To say that Trump’s foreign policy is really good except for the tariff nonsense, is like saying that Ted Bundy was a really nice guy except for the raping and murdering.
The bad thing about the tariff policy is not just that it is terrible economic policy, but also that it has totally alienated reliable US allies. Don't forget that this whole tariff business started out targeting primarily Canada and Mexico.
And have we forgotten about how Trump has threated to annex Canada and Greenland? And sowing doubt about US commitment to NATO? The disastrous meeting with Zelenskyj?
Trump has managed to severely alienate all his traditional allies. We cannot in our right minds call that good foreign policy — even if this Maduro business turns out on balance to be positive (which is still too soon to say).
Breaking the Iran nuclear deal was also a big own goal. It's worked out better than I expected, since Israel was able to find an excuse to kick Iran's ass, but I'm skeptical that they can manage the situation long term by regularly mowing the proverbial lawn in Iran as well as Gaza. Seems infeasible and prohibitively costly. So Iran will go nuclear soonish.
I don't have a problem with Trump being praised for his actions in Venezuela. Where I disagree is in equating this one incident with a relatively small country (with admittedly large oil reserves) with the totality of "his entirely good (sans tariffs) foreign policy."
Antagonizing Denmark, threatening Canada, attacking Zelensky, supporting the AfD, praising Putin, the endless theater of Ukrainian "peace talks" with no discernible benefit, humiliating the South African president on TV without actually obtaining any meaningful concessions within South Africa itself... Lots of fanfare, not much good.
It's really too early to tell what will happen. I hope for the best, but skepticism is warranted.
The threats against Greenland are a unique level of incompetence. They managed to distract everyone from their spectacularly successful Venezuela operation, to focus on a bunch of warmongering threats against a NATO ally in less than a week. Nice job, Steven Miller. You would think maybe Trump would have wanted to wait to see what his poll numbers looked like for a split second before changing the subject to something that's definitely far less popular.
Nevermind that it's early January which is not exactly an ideal time to invade Greenland.
Trump doesn't have to worry about his poll numbers. He is not an electoral candidate.
GOP Congressmen might have to worry, but that's their problem, not Trump's. He's not the Party Leader who will lose anything if the Dems take either house this year.
Trump's presidency is great, except for his tarriff idiocy, and his pandering to white nationalism, and his wanting to end democracy, and his open "pay to play" corruption, and his hiring of unqualified sycophants, and his murdering of people I hope actually were drug dealers, and his threatening of longtime allies, and his attempting to illegally annex a territory that already gives us free reign, and his arresting of a foreign head of state without a plan, and his committment to the bizarre quasi-fascist goals of Project 2025, and his enabling of Musk's DOGE idiocy that didn't actually fix anything, and his shameless slapping of his name on things, and his "Gulf of America" renaming, and his hiring of RFK Jr. to run American health care, and his White House renovation, and his screwing over Ukraine, and his enabling of Russia, and his inexplicable pardoning of the Honduran former president, and his deportation of a gay haridresser to a Salvadoran prison for being a "gang member", and all of the other illegal and unethical shit he's doing that we don't know about, and his denoucing of anyone who questions him as an "enemy of the state".
Other than all of that, he is great!*
Not RH's best take.
*I really could have gone on, but I was getting depressed just writing all of this out.
You do know Richard contributed to Project 2025 right? Also you shouldn’t really mix stupid grievances (Gulf of America, WH ballroom) with the many legitimate ones it makes you look kinda deranged.
I had thought he was a remorseful former right-winger, but I'm starting to question that now. I'm a former conservative, now centrist-liberal, who enjoys contrarian takes, but even I have limits.
I don't think including GOA is "deranged", but rather sort of a running example of Trump's bizarre controversies, large and small. Calling this "deranged" feels a bit like the standard conservative "TDS" gaslighting.
That's what I like about him. I'd like to think I share that with him, albeit in a different way.
The point of my original comment was that I thought this piece seemed to be normalizing the abnormal, more in line with your typical Faux News slop than the more stimulating RH takes.
When I moved over to being liberal back in the mid-2010's, I still felt the need to keep in touch with some of my former conservatism. But I dropped most of my conservative sources when they began to shill shamelessly for Trump during his first admin.
Reading RH is one of my attempts to reintroduce conservatism to myself to some degree - this desire being caused by my fatigue with wokeness and other forms of liberal correctness. But this piece rubbed me the wrong way.
This piece seems like you don't understand how power works. The Chavista regime has a whole network of client interests, from the top all the way down to the paramilitaries employed by the regime to suppress dissent. All of those people are paid off in various ways for their support, and paying them off entails giving them a cut of the oil money, or giving them control of other revenue streams. State controlled industries, for instance. This is why it's hard to change government policies without wholesale sweeping aside the existing regime. It would take someone who has a lot of internal support in the country, like Milei in Argentina, someone with the legitimacy you get from actually being elected, to take away the gravy trains. Delcy Rodriguez is the VP of a former strongman who stole the election last time. She wasn't elected in any sense. She has zero legitimacy. While she may be able to keep running the Venezuelan state apparatus and maintain all the relationships with existing interests, she's hardly in a position to start making major economic reforms that will piss off literally everyone inside the old Chavista power structure. Not going to happen. They need to have democratic elections to put a leader in charge who has a mandate to make those kinds of reforms.
You make some good points, but I find yesterday's articles by Phillips O'Brien and Anne Applebaum a lot more persuasive. Plus, responsibility/blame is much more likely to accrue to an actor - ie, it's safer to take the conservative route and not act in most cases.
Richard this is just nonsense - not even an argument, but a total failure to link relevant facts to logical conclusions. Delcy has been in government since the Chavez days and in important roles throughout Maduro's tenure. Her entire family is deeply connected to the regime.
The recent GDP growth has been driven by a rebound in oil production off a very low base vs. reserves and historic production levels. This is mean reversion, not reform or evidence of a path to sustained growth. The funding has come from China which has been the main source of Venezuela's limited FDI and export sales. All the core problems of PDSVA (lack of access to markets and capital, corruption, mismanagement, etc.) have been constants for the last decade or more. Same is true for the other state-backed companies which are the only significant players in this economy.
Poverty has remained very high by any metric.
GDP per capita remains disastrously low, like significantly worse than the Chavez days or countries that we can all agree are not performing well.
Inflation has remained very high and the currency has remained unstable, such that most people transact in dollars/black markets.
The only metric where I see any big improvement in recent years is unemployment - but you would expect low long-run unemployment in a very poor socialist country without a functioning government where the alternatives to employment are literal starvation or outmigration.
Have any multinationals other than a few Chinese state companies returned to Venezuela? No.
Is there any evidence of wealthy locals with offshore wealth bringing it back to the country to invest? No.
But sure, call a Marxist "pro market" without citing any statistics or actions and pretend that you know something about a topic.
I think both Khruschev and Deng inherited regimes that were very stable and secure, both from internal and external enemies. That gave them the space to conduct reforms.
Rodriguez I think has inherited a poisoned chalice, effectively placed in power (that's how it'll be seen) by the invader (USA). It's really too early to say anything definitive right now. Also, Rubio is seemingly going to be a Viceroy or something; does that mean he gets to override Rodriguez and the Venezuelan military whenever he wants? How stable will that situation be?
Trump's foreign policy is really good ? He is threatening to invade Greenland, Canada, Columbia and other countries. Get your american head out of your american ass (I'm canadian).
Those goals look like they could all be good for the United States, which is the country that Trump was elected to be President of. Who cares if they're bad for Canada? We didn't elect him. (and I'm Canadian too.)
My bad. I thought the question of whether a foreign policy might lead to war, to empowering dictators who also want to invade neighboring countries or to denying the rights of other people was a criteria.
Actually none of those criteria are relevant to a foreign policy. We would perhaps wish that they were, because they make life easier and more comfortable for us foreigners the policy is directed at, but that's not relevant to Americans. If, for example, the rebuilding of Venezuela's oil industry makes Canadian crude eventually so uncompetitive that Alberta has to accept very low royalty in order to be able to sell it, that is bad for us but great for the U.S. That will hardly be a "bad" foreign policy from America's viewpoint.
Genghis Khan was a highly successful leader, from the point of view of his tribesmen.
The impact of foreign policy on other countries is relevant to its quality just like the impact of your actions on others is relevant to their quality.
That's why we have prisons.
You can think that the strong do what they want and the weak endure what they must, and that there's nothing else to say about right/wrong, good/bad, but that's 1) highly debatable 2) unlikely that you coherently apply this outlook in your life.
In other words, if I were to saw your leg off, you would scream that I shouldn't do that. I think you would be right.
Incredible hubris here, like celebrating the Iraq War in April 2003. The hot takes economy incentivizes reaction to press releases instead of learning how the actual politics works inside a country.
The thing is that this isn’t comparable to Iraq. No occupation. Different hemisphere. No Islam.
I think Trump is a bad president who meaningfully shortened the lifespan of the republic. But people said he was starting WWIII when he antagonized NK, when he took out Soleimani, etc. He didn’t. He makes aggressive moves that carry downside risks but he never fully commits in a way that could cause lasting damage to his image as a strongman.
Looks like it was fixed. I think just about everyone would have to hand it to Trump if he somehow netted 30 billion barrels of oil from a 90 minute special operation. That approaches total annual oil consumption worldwide.
Trump has the instincts of a bully. He likes to pick on people that seem weak. From a foreign policy standpoint, this isn't actually a terrible way of going about things.
Figures like Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, and the Kims are many things, but they did not ever seem weak. They clearly signaled, as hard as they possibly could, that they were formidable adversaries that would not go down without a fight. The Taliban is still around, the Kims are still around, and while Saddam did get overthrown easily, the resulting chaos and turmoil this created was an overall disaster.
In comparison, Maduro seemed weak. His social demeanor as ruler of Venezuela strongly projected incompetency, corruption, and idiocy. The EU seems weak: the male leaders seem like they have barely any masculine fortitude, and the whole continental vibe is akin to a kid who trembles in fear over the possibility of being shoved in a locker. The leader of Iran seems weak: decades of terror and Islamic obscurantist extremism have given way to a haphazard, scattered country, ran by a kooky-seeming old guy. In comparison, Putin, Kim Jong-Un, and the Saudis project strength.
Richard, Be careful what you ask for, you may get it.
The “welfare-warfare state” describes a political economy in which a government runs expansive domestic social programs while also sustaining a large, active military establishment. Although often framed as a “guns versus butter” trade-off, the concept argues that welfare and warfare are frequently co-produced: neither can be sustained at scale without building the same centralized machinery to raise revenue, finance deficits, manage large bureaucracies, and coordinate society through planning and mobilization, and each can reinforce the political legitimacy of the other.
That is the law of unintended consequences in policy form. If you do not want both, tough sh-t. In practice, if you demand one at scale, you will get the other.
I would be interested in reading a defense of Trumps foreign policy. Ive been underwhelmed to say the least, especially with respect to Ukraine. Maybe that is starting to change now that we are capturing Russian flagged shadow fleet vessels. But thus far he has been arguably worse than Biden on Ukraine, which is saying a lot.
To say that Trump’s foreign policy is really good except for the tariff nonsense, is like saying that Ted Bundy was a really nice guy except for the raping and murdering.
The bad thing about the tariff policy is not just that it is terrible economic policy, but also that it has totally alienated reliable US allies. Don't forget that this whole tariff business started out targeting primarily Canada and Mexico.
And have we forgotten about how Trump has threated to annex Canada and Greenland? And sowing doubt about US commitment to NATO? The disastrous meeting with Zelenskyj?
Trump has managed to severely alienate all his traditional allies. We cannot in our right minds call that good foreign policy — even if this Maduro business turns out on balance to be positive (which is still too soon to say).
Breaking the Iran nuclear deal was also a big own goal. It's worked out better than I expected, since Israel was able to find an excuse to kick Iran's ass, but I'm skeptical that they can manage the situation long term by regularly mowing the proverbial lawn in Iran as well as Gaza. Seems infeasible and prohibitively costly. So Iran will go nuclear soonish.
I don't have a problem with Trump being praised for his actions in Venezuela. Where I disagree is in equating this one incident with a relatively small country (with admittedly large oil reserves) with the totality of "his entirely good (sans tariffs) foreign policy."
Antagonizing Denmark, threatening Canada, attacking Zelensky, supporting the AfD, praising Putin, the endless theater of Ukrainian "peace talks" with no discernible benefit, humiliating the South African president on TV without actually obtaining any meaningful concessions within South Africa itself... Lots of fanfare, not much good.
It's really too early to tell what will happen. I hope for the best, but skepticism is warranted.
The threats against Greenland are a unique level of incompetence. They managed to distract everyone from their spectacularly successful Venezuela operation, to focus on a bunch of warmongering threats against a NATO ally in less than a week. Nice job, Steven Miller. You would think maybe Trump would have wanted to wait to see what his poll numbers looked like for a split second before changing the subject to something that's definitely far less popular.
Nevermind that it's early January which is not exactly an ideal time to invade Greenland.
Trump doesn't have to worry about his poll numbers. He is not an electoral candidate.
GOP Congressmen might have to worry, but that's their problem, not Trump's. He's not the Party Leader who will lose anything if the Dems take either house this year.
I think Trump cares about his poll numbers for egotistical reasons.
Ah, OK. So it's just uninformed speculation. Got it. Thanks.
don't forget about picking a fight with india because he wants modi to say he ended the india-pakistan conflict
Trump's presidency is great, except for his tarriff idiocy, and his pandering to white nationalism, and his wanting to end democracy, and his open "pay to play" corruption, and his hiring of unqualified sycophants, and his murdering of people I hope actually were drug dealers, and his threatening of longtime allies, and his attempting to illegally annex a territory that already gives us free reign, and his arresting of a foreign head of state without a plan, and his committment to the bizarre quasi-fascist goals of Project 2025, and his enabling of Musk's DOGE idiocy that didn't actually fix anything, and his shameless slapping of his name on things, and his "Gulf of America" renaming, and his hiring of RFK Jr. to run American health care, and his White House renovation, and his screwing over Ukraine, and his enabling of Russia, and his inexplicable pardoning of the Honduran former president, and his deportation of a gay haridresser to a Salvadoran prison for being a "gang member", and all of the other illegal and unethical shit he's doing that we don't know about, and his denoucing of anyone who questions him as an "enemy of the state".
Other than all of that, he is great!*
Not RH's best take.
*I really could have gone on, but I was getting depressed just writing all of this out.
You do know Richard contributed to Project 2025 right? Also you shouldn’t really mix stupid grievances (Gulf of America, WH ballroom) with the many legitimate ones it makes you look kinda deranged.
I had thought he was a remorseful former right-winger, but I'm starting to question that now. I'm a former conservative, now centrist-liberal, who enjoys contrarian takes, but even I have limits.
I don't think including GOA is "deranged", but rather sort of a running example of Trump's bizarre controversies, large and small. Calling this "deranged" feels a bit like the standard conservative "TDS" gaslighting.
Richard is pretty unashamedly conservative in his own weird heterodox way when it comes to certain issues.
That's what I like about him. I'd like to think I share that with him, albeit in a different way.
The point of my original comment was that I thought this piece seemed to be normalizing the abnormal, more in line with your typical Faux News slop than the more stimulating RH takes.
When I moved over to being liberal back in the mid-2010's, I still felt the need to keep in touch with some of my former conservatism. But I dropped most of my conservative sources when they began to shill shamelessly for Trump during his first admin.
Reading RH is one of my attempts to reintroduce conservatism to myself to some degree - this desire being caused by my fatigue with wokeness and other forms of liberal correctness. But this piece rubbed me the wrong way.
I'm not mad, just disappointed.
kinda
Is there any rationalization that Richard will not employ?
Initially, he was talking about "regime change". But Trump left the regime in place, so he talks about the "golden mean".
He then calls bombing a country's capital and kidnapping their president as ... "gradualism"!
Do words have meaning?
This piece seems like you don't understand how power works. The Chavista regime has a whole network of client interests, from the top all the way down to the paramilitaries employed by the regime to suppress dissent. All of those people are paid off in various ways for their support, and paying them off entails giving them a cut of the oil money, or giving them control of other revenue streams. State controlled industries, for instance. This is why it's hard to change government policies without wholesale sweeping aside the existing regime. It would take someone who has a lot of internal support in the country, like Milei in Argentina, someone with the legitimacy you get from actually being elected, to take away the gravy trains. Delcy Rodriguez is the VP of a former strongman who stole the election last time. She wasn't elected in any sense. She has zero legitimacy. While she may be able to keep running the Venezuelan state apparatus and maintain all the relationships with existing interests, she's hardly in a position to start making major economic reforms that will piss off literally everyone inside the old Chavista power structure. Not going to happen. They need to have democratic elections to put a leader in charge who has a mandate to make those kinds of reforms.
Great idea. But who will bell the cat?
You make some good points, but I find yesterday's articles by Phillips O'Brien and Anne Applebaum a lot more persuasive. Plus, responsibility/blame is much more likely to accrue to an actor - ie, it's safer to take the conservative route and not act in most cases.
Richard this is just nonsense - not even an argument, but a total failure to link relevant facts to logical conclusions. Delcy has been in government since the Chavez days and in important roles throughout Maduro's tenure. Her entire family is deeply connected to the regime.
The recent GDP growth has been driven by a rebound in oil production off a very low base vs. reserves and historic production levels. This is mean reversion, not reform or evidence of a path to sustained growth. The funding has come from China which has been the main source of Venezuela's limited FDI and export sales. All the core problems of PDSVA (lack of access to markets and capital, corruption, mismanagement, etc.) have been constants for the last decade or more. Same is true for the other state-backed companies which are the only significant players in this economy.
Poverty has remained very high by any metric.
GDP per capita remains disastrously low, like significantly worse than the Chavez days or countries that we can all agree are not performing well.
Inflation has remained very high and the currency has remained unstable, such that most people transact in dollars/black markets.
The only metric where I see any big improvement in recent years is unemployment - but you would expect low long-run unemployment in a very poor socialist country without a functioning government where the alternatives to employment are literal starvation or outmigration.
Have any multinationals other than a few Chinese state companies returned to Venezuela? No.
Is there any evidence of wealthy locals with offshore wealth bringing it back to the country to invest? No.
But sure, call a Marxist "pro market" without citing any statistics or actions and pretend that you know something about a topic.
Can't see why you're simping for Trump all of a sudden after making sense most of last year.
I think both Khruschev and Deng inherited regimes that were very stable and secure, both from internal and external enemies. That gave them the space to conduct reforms.
Rodriguez I think has inherited a poisoned chalice, effectively placed in power (that's how it'll be seen) by the invader (USA). It's really too early to say anything definitive right now. Also, Rubio is seemingly going to be a Viceroy or something; does that mean he gets to override Rodriguez and the Venezuelan military whenever he wants? How stable will that situation be?
Trump's foreign policy SUCKS!!!
There is not one thing that he has done, or is planning to do, that serves the best interests of America or democratic ideals.
Trump's foreign policy is really good ? He is threatening to invade Greenland, Canada, Columbia and other countries. Get your american head out of your american ass (I'm canadian).
He didn’t say it was good for Canada!
Those goals look like they could all be good for the United States, which is the country that Trump was elected to be President of. Who cares if they're bad for Canada? We didn't elect him. (and I'm Canadian too.)
My bad. I thought the question of whether a foreign policy might lead to war, to empowering dictators who also want to invade neighboring countries or to denying the rights of other people was a criteria.
Yay for Genghis Khan's foreign policy !
Actually none of those criteria are relevant to a foreign policy. We would perhaps wish that they were, because they make life easier and more comfortable for us foreigners the policy is directed at, but that's not relevant to Americans. If, for example, the rebuilding of Venezuela's oil industry makes Canadian crude eventually so uncompetitive that Alberta has to accept very low royalty in order to be able to sell it, that is bad for us but great for the U.S. That will hardly be a "bad" foreign policy from America's viewpoint.
Genghis Khan was a highly successful leader, from the point of view of his tribesmen.
The impact of foreign policy on other countries is relevant to its quality just like the impact of your actions on others is relevant to their quality.
That's why we have prisons.
You can think that the strong do what they want and the weak endure what they must, and that there's nothing else to say about right/wrong, good/bad, but that's 1) highly debatable 2) unlikely that you coherently apply this outlook in your life.
In other words, if I were to saw your leg off, you would scream that I shouldn't do that. I think you would be right.
Incredible hubris here, like celebrating the Iraq War in April 2003. The hot takes economy incentivizes reaction to press releases instead of learning how the actual politics works inside a country.
The thing is that this isn’t comparable to Iraq. No occupation. Different hemisphere. No Islam.
I think Trump is a bad president who meaningfully shortened the lifespan of the republic. But people said he was starting WWIII when he antagonized NK, when he took out Soleimani, etc. He didn’t. He makes aggressive moves that carry downside risks but he never fully commits in a way that could cause lasting damage to his image as a strongman.
30 to 50 billion barrels - or million?
Looks like it was fixed. I think just about everyone would have to hand it to Trump if he somehow netted 30 billion barrels of oil from a 90 minute special operation. That approaches total annual oil consumption worldwide.
Trump has the instincts of a bully. He likes to pick on people that seem weak. From a foreign policy standpoint, this isn't actually a terrible way of going about things.
Figures like Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, and the Kims are many things, but they did not ever seem weak. They clearly signaled, as hard as they possibly could, that they were formidable adversaries that would not go down without a fight. The Taliban is still around, the Kims are still around, and while Saddam did get overthrown easily, the resulting chaos and turmoil this created was an overall disaster.
In comparison, Maduro seemed weak. His social demeanor as ruler of Venezuela strongly projected incompetency, corruption, and idiocy. The EU seems weak: the male leaders seem like they have barely any masculine fortitude, and the whole continental vibe is akin to a kid who trembles in fear over the possibility of being shoved in a locker. The leader of Iran seems weak: decades of terror and Islamic obscurantist extremism have given way to a haphazard, scattered country, ran by a kooky-seeming old guy. In comparison, Putin, Kim Jong-Un, and the Saudis project strength.
Richard, Be careful what you ask for, you may get it.
The “welfare-warfare state” describes a political economy in which a government runs expansive domestic social programs while also sustaining a large, active military establishment. Although often framed as a “guns versus butter” trade-off, the concept argues that welfare and warfare are frequently co-produced: neither can be sustained at scale without building the same centralized machinery to raise revenue, finance deficits, manage large bureaucracies, and coordinate society through planning and mobilization, and each can reinforce the political legitimacy of the other.
That is the law of unintended consequences in policy form. If you do not want both, tough sh-t. In practice, if you demand one at scale, you will get the other.
I would be interested in reading a defense of Trumps foreign policy. Ive been underwhelmed to say the least, especially with respect to Ukraine. Maybe that is starting to change now that we are capturing Russian flagged shadow fleet vessels. But thus far he has been arguably worse than Biden on Ukraine, which is saying a lot.