Donald Trump's Erratic Foreign Policy Is a Failure

Bonnie Kristian

Security,

The president talks a good talk about ending “endless wars,” to use a phrase from last year’s SOTU, but he has failed to extricate the United States from a single conflict. The incongruity is indefensible.

One of the most memorable parts of the 2020 State of the Union was President Trump’s surprise reunification of a military family. “For the past seven months, her husband, Sgt. 1st Class Townsend Williams, has been in Afghanistan on his fourth deployment,” the president said, introducing Amy Williams and her two young children before revealing to thunderous applause that Sgt. Williams was present in the House chamber. A happy moment, but why shouldn’t all military families experience the same joy?

Reuniting one family is good, but what about the tens of thousands of other families still separated by wars Trump could end at any moment? The president talks a good talk about ending “endless wars,” to use a phrase from last year’s SOTU, but he has failed to extricate the United States from a single conflict. The incongruity is indefensible.

Trump has promised, again and again, to finish these misadventures and bring American soldiers home. With three-quarters of this term complete, he is instead pursuing an erratic foreign policy lightly seasoned with the rhetoric of restraint, words belied by a wasteful military build-up and a stagnant prosecution of the very wars he campaigned against. The 2020 SOTU showcased this inconsistency..

The substantive portion of the foreign policy section of the speech was brief: “As we defend American lives, we are working to end American wars in the Middle East. We have made tremendous progress and peace talks are underway. I am not looking to kill hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan, many of them totally innocent,” Trump said. “It is also not our function to serve other nations as law enforcement agencies,” he continued. “We are working to finally end America's longest war and bring our troops back home.”

This is all to the good, but what’s the delay? Trump has shown himself more than willing to govern by executive order on issues he deems important, and there is no legal constraint on his ability to “end America’s longest war”—or, indeed, any of our other military interventions in the greater Middle East and North Africa, most notably those in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.