National Security Republicans tell themselves that Obama was an old school lefty of the ilk who believed that the Dulles brothers destroyed the world; national security Democrats act like Trump is a Nazi—and that the transition from Hope and Change to MAGA has been tectonic.
The truth is that MAGA needed little transition, requiring nothing butoffensively bad style, Brylcreem and the typical loud things that you would expect with a shift from limousine liberal to bridge and tunnel. Things seem to have gotten marginally dumber, but it’s a matter of degree. The unserious and un-American (yes, I said it) foreign policy over the past 10 years has left the country in a bad place.
The boondoggle in Hanoi seems scripted to prove that Eliot Cohen’s character description for the Obama administration, “Little Metternichs,” applies to the Trump administration, too.
In announcing that he would first meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Trump waved off complaints that he was giving Kim what no American president has been willing to give to a North Korean leader: the legitimacy lent by sitting with the president of the United States. America’s revolutionary history paid for that legitimacy.
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