CJ 2.0:
Hello there my fellow Canadian, salut mon ami! All I can say is that we are still early on in the Trump presidency and the rising death tolls in Iraq, Syria and Yemen are mounting.
They are, and they are all still attributable to Obama.
The guy gave Iran billions, which have been fed directly into these conflicts. Yemen is a mess because of Iranian involvement and attacks against Saudi Arabia, Syria is Syria because of Obama's olead from behind nonsense and Iraq is Iraq because of his pre-mature pull-out.
Obama didn't get a pass on responsibility for this stuff just because his term ended.
If a world reaction against the symbol of Trumpism and any perceived military missteps triggers a hostile global military and economic cascade against Amerca then the butcher's bill could be very high indeed. I sincerely hope I am wrong but I fear for peace and coexistence in a Trump-dominated world badly mediated by impotent relatives and authoritarian toadies and sycophants.
Yeah, I know what you mean. His handling of NK leaves a lot to be desired (although in a different way so did Clinton's, Bush's, and Obama's, since they all let things get as bad as they are now). But on the ME this realignment couldn't be more welcome. Obama's foreign policy in the ME was fundamentally wrong. Literally everything about it from his hostility to Israel to his unwillingness to support the Iranian protesters to his Cairo speech to his support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to his position on Libya, to his approach to Syria, to Iraq, to his coddling and attempted reorientation to Iran. Every single thing he touched is worse now than it was before and not by accident but because what he set out to do was fundamentally wrong. All of his instincts were wrong and the results are what we are seeing now.
Trump, for all of his ... mental issues ... is actually doing much better in the ME. He is reorienting to traditional allies and antagonizing enemies, he is encouraging and facilitating alignments between allies to address threats so the US doesn't have to (see the warming ties between Israel and the gulf states as a counter to Obama-enabled Iran) and he is not willing to be browbeaten by the clueless European mandarins about how to conduct ME policy. All of that is a 100-fold improvement to where we were before.
Trump, unlike Obama, also gets why we don't have peace with the Palestinians and, unlike Obama, isn't going to go after Israel to address Palestinian intransigence.
So all in all, while it would be hard to give Trump high marks generally, I think he is doing an excellent job on the ME file.
and to you!