Damn With Faint Praise
In a peculiar op-ed at The Wall Street Journal , Gerard Baker decides Trump is no big deal, he just did what any president would have done: No country, let alone a superpower, can approach national security with a rigid dogma about the use of force, and for all the binary nature of the contentions we have had on the subject in the past few decades, I suspect no American president ever has. . . . Seen in this light President Trump’s decision to order a U.S. military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities isn’t a “win” for the interventionists against the noninterventionists in the president’s coalition, a decisive departure in Trumpian foreign policy. It looks instead like a classic and—as far as we can tell—effective piece of operational expediency born of tactical opportunism to advance legitimate strategic objectives. As far as I can see, the sort of any-president Mr Baker has in mind must be Josiah Bartlet, the one played by Martin Sheen in The West Wing . The problem Trump...