newYou can listen to the Fox News article!
Donald Trump knows how to infuriate the fabric of American foreign policy.
And recently, he told Bloomberg Businessweek:
“I think Taiwan should pay us “It’s for defense. We’re no different from an insurance company. Taiwan is not giving us anything.”
A sign reading “America First Means America First” is seen during preparations for Day 4 of the Republican National Convention at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on July 18, 2024. (Andrew Harnick/Getty Images)
Trump’s rhetoric may seem like a spoken version of “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride,” but, as is so often the case, his instincts aren’t that far off the mark.
The assassination attempt on Trump showed Putin and Xi Jinping that the West under Biden is weak and unfocused.
Countries expecting the US to show up when trouble arise cannot claim they have not been warned.
For too long, American elites seem to have viewed overseas deployments as practical graduate seminars to test their international relations skills. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright exemplified this when she scolded Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell for not wanting to send U.S. troops to Bosnia without a clear political objective.
On October 14, 1998, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with President Bill Clinton. (Stephen Jaffe/AFP via Getty Images)
“What’s the point of having this great army you always talk about if you can’t use it?”
Imagine a US fire department with a limited number of fire engines: if Israel, Ukraine, Poland, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines all call 911 at the same time, who gets priority?
Ask the ambassadors of these countries the same question and ask them who they would prioritize if they were the United States.
Trump’s second-term foreign policy likely to focus on ‘strength’ and ‘deterrence’: experts
People who do their best to protect their homes from fire and who have plenty of fire extinguishers and are desperately trying to put out the fires will catch fire.
This is not a guy who is trying to tear down his garden shed without taking proper fire safety measures.
If there is a Trump-Vance administration, countries looking to America for support would be better off doing all they can to protect themselves if they expect America to send in troops.
As for Taiwan, there are good reasons to not let China take over Taiwan, and President Trump needs to discuss this with former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien. Yes, Taiwan is buying American hardware. But that’s not enough.
For decades, successive Taiwanese governments underfunded their military, paid little attention to its power and appeared oblivious to the Chinese threat, assuming the United States would emerge when it needed it.
Japan? It’s similar. Japan is a key ally. But it has been under-spending on defense for decades, and recently fell 50% short of recruitment targets. Unfortunately, its military is not prepared for war. There’s no need to worry. When Japanese politicians are drunk, they sometimes say that America’s watchdogs will protect us.
Republican senator slams Biden for ‘weak’ foreign policy record in preview of Republican National Convention speech, calling him ‘the laughing stock of the world’
European countries, with the few exceptions of Poland and a few “small countries”, ignored US calls to take their defenses seriously. They mocked President Trump when he warned of the dangers, and the “bubu” back home called him an unruly country bumpkin. Ukraine was a wake-up call, but it seems it wasn’t enough.
Foreign policy officials in Washington claim that those who call for caution when sending U.S. troops overseas or getting involved in other countries’ fights are “isolationists” or “America First” — yet they and their relatives (and even friends) rarely serve in the military.
To make matters worse, foreign policy Brahmins don’t really care about the poor souls in regions only a plane ride away who make up the bulk of the U.S. military.
Families whose children serve in the military are never asked what they think, and after two decades of failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, endless involvement in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the outbreak of war in East Asia, families have every reason to think that their “chunk” might not be all that smart.
Click here to read more FOX News Opinion
They are not isolationists, they are patriots ready to sacrifice everything for their country.
But the lower classes (as the Blob sees it) are no longer willing to write blank cheques to foreign policy experts.
And to compound their alarm, they saw that the elite’s shipbuilding and overseas jobs were doing nothing to stop the influx of deadly drugs into their communities, while the country welcomed 10 million illegal immigrants into the country as a cheap, alternative labor force.
Click here to get the FOX News app
To my friends around the world, if we have a Trump administration, you know what to do. Our military personnel have every responsibility. If you’re going to ask someone in Kansas to give their life for you, you’d better do everything in your power to protect yourself first.
The more you can do for yourself, the more likely a fire engine will be dispatched when the time comes.
For more information on Grant Newsham click here
