DONALD Trump can do no right. When he tries to make peace he’s blamed. If he’s not belligerent, he’s blamed. If he is belligerent he’s blamed. This week has been no different. According to the oh-so-predictable Guardian his bombing of Iran was an illegal and reckless act. As for CNN and the New York Times his actions were ineffective and – no doubt to the delight of Iran – both outlets underplayed the impact of the US bombing of Iran’s nuclear installations, claiming they had merely set back Iran’s operations ‘contrary to his boasting’. Trump has threatened to sue.
For sure, Trump Derangement Syndrome is such that no one is prepared to give him any credit in the MSM. This has had JD Vance leaping to his defence. In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News Vance says all of the critics coming at Trump from every direction after his massive success in ending the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, culminating in the Iranian airstrikes, need just to ‘let him cook’, i.e. let him do what he is good at. Trump, Vance said, has pulled a Middle East hat-trick: ‘destroyed Iran’s nuke program, no quagmire, pathway to peace’. The President brokered a ceasefire between Iran and Israel – despite both sides fighting it out to the very bitter deadline and violating it in the middle of the following night. Vance credits Trump’s unique approach to foreign policy as the driving force behind the success:
‘So if you go back to the first Trump administration . . . he’s been very consistent throughout his entire administration that we can engage in America’s national security interest . . . We don’t have to have mission creep. We don’t have to let a limited military operation turn into a five-year war. And what I think is kind of amazing is that the President threaded the needle between two camps, people who were so worried about a Middle Eastern quagmire that they, frankly, would have let Iran have a nuclear weapon, and people who are so obsessed with what’s going on in the Middle East that they would have happily put 100,000 American boots on the ground. I think what the President said very clearly is, number one, Iran getting a nuke is not going to happen. So he defined the national interest very clearly. Number two, he used diplomacy aggressively to try to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. And, number three, when that diplomacy – he felt like it wasn’t going anywhere – he used overwhelming military force to obliterate the nuclear program of Iran. I think just that sequencing . . . number one, here’s our national interest, number two, let me try to see what I can do through diplomacy but, hell, number three, if diplomacy fails, I will use the overwhelming might of the American military. I think what makes it so powerful is that it creates clear lines. Everybody knows exactly what we’re going to do. I think for the American people, they understand what he’s trying to accomplish. He’s sort of telling them, “Hey, I’m the President, I’ve got access to this classified intelligence. Here’s what I think that we need to do for our own people.” And then he backs it up with action. So people . . . know, if they’re going to do diplomacy with Donald Trump, they have to be serious about it.
‘First of all, we inherited a mess. We inherited Iran marching towards a nuclear weapon. Had the President not destroyed that program, I really think that Iran would have had incredible leverage over the United States and could have been a destabilising force all over the world . . . That’s why it matters so much. You think about how much prosperity, how much trade, how much private investment we’re talking about getting from the UAE and from Saudi Arabia. Well, that’s not going to happen [if Iran has a nuke]. All that great peace and prosperity is not going to happen if Iran has a nuclear weapon and is able to bully these guys, and so President Trump just cut this off. That was a very profound thing. But had we not had the Biden and Obama presidencies, then the Iran nuclear program wouldn’t have been in such an advanced shape. But it is what it is. He inherited a mess. He fixed the mess. He inherited a house with some very serious problems. He repaired the problems with Iran. I think now we’re on to other things. The other thing that’s very interesting about all this to me, is you’re right. A lot of the people who are very sceptical about our involvement – about doing anything with regards to the Iranian nuclear program – they’re good people. I understand their concerns about a Middle Eastern quagmire, but I think they forgot that Donald Trump is the President, not Dick Cheney. There’s a lot that can be accomplished when you have strong, decisive presidential leadership, as opposed to the kind of presidential leadership where you meander into a foreign war and you kind of get stuck there.
‘By standing up against those folks, but also the folks on the other extreme calling for “regime change”,’ Vance said that Trump was able to reorient US foreign policy for the next generation. Vance said he thinks the Trump Doctrine will be followed by leaders of both parties, too, not just Republicans, for the next several years to come.
‘The President was very clear, “we’re doing this to end Iran’s nuclear program. We’re not trying to change the regime. We’re not trying to create democracy. We’re not trying to turn Iran into Wisconsin, we’re destroying their nuclear program and once we do that, we’re out.” I think setting that clear mission, accomplishing that clear mission with overwhelming force, and then being willing to say ‘we’re done’ – all three of those things are very, very important, and I see them as the critical piece of the Trump Doctrine. By the way, just one final point on this, I think the Trump Doctrine is going to become the dominant force in American foreign policy, not just Republican foreign policy. I think that people are going to take this approach very clearly, defining our interest, trying to use diplomacy, then overwhelming military force when diplomacy fails. Frankly, that’s what we should have been doing for the past 50 years, but like with so many issues President Trump is the person who kind of brought common sense back to another major American set of ideas and this time it’s foreign policy.’
You can read the full article here.
