The policy of the GOP for half a century has been that the executive branch enjoys considerable latitude in foreign affairs. Instead the text was the legislative equivalent of calling Trump a big meanie. It took him to task for his “precipitous” decision to pull American forces out of Syria and Afghanistan and for failing to genuflect with sufficient respect before the altar of our no-doubt extremely competent and disinterested intelligence services.
The problem with this nonsense is that it is not even internally consistent. You cannot simultaneously suggest that the president is being hasty by withdrawing from Syria and call him a fool for publicly doubting the CIA’s finding that Iran is complying with the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal. If the argument is that the United States must continue to maintain a significant troop presence in Syria in order to counteract the no-doubt world-historic threat to “America’s security” posed by Iran, why is it irresponsible of Trump to insist that the CIA is “naive” in its assertions about the Islamic republic’s lack of progress toward nuclear weapons? Shouldn’t he be praised for his hard-headed seriousness about the real danger posed by the mullahs? Republicans have been insisting for nearly 20 years that Iran is a budding nuclear power on the verge of blowing us all to smithereens. Wasn’t Barack Obama a feckless liberal ninny because he failed to take this very threat seriously? Obama’s argument for his administration’s Iran policy was premised upon the same conclusions Trump is now rejecting. As I often tell my children, you can pick one but not both.
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