You might be interested in Uri Friedman’s Atlantic piece in which he speculates about the incoming Trump Administration’s approach to terrorism. He first summarizes President Obama’s views:
Barack Obama has downgraded Bush’s War to a fight, and the enemy from Terror to specific terrorist groups. He rejects the notion of a clash of civilizations, both because he thinks it overestimates the threat of terrorism to the United States and because he doesn’t want to affirm the jihadists’ narrative of a struggle between Islam and infidels in the West. When a U.S. president uses “loose language that appears to pose a civilizational conflict between the West and Islam, or the modern world and Islam, then we make it harder, not easier, for our friends and allies and ordinary people to resist and push back against the worst impulses inside the Muslim world,†Obama told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.
What will President Trump’s alternative be? I don’t think there’s any way to tell. If he turns his attention to foreign policy early in his first term, it will be a significant departure from previous incoming presidents.
But with this guy anything can happen.
Well, I’m more worried He’s appointed another Goldman Sachs guy and is talking about borrowing another trillion for our crumbling roads and bridges. If thats the case we really are lost, because anyone we elect must bow to the financial sector, as Obama has done, and now Trump?
Gray Shambler, Trump made the pitch that he uniquely could fix a crooked system because he had been a part of it. Its just doubling down (again).
Shaw, markers down, hope you’re right.
I’m not particularly hopeful about anything; I’m just not sure that any of these appointments mean anything. We’ll look back a few years from now and we’ll see the pattern, but right now, we’re in uncharted territory.
Bully boy fascism for The Workers. It worked here.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/trumps-first-big-promise-kept/509219/
“…. the Carrier plant, of course: His vow either to convince the company to stay in the United States or else slap it with a huge tariff was symbolic of the protectionist view he expounded for trade. It was also a key test for his claim that the negotiation skills he said he’d honed in years of business could produce results.
That makes the deal that Trump has apparently struck to keep the jobs in Indiana a major political win—the president-elect fulfilling a major promise well before he takes the oath of office.”
It’s all mere political signaling that jobs are important. True virtue lies in following a higher calling, no matter how many other people’s jobs are sacrificed for the greater good.
It’s going to be a big announcement, of course. News outlets are already reporting that a $700,000 per year subsidy (for an unknown number of years) is going to be paid, by the State of Indiana. Extortion by Carrier? Payment of bribe by Indiana?
Agree with no way to tell. He could anything from invasion to bombings to giving us another 4 years of Bush/Obama. However, since he has placed such strong anti-Islamists like Bannon and Flynn in charge, I would expect more aggressive policy.
Steve