Trump unleashes a new foreign policy peril in Syria
The Syria pullout is only the latest Trump decision that has unnerved Pentagon veterans. His earlier expressions of contempt for NATO and the European Union, which created collective security and a reliable Western alliance growing out the World War II and the Cold War, displayed a pathetic disregard of that history.
Trump's naive courtship of Russian President Vladmir Putin at Helsinki, whom he failed to confront on the meddling in the 2016 American election confirmed by the U.S. intelligence community, was a vivid national humiliation.
On the Korean peninsula, the president's buy-in to North Korea dictator Kim Jong Un's assurances that he would de-escalate his nuclear-weapon arsenal compounded the concern of military minds throughout the West, Japan and South Korea that Trump again was blindly crippling the collective security.
Now for perhaps the first time in the Trump era, some strong-willed congressional defenders of the military like Graham are beginning to express reservations about the whims and failures of the man in the Oval Office to inform himself, through experts and papers he seems too lazy to read.
This presidency by tweets, derision and division has taken on the dimensions of a national disaster as frightening as any recent natural climate or weather crisis, with slumbering or uncomprehending members of the Grand Old Party collaborating or just helplessly looking away.
Wake up, America!
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(Jules Witcover's latest book is "The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power," published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@comcast.net.)
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