Trump is putting the U.S. on a refreshing new foreign policy path

[Right_in_Virginia]

Trump is putting the U.S. on a refreshing new foreign policy path
McClatchy DC, Feb 4, 2019,  ANDREW MALCOLM

<snip>

While Washington was focused on shutdown hyperbole, the White House engineered a strikingly simple series of events: Vice President Mike Pence phones the legislature’s opposition leader, Juan Guaido. The next morning, Guaido declares himself interim president. Minutes later, the Trump administration officially recognizes him.

The Republican president then calls to encourage the head of a major oil supplier who’s a socialist. Trump aides say this is part of a more attentive U.S. policy toward the Americas, something previous administrations have vowed but not pursued.

Historically, the United States has been infamous throughout Latin America for often ignoring human concerns, launching tardy military interventions and supporting for its own convenience right-wing generals whose military costumes sport far more medals than buttons.

Trump’s leadership includes crippling new sanctions on Venezuela’s national oil company, which provides more than 80 percent of government revenues.  That’s prompted several dozen other nations to follow, recognizing Guaido in a growing effort to oust Maduro and begin rebuilding Venezuela’s economy that’s lost half its GDP in five years.


Read more here: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/opinion/article225519360.html#storylink=cpy

[Right_in_Virginia]

FTA

And, the limited ISIS campaign aside, the default has not been movements by the U.S. military whose modern missions tend to creep broader and broader.  See the war in Afghanistan. That began as a revenge action to prevent more 9/11s and became an attempt to glue together a forsaken tribal land where Genghis Khan, Alexander, the Brits and Soviets had failed.

The U.S. entry was 18 years and 4,566 American lives ago.

While results in both Venezuela and North Korea are far from complete and isolation of Cuba and Nicaragua even more distant, they do display an encouraging evolution of Trump foreign policy. One sure thing, the standard diplomacy of every other recent presidency proved incapable of achieving even such tentative results.