The article goes on to examine that record and I think it makes some cogent points. I myself posted a couple of times before the election that I thought Hillary Clinton’s statement that she would establish a no-fly zone in Syria when elected President was far more worrying than anything Trump said. Shooting Russian jets out of the sky would have been a surefire recipe for disaster and I breathed a sigh of relief when it became clear she would never get the chance.
So was I, truth be told. At best, the result is maybe you dodged a bullet, but in doing so you walked across a busy highway. Maybe nothing will happen, maybe something a lot worse than a bullet will.
That’s exactly what she should have done. If we’re back to Cold War brinksmanship that means we can’t back down just because Russia pushes us in some part of the world.
If we set up a no-fly zone, the Russia makes a choice whether to violate it and risk their pilots or not, just like they made that calculation when violating Turkish airpsace.
Why in the fucking hell would we want to go back to Cold War brinkmanship? Back to the time when they had a “doomsday clock” minutes from midnight, back when little kids drilled on how to react to a nuclear strike in schools, when people built bomb shelters in their back yards. And all over a few thousand Syrians in Aleppo? Are you really prepared to risk trading NYC and Chicago for Moscow and St. Petersburg?
That’s the foreign policy position of the supposedly-rational and experienced candidate?
I don’t like New Yorkers much, but even I say no thanks.
because its better than being stepped over by the Russians, who clearly want to build a new Soviet Union. Wanna see what Russia really wants? Check it out.
We should be more selective in picking which areas we declare no-fly-zones over. Nothing and nobody in Syria is worth even a small chance of a war with Russia.
Wrong… Any politician who pretended to accept climate change would be better than a climate change denier. The Human desire for the World to keep being able to support us took the bullet in the face.
Seconded. This is one of the worst legacies of the Iraq war; that the US feels powerless to do anything. And that if we do, people scratch around for some CT of what the real reason for getting involved is (in Syria it’s apparently that the US gives a mega fuck about a pipeline being built :rolleyes:).
As for Trump therefore being a dodged bullet, he’s hardly been consistent on what his foreign policy plans are. I suspect he will be much more dangerous because he will overreact to whatever public opinion is, with absolutely no restraint.
The premise is beyond absurd in its total lack of perspective. Syria is a serious humanitarian and strategic crisis and I frankly don’t know what the answer is, but I do know that the Presidency doesn’t center around one single policy detail that can be easily re-evaluated if the circumstances warrant.
To me this whole argument is kind of like firing your chauffeur because he once made a rolling stop at a stop sign. Not safe – can’t have that. So you fire him and replace him with … a drunken monkey. The way the Trump administration is already shaping up, the man seems determined to do absolutely the wrong thing and the most outrageously asinine thing on every single policy issue that come up. His victory is already been celebrated with a surge in hate crimes, and some of the most notorious incompetents imaginable are being proposed for key roles in government. It’s mind-boggling that anyone could think that this display of malevolent incompetence that is already manifest at this very early stage is “dodging a bullet”. Seems to me that the bullets will soon be flying like raindrops in a summer thunderstorm.