In the battle between Donald Trump’s gut and contradictory evidence, it’s a safe bet which will win the president’s favor. Days after major newspapers reported on a CIA assessment claiming that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the president declared his fulsome support for Saudi Arabia.
Also Read: Trump’s Statement On Saudi Arabia
U.S. President Donald Trump. Photo courtesy/White House
As if one wasn’t enough, there will be two Trump presidencies starting from January. With the Democrats in control of the House of Representatives, the White House will find it more difficult than ever to pursue a productive domestic agenda. Tax cuts, immigration reforms, border security, changes to healthcare—none of this will happen under divided government. As a result, President Trump’s attention will drift inexorably toward foreign affairs…
The United States has spent nearly $6 trillion on wars that directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 people since the 9/11 attacks of 2001.
Some of the Costs of War Project’s main findings include:
370,000 people have died due to direct war violence, including armed forces on all sides of the conflicts, contractors, civilians, journalists, and humanitarian workers.
It is likely that many times more than 370,000 people have died indirectly in these wars, due to malnutrition, damaged infrastructure, and environmental degradation.
200,000 civilians have been killed in direct violence by all parties to these conflicts.
Over 6,800 US soldiers have died in the wars.
We do not know the full extent of how many US service members returning from these wars became injured or ill while deployed.
Many deaths and injuries among US contractors have not been reported as required by law, but it is likely that at least 6,900 have been killed.
10.1 million million Afghan, Iraqi, and Pakistani people are living as war refugees and internally displaced persons, in grossly inadequate conditions.*
The US military is conducting counterterror activities in 76 countries, vastly expanding the counterror war across the globe.
The wars have been accompanied by erosions in civil liberties and human rights at home and abroad.
The human and economic costs of these wars will continue for decades with some costs, such as the financial costs of US veterans’ care, not peaking until mid-century.
US government funding of reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan has totaled over $170 billion. Most of those funds have gone towards arming security forces in both countries. Much of the money allocated to humanitarian relief and rebuilding civil society has been lost to fraud, waste, and abuse.
The cost of the Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Syria wars totals about $5.6 trillion. This does not include future interest costs on borrowing for the wars, which will add an estimated $8 trillion through 2054.
The ripple effects on the US economy have also been significant, including job loss and interest rate increases.
Both Iraq and Afghanistan continue to rank extremely low in global studies of political freedom.
Women in Iraq and Afghanistan are excluded from political power and experience high rates of unemployment and war widowhood.
Compelling alternatives to war were scarcely considered in the aftermath of 9/11 or in the discussion about war against Iraq. Some of those alternatives are still available to the US.
In unrelenting rain, more than sixty world leaders—Presidents and Prime Ministers, kings and princes, from a third of all the nations on Earth—shared big black umbrellas as they marched together down the Champs-Élysées, in Paris, on Sunday. They gathered to mark the hundredth anniversary of the Armistice that ended the fighting of the First World War, and to express global unity. Donald Trump was not among them.
It is possible to think two things at once: that U.S. President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has been “bad,” which many think it has been, and that it has offered a somewhat coherent alternative for how the United States should conduct itself beyond its borders. This suggests that the casual and smug dismissals of Trump, on domestic and foreign policy alike, are missing something important.
Since Donald Trump was sworn in as president in January 2017, he has put America’s democratic system under constant assault. The country has learned that, by itself, the Constitution is not enough to sustain effective and responsible government. This requires, in addition, norms of restraint and good conduct. The president hasn’t just neglected to abide by those norms: He has mocked and repudiated them.
Trump haters may be tempted to conclude from all this that he is about to lead America into a sudden decline, but that is not the point. This American decade started under President Obama, continued under Mr. Trump and survived congressional gridlock throughout, showing that the economy often rises above politics. The economy is driven less by ideology than by its own internal cycles, and this cycle has been turning in America’s favor for so long that it is unlikely to last much longer.
Over the last couple of years, the China-policy debate in the US has begun to reflect more realism, with a growing number of voices recognizing China’s ambition to supplant its American benefactor as the leading global superpower. But is it too late to rein in America’s main geopolitical rival?
The president of the leading global power has made it clear that he has no interest in getting involved in resolving any of the world’s shared problems, dressing up his foreign policy as one of “principled realism.” But there is nothing principled or realistic about it.
Regardless of the outcome of the elections, interested observers in Asia should anticipate four distinct shifts in U.S. foreign policy in the near term: Washington will be increasingly focused on China, Congress will likely support initiatives in the Indo-Pacific with greater resources, Trump may be less constrained in his use of presidential power, and surprisingly, the American people may actually be increasing their commitment to a rules-based order.
