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Trump’s Disdain for Diplomacy and Restraint

The nuclear deal is a major nonproliferation success, which makes Trump's attacks on it all the more ridiculous.
DC: Donald Trump And Ted Cruz Join Capitol Hill Rally Against Iran Deal

Scott McConnell remarked on the aggressive foreign policy rhetoric at last week’s convention:

I have not heard a word from the convention podium about the misguidedness of that war, but there have been plenty of bellicose statements directed at Russia and Iran, important states whose interests do not necessarily clash with America’s at all.

Trump’s acceptance speech was much the same. There was a throwaway line rejecting “nation-building and regime change,” but the overall effect his remarks on foreign policy was to paint a dreary picture of American weakness in which diplomacy and restraint were presented as folly. Trump’s railing about the nuclear deal and the “red line” episode was instructive:

Not only have our citizens endured domestic disaster, but they have lived through one international humiliation after another. We all remember the images of our sailors being forced to their knees by their Iranian captors at gunpoint.

This was just prior to the signing of the Iran deal, which gave back to Iran $150 billion and gave us nothing – it will go down in history as one of the worst deals ever made. Another humiliation came when president Obama drew a red line in Syria – and the whole world knew it meant nothing.

These are mostly recycled hawkish talking points, they’re either false or very misleading, and they show just how poor Trump’s grasp on these issues is. The episode with the sailors that were briefly detained in the Gulf is a good example of this. The sailors had strayed into Iranian waters, they were detained, and then thanks to the diplomatic contacts created during the negotiations over the nuclear deal (which had already been concluded) they were released within a day. An incident that could have dragged on for weeks or months was resolved peacefully and speedily because of U.S. diplomatic engagement with a hostile power in a way that would have been almost impossible a few years earlier.

Trump also repeats his usual false claims about the nuclear deal. The $150 billion figure is a huge exaggeration, and the reality is that Iran may get access to at most roughly $50 billion of their own money in exchange for dismantling most of their nuclear program. Far from getting “nothing,” the U.S. achieved the main goal of its diplomacy with Iran, and it did so at no cost to us. One would think that the compensation-obsessed Trump would be thrilled by how lopsided the deal is in our favor, but that would require him to understand it.

The nuclear deal is a major nonproliferation success, which makes Trump’s attacks on it as “one of the worst deals ever made” all the more ridiculous. He continues to prove that he not only knows nothing about the specific issues, but it also shows that he has no clue how to judge the value of international agreements.

The “humiliation” of the “red line” episode was felt most acutely by the Syria hawks that wanted the U.S. to get into a new war. There are so many other examples of Obama foreign policy errors, and yet Trump chose to mention the one instance in which Obama threatened but did not use force. The implication is that the U.S. would be better-served to attack another country and get into an open-ended war than suffer the embarrassment of a climbdown from an ill-advised threat.

Trump selected a successful diplomatic effort and a decision to refrain from military action as examples of American “humiliation,” and that reflects his apparent disdain for diplomacy and restraint.

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