All the President’s Generals
[Ross Douthat]
Ross Douthat APRIL 8, 2017
BY the standards of recent American presidencies, two very normal-seeming things happened in the Trump administration last week. On Wednesday, Steve Bannon, the president’s not particularly effective strategist and ideologist, was demoted out of the National Security Council’s principals’ committee. And on Thursday, the president rained cruise missiles onto Syria.
The demotion suggested that Trump’s foreign policy might be losing some of its promised “America First” distinctiveness; the bombing seemed to confirm it. Allowing for a few Trumpian flourishes, the strikes could have happened under Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, and so could the response: Politicians of both parties offered support, liberal hawks and neoconservatives were suddenly happy, TV pundits talked up Trump’s newfound stature … and critics of U.S. warmaking were back to crying in the wilderness, the taste of betrayal in their mouths.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/opinion/sunday/all-the-presidents-generals.html?ref=opinion
