Headlines are replete with former President Trump indictments and federal felony charges. But Trump still intends to run for president again in 2024, if he is still a free man. What do those countries on whom we count on for support and assistance in pursuit of our foreign policy objectives think about Trump becoming the U. S. President again.
Foreign policy plays a significant role in every presidential administration and absorbs much presidential and staff time and attention. It’s primary objectives involve: promoting stability in all regions of the world, preventing enemies from threatening the United States or our allies with weapons of mass destruction, and protecting and assisting American citizens who travel, conduct business, and live abroad. It is not a frivolous endeavor and the budget it absorbs is in the billions.
Let’s examine the international support Trump will attract, starting with Europe, the traditional bastion of U.S. foreign policy support.
“The world is not ending, as some people seem to be suggesting,” said the German Ambassador to the United States. “Let’s not panic.” The Ambassador was addressing fear of four more years of U.S. President Donald Trump, among Europe’s foreign policy elite. They do not deny that relations between the U.S. and Europe were at an historic low during Trump’s previous tenure.
A senior European diplomat said, of all the innumerable “horrors,” the worst aspect of Trump is the chaos he brings to the world arena: “The lack of being able to plan, the lack of being able to extrapolate from a normal set of facts and arguments…”
Radosław Sikorski, a former Polish defense minister and longtime foreign minister, called Trump’s first term “an extraordinary saga of bluster and incompetence.”
After a G7 summit, dominated by Trump, German Chancellor Angela Merkel remarked “The era in which we could fully rely on others is over…” “That’s what I experienced over the past several days.” “We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands — naturally in friendship with the United States of America, and Russia, she said to applause from the Christian Social Union (CSU).
Most European officials and diplomats can point to a moment in Trump’s first term when a feeling of doom set in — a sense that relations between Europe and the U.S. were splintering and potentially suffering irreparable harm. It is obvious, Europeans do not look forward to another 4 years of a Trump presidency.
And what about the Middle East, which has been our predominant foreign policy area of interest since 1948, except for the periods of the Korean War, Vietnam and the Cuban missile crisis. Ten thousand Americans have died in the implementation of our Middle East policy objectives, and 9/11 killed more Americans than Pearl Harbor.
During his presidency Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and announced the movement of our Embassy to the city. Israel occupies the city illegally, and thus does not hold sovereignty in the city.
Arabs
and Muslims around the world, 1.9 billion of them, condemned the U.S.
policy decision, and considered it an incendiary move in which
Washington was abandoning its leading role as a peace mediator in the
region. Worldwide demonstrations burned American flags and images of
Trump.
The European Union and the United Nations also voiced alarm at President Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and its repercussions for any chances of reviving peace talks.
Israel, of course, applauded Trump’s decision.
Among Muslim leaders, Trump has been accused of being an Islamophobic bigot.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls wrote on Twitter, “Mr. Trump fuels hatred: our ONLY enemy is radical Islam.” Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron said he “completely disagrees” with Trump and sees his comments as “divisive, unhelpful and quite simply wrong.”
A day after Donald Trump issued a statement calling for “a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” world leaders and heads of organizations ranging from religious groups to the U.N. refugee agency, expressed shock and revulsion at Trump’s comments.
In the UK, the Labour Party’s Jack Dromey told The Mirror, "Donald Trump is a dangerous fool who would divide people and faiths just when we most need a unity of people and faiths to defeat ISIS.”
In the Muslim world, Egypt’s official religious spokesman, Dar al-Ifta, said Trump’s remarks amounted to “hate rhetoric.”
The head of the Pakistan’s biggest council of Muslim clerics, said that Trump’s stance promotes violence. “If some Muslim leader says there is a war between Christians and Muslims, we condemn him. So why should we not condemn an American if he says that?” And a prominent Pakistani human rights lawyer told NBC that “He is creating a hatred between Muslims and the United States of America.”
Should Trump regain the White House, his foreign policy objectives will undoubtedly be the most difficult to achieve perhaps as any in the history of the nation.
Ron Estes served 25 years as an Operations Officer in the CIA Clandestine Service.
