The Burning Platform reprints a string of Tweets from The Last Refuge that seems to be a pretty accurate summation of how President Trump's foreign policy has worked out thus far. It's impressive. Here's an excerpt.
3. Just because western media doesn’t understand how President Trump executes a geopolitical strategy based on economic leverage, that doesn’t mean adversaries are not fully aware of the effectiveness of the approach.
4. The Trump Doctrine has two avenues toward dealing with national security adversaries.
5. The first route is direct assignment of responsibility toward the enablers: see China for North Korea; The Gulf States for Qatar (Sunni extremism); Russia for Syrian terrorism (Assad); and Pakistan for Afghanistan (Taliban); as recent examples.
6. However, when the geopolitical threat stems directly from the enabler, and not the enabled, the Trump Doctrine has a distinctly different & far more encompassing, approach.
7. Route two goes through leveraging regional allies and partners. (TWO THREATS, China and Russia) See ASEAN and India for ¹China; and France, Poland, Baltic States for ²Russia.
8. In each case: China, Russia and Iran, unlike Western media, these powers assemble volumes of research to assist them in understanding the most likely sequence of events President Trump will take.
9. When we say volumes of research, we indeed mean hundreds of people researching and drafting position documents based upon every scintilla of every deal Donald J Trump has engaged in.
10. These states fully understand how President Trump intends to utilize economic leverage toward his next national security focus. As soon as President Trump mentions a strategy for a foe, all international adversaries immediately began road-mapping their defense.
There's more at the link. Highly recommended reading.
Peter
BINGO!
ReplyDeleteThe other day a friend and I drove past the FoxConn development site here in Wisconsin. That Chinese-mainland company will be employing around 10-12,000 people here for a 5GL product.
That development came together about 90 days after Trump was elected, and I speculated that the owner of FoxConn knew exactly what Trump was all about--and he pulled the trigger on the Wisconsin plant almost immediately.
He knows that Trump could have shut him out of the US market...but chose instead to play Trump's game.
Well said, and yes, economics IS the iron fist in the velvet glove...
ReplyDeleteFoxconn is actually based out of Taiwan, not mainland China, even if the bulk of their manufacturing capacity is currently situated in mainland China.
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