest 2017 has been a dismal year for our foreign policy.  We have not enough diplomats and the president and his Tweeting thumbs are making a mockery of our state department and our place in the world.

But let’s take a good look at Trump’s foreign policy 2017 record……

The first year of the Trump administration saw much more than the continuity in U.S. foreign policy that many of us expected. Trump’s candidacy and then his election were greeted with alarm by almost everyone in the foreign policy establishment, with an overwhelming consensus that he stood for a so-called “isolationist” withdrawal from international affairs. This interpretation was a serious misreading of Trump’s rhetoric and led to the usual knee-jerk reflex to define anything that differed from post-Cold War foreign policy as an outright rejection of all international engagement. As Trump’s policies have shown, he is open to a kind of international engagement, but it is one that is heavily militarized and defined by zero-sum contests with adversaries and allies alike.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/reviewing-trumps-2017-foreign-policy-record/

We can hope that Trump will tighten up and learn a thing or two about diplomacy and international relations…..but I think he will keep playing with his Twitter button and keep pushing the US further down the rabbit hole.

Trump is allowing Russia and China to assert themselves as a world leader because of his ignorance of international relations……Russia will be the one to watch…..

In 2017, Russia fought a bloody and indiscriminate war in support of a brutal Syrian regime, armed rebels occupying eastern Ukraine, and continued its propaganda campaign targeting elections in Western democracies—the same campaign that helped to put Donald Trump in the White House.

There’s no reason to believe 2018 will be any different. Ignoring Trump’s own personal fondness for Vladimir Putin and his autocratic regime, the Trump administration’s national security team in December named Russia as one of the top threats to American interests. But it’s unclear what the divided administration of a compromised president will actually do to confront a resurgent Russia.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/where-will-russia-pick-a-fight-in-2018

Since Trump has a soft spot for Russia….how far will they go before the US steps in and reasserts ourselves as the world leader we should be?