It has been clear for a longtime that the loyalty Republicans in Congress show to President Donald Trump far exceeds any concerns they may have about the president’s unhinged, impulse-driven foreign policy.
That has never been truer than now.
Trump has gotten the country into an unnecessary war in Iran that has seriously depleted and demoralized the U.S. military while dramatically boosting gasoline prices for American consumers. And, having once insisted the war would be over in days, Trump now just makes up bogus assertions of success that only indicate he has no plan at all for bringing the conflict to an end.
In the process, Trump verbally attacks American allies whom he deems insufficiently obedient to his demands. Just in the last few days, he has threatened to “Bomb the sh*t” out of Oman, a longtime Middle East ally, and he has discontinued military exercises with South Korea, apparently because that country’s leader declined to take part in Trump’s Iran misadventure.
In distancing himself from South Korea, Trump once again bragged about his close friendship with Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s vile, nuclear-armed dictator and claimed, showing no evidence, that he and Kim were meeting soon for a love fest.
Trump also came up with a crackpot idea much akin to his threat of colonizing Greenland: make the Strait of Hormuz a U.S. territory. How such a scheme could be accomplished, let alone sustained, was left to the president’s imagination.
The list of Trump’s deranged foreign policy antics is quite long, but the tally of publicly expressed concerns or disagreements coming from Republican senators and representatives is exceedingly short. It is obvious to the entire world — both friends and foes — that the United States is being led by a narcissistic bully who treats international relations like a cage fight, a man who cannot be counted on to hold to any promise. Yet, the faux patriots in the GOP Congress stay quiet and compliant.
House and Senate Republicans’ timidity is not simply a strategy to protect their cozy jobs by avoiding the president’s wrath, it is also a result of their ignorance and disinterest in foreign affairs.
I recently had lunch with a reporter who moved from England to cover Congress for a British publication. Though he had interviewed his share of mediocrities in the British parliament, he was astounded by the number of American congressmen who are incapable of stating informed opinions beyond simplistic sound bites. A great many American voters pay scant attention to what happens in the rest of the world. That ignorance is reflected in the people they elect to Congress who continue to support Trump’s dangerous follies simply because they are unable to discern the obvious: Trump is a deluded know-it-all whose erratic whims are turning the USA into an international pariah.
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