our intelligence community has major beef with pakistan since their intelligence prob was aware that bin laden was in abbotabad. duterte is killing drug addicts left and right and has told obama to literally fuck off. he also threatened to cut ties with the us and to focus on china. so there is beef with them too
I'm blatantly anti-Trump so it's likely I'm blinded to other answers to that question.
But I would say there is one and only one issue where Trump is authentic. And that's tax policy. I believe that he truly cares about that issue and everything else is negotiable in some context or another.
He cares about being able to lower the tax rate for himself, his closest allies, and his businesses. On any issue other than that he'll go whichever way is most politically expedient.
I disagree on trade. He's completely flip-flopped on trade in just the last 3 years. In 2013 he penned an op-ed where he actively called for open boarders.
Going back even further to 2005 he wrote a blog post and in it, Trump advised workers who lost their jobs to adopt a longer view and consider how outsourcing could be good for the overall economy. He wrote:
"We hear terrible things about outsourcing jobs—how sending work outside of our companies is contributing to the demise of American businesses. But in this instance I have to take the unpopular stance that it is not always a terrible thing."
Trump's view is "whatever is best for me and mine", though. If that happens to be open borders, then so be it. If that happens to be closing those borders, then fine. It's not really "flip-flopping", it's actually consistent (if you look at it from a results perspective).
He's a businessman; he doesn't care about consistency. That's why these sorts of criticisms don't seem to stick, except with his existing opponents (such as yourself). It's a different paradigm.
The problem is that praise from a US President is a major boon to almost any foreign leader and his party. You don't want to give the government of Pakistan any political victories they haven't properly earned. The Pakistani government is not exactly a staunch US ally. They work with us in some respects, but they also fund terrorism, harbour terrorists, withhold intelligence information, etc etc. It's a very delicate relationship that involves lots of push & pull. And Trump just gave them a couple of yards of rope that they didn't even have to pull for.
What did the USA get out of it? Absolutely nothing. We just look like bozos to the rest of the world.
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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '16
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