By Max Boot
September 12, 2024 at 6:30 a.m. EDT
When it comes to the role of commander in chief, U.S. voters face a choice in November between someone who has done the job and someone who hasn’t. Normally this would be an area where experience trumps, so to speak, inexperience. But Tuesday night’s presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump showed why Harris is actually a much safer bet on national security policy. That’s the case even though Harris has been only an adviser, not the actual decision-maker — and, as far as an outsider can tell, not a particularly influential one.
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In a meta sense, the entire debate was a refutation of Trump’s chief foreign policy argument: that he is the only candidate tough enough to stand up to the world’s tyrants and bullies. This plays, of course, into the sexist assumption that a woman doesn’t have what it takes for the world’s toughest job. But anyone who watched the debate could see that Harris was calm and steady. Trump was the one who seemed emotional and erratic. If Trump comes unglued when Harris questions his crowd size, how would he perform in negotiations with actual strongmen such as Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin?
The former president trotted out his usual line about what a “good relationship” he has with the Russian president, and complained that President Joe Biden “hasn’t even made a phone call in two years to Putin.” As if there were anything worth discussing with a despot who is waging war on a neighboring country and clearly has no interest in serious peace negotiations.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...c_magnet-op2024elections_inline_collection_19
Even more bizarrely, Trump tried to claim that he will be more respected abroad than Harris by citing, of all people, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a far-right demagogue who has undermined democracy in his own country and cozied up to China and Russia. Orban “said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump,” Trump bragged, not realizing that he was thereby providing yet more evidence of just how easily he is manipulated by shrewd foreign strongmen.
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Trump made many strange comments in the debate, but, from a geopolitical perspective, his most alarming statement was what he didn’t say. Moderator David Muir of ABC News asked Trump “a very simple question”: “Do you want Ukraine to win this war?” Instead of simply answering in the affirmative, Trump replied, “I want the war to stop.” The audience is entitled to take that as a “no.”
Trump went on to claim that he would end the war in the period between the election and the inauguration. As usual, he never explained how he would achieve this miraculous feat, but it stands to reason that the only way he could possibly do so is by telling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he has to agree to Putin’s terms — whatever they might be.
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Trump’s weakness as a debater, which no doubt reflects his weakness as a negotiator, meant that Harris was never pressed on her own policy shortcomings — namely the fact that, while she wishes Ukraine well, she doesn’t have a plan for Ukraine’s victory, either. Nor does she have a plan for ending the Israel-Gaza war, as she made clear in answering a question about how she would break the “stalemate” between Israel and Hamas. A different opponent might have scored points off her lack of specificity.
Trump revealed how little he learned about foreign policy during his four years in office when he tried to blame the Biden administration for the botched U.S. exit from Afghanistan that he set in motion. The internet was on fire after he claimed to have told “Abdul” — “the head of the Taliban” — that attacks on U.S. troops had to stop or else he would have big problems. “And he said, ‘Why do you send me a picture of my house?’ I said you’re going to have to figure that out, Abdul. And for 18 months we had nobody killed.” Trump’s implication: The Taliban were too afraid of him to attack U.S. troops but went right ahead when Biden took office.
In reality, Abdul Ghani Baradar — presumably the “Abdul” he referred to — is not the head of the Taliban. He is a deputy to the actual Taliban leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada. There was, as the New Republic notes, an 18-month period of time when no U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan (March 2020 to August 2021), but more than third of that time period was during Biden’s presidency.
There is no evidence that the Taliban stopped targeting U.S. troops because Trump threatened to target their leaders’ houses; in fact, U.S. forces spent two decades killing senior Taliban leaders (including Akhundzada’s predecessor) without ending the insurgency. The Taliban refrained from targeting U.S. troops in 2020-2021 only because they did not want to do anything to interfere with the one-sided deal that Trump negotiated, which called for U.S. troops to depart but not for the Taliban to lay down its arms. Incidentally, the suicide bomber who carried out the deadly attack in Kabul on Aug. 26, 2021, which killed 13 U.S. service members, was not even a member of the Taliban; he was an Islamic State operative.
Harris is actually vulnerable on the botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan — she claimed to have been the “last person in the room” when Biden was making the decisions, but now clearly wants to dodge any responsibility for the fiasco that followed. Yet Trump was so lost in a farrago of disinformation and distemper that he was never able to exploit her actual vulnerabilities. His failure on the debate stage gives clues about why he so often failed as commander in chief — and why he doesn’t deserve a second crack at the job.
September 12, 2024 at 6:30 a.m. EDT
When it comes to the role of commander in chief, U.S. voters face a choice in November between someone who has done the job and someone who hasn’t. Normally this would be an area where experience trumps, so to speak, inexperience. But Tuesday night’s presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump showed why Harris is actually a much safer bet on national security policy. That’s the case even though Harris has been only an adviser, not the actual decision-maker — and, as far as an outsider can tell, not a particularly influential one.
Sign up for Shifts, an illustrated newsletter series about the future of work
In a meta sense, the entire debate was a refutation of Trump’s chief foreign policy argument: that he is the only candidate tough enough to stand up to the world’s tyrants and bullies. This plays, of course, into the sexist assumption that a woman doesn’t have what it takes for the world’s toughest job. But anyone who watched the debate could see that Harris was calm and steady. Trump was the one who seemed emotional and erratic. If Trump comes unglued when Harris questions his crowd size, how would he perform in negotiations with actual strongmen such as Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin?
The former president trotted out his usual line about what a “good relationship” he has with the Russian president, and complained that President Joe Biden “hasn’t even made a phone call in two years to Putin.” As if there were anything worth discussing with a despot who is waging war on a neighboring country and clearly has no interest in serious peace negotiations.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...c_magnet-op2024elections_inline_collection_19
Even more bizarrely, Trump tried to claim that he will be more respected abroad than Harris by citing, of all people, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a far-right demagogue who has undermined democracy in his own country and cozied up to China and Russia. Orban “said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump,” Trump bragged, not realizing that he was thereby providing yet more evidence of just how easily he is manipulated by shrewd foreign strongmen.
Follow Max Boot
Trump made many strange comments in the debate, but, from a geopolitical perspective, his most alarming statement was what he didn’t say. Moderator David Muir of ABC News asked Trump “a very simple question”: “Do you want Ukraine to win this war?” Instead of simply answering in the affirmative, Trump replied, “I want the war to stop.” The audience is entitled to take that as a “no.”
Trump went on to claim that he would end the war in the period between the election and the inauguration. As usual, he never explained how he would achieve this miraculous feat, but it stands to reason that the only way he could possibly do so is by telling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he has to agree to Putin’s terms — whatever they might be.
Advertisement
Trump’s weakness as a debater, which no doubt reflects his weakness as a negotiator, meant that Harris was never pressed on her own policy shortcomings — namely the fact that, while she wishes Ukraine well, she doesn’t have a plan for Ukraine’s victory, either. Nor does she have a plan for ending the Israel-Gaza war, as she made clear in answering a question about how she would break the “stalemate” between Israel and Hamas. A different opponent might have scored points off her lack of specificity.
Trump revealed how little he learned about foreign policy during his four years in office when he tried to blame the Biden administration for the botched U.S. exit from Afghanistan that he set in motion. The internet was on fire after he claimed to have told “Abdul” — “the head of the Taliban” — that attacks on U.S. troops had to stop or else he would have big problems. “And he said, ‘Why do you send me a picture of my house?’ I said you’re going to have to figure that out, Abdul. And for 18 months we had nobody killed.” Trump’s implication: The Taliban were too afraid of him to attack U.S. troops but went right ahead when Biden took office.
In reality, Abdul Ghani Baradar — presumably the “Abdul” he referred to — is not the head of the Taliban. He is a deputy to the actual Taliban leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada. There was, as the New Republic notes, an 18-month period of time when no U.S. troops were killed in Afghanistan (March 2020 to August 2021), but more than third of that time period was during Biden’s presidency.
There is no evidence that the Taliban stopped targeting U.S. troops because Trump threatened to target their leaders’ houses; in fact, U.S. forces spent two decades killing senior Taliban leaders (including Akhundzada’s predecessor) without ending the insurgency. The Taliban refrained from targeting U.S. troops in 2020-2021 only because they did not want to do anything to interfere with the one-sided deal that Trump negotiated, which called for U.S. troops to depart but not for the Taliban to lay down its arms. Incidentally, the suicide bomber who carried out the deadly attack in Kabul on Aug. 26, 2021, which killed 13 U.S. service members, was not even a member of the Taliban; he was an Islamic State operative.
Harris is actually vulnerable on the botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan — she claimed to have been the “last person in the room” when Biden was making the decisions, but now clearly wants to dodge any responsibility for the fiasco that followed. Yet Trump was so lost in a farrago of disinformation and distemper that he was never able to exploit her actual vulnerabilities. His failure on the debate stage gives clues about why he so often failed as commander in chief — and why he doesn’t deserve a second crack at the job.
