DJT's Safe America

On her 07 October 2023 (the day of...) podcast, "Honestly," Bari Weiss asked Michael Bonstein Oren, former Israeli Ambassador to the US, what might have impacted the timing of the heinous, Hamas raid into southern Israel. Oren replied, to the effect, likely Hamas was watching Donald Trump's rise in the polls, and they wanted to execute their raid before Trump reassumed the presidency. My initial reaction to Oren's comment was, "I wonder what tipped him off?"

During his four-year presidency, from 2016 to 2020, Donald J. Trump executed a US foreign policy clearly echoing Machiavelli's "it is better to be feared than loved" admonition for nation state leaders. Russia, emboldened to annex Crimea during the Obama administration (2014), was quiet during DJT's four years, only to resume her push for hegemonic expansion in eastern Ukraine during the Biden administration. Rocket Man, (North Korea's President Kim Jong Un), paused North Korea's nuclear missile testing for the four-year duration of the Trump presidency only to resume firing rockets after Biden assumed the US presidency. Trump cancelled Obama's-dollars-to-Iran deal while taking out Iran's terrorist leader, Qasem Soleimani, in a targeted drone attack. Under Biden, renewed US appeasement of Iran coincides with Hamas terrorist horror on a scale not seen since WWII.

Post Trump, America has been humiliated by Chinese diplomats in Anchorage; has bungled an exit in Afghanistan leaving her enemies billions of dollars' worth of armaments and thirteen American dead soldiers; downed a Chinese spy balloon only after it had transited the entire continental US; has, conveying weakness, emboldened enemies, Russia and Hamas, to start wars; and, has worried erstwhile friends, who now hedge those friendship bets by coalescing into a new third world power block leaning towards China.

I miss the days when the world was safer because of DJT's projection of a feared America, and not a teetering, patsy America, as is the case today.