"The End of Smugness"

Perhaps the shock of Trump winning the election is beginning to wear off- at least for some.  Devin Stewart, "senior fellow and director of the Asia program at Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and a Truman Security Fellow. He has served as an adjunct professor of international affairs at Columbia University and New York University", and a Democrat who admits that he felt at the time that "a Trump victory seemed to portend certain economic disaster, nuclear war, and pretty much the end of America as we knew it." has penned a piece titled "Trump and the End of Smugness", and shockingly enough, he doesn't mean Trump's.

He puts aside the feelings Trump may evoke, and what he refers to as the left's "efforts at amateur psychoanalysis", to examine what Trump has actually done in the arena of foreign policy.  It turns out that it's a remarkably rational, incisive examination of Trump's foreign policy record, and an attempt to begin to define a "Trump Doctrine".  My sense is that he's reasonably accurate.  If you'd like to have a rational argument about Trump's foreign policy with someone who is against Trump, maybe have them read this first.
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4 comments:

  1. Grim1:46 PM

    There is a kind of logic at work. It takes a minute to see, and it’s not as if Trump himself has worked it out in rational terms. But it’s there, and it works a fair part of the time.

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  2. E Hines3:04 PM

    Stewart isn't the only one. From Trump's 60 Minutes interview:

    I always used to say the toughest people are Manhattan real estate guys and blah, blah. Now I say they’re babies. This is the most deceptive, vicious world. It is vicious, it's full of lies, deceit, and deception. You make a deal with somebody and it's like making a deal with that table.

    Eric Hines

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  3. Gringo10:19 PM

    One reason I left the Left was the smugness of so many lefties.

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  4. douglas3:24 AM

    Yeah, I think the title is certainly overly optimistic, but he is certainly trying to put aside the emotions and make a reasonable analysis. It was the contrast with pretty much everything from the left today that struck me as worthy of note.

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