President Donald Trump has committed “the most profound flip-flop in recent presidential history,” according to a former Democratic presidential chief of staff and US ambassador to Japan — and now the Republican’s political enemies can capitalize.
“We’ve just witnessed the most profound flip-flop in recent presidential history,” Rahm Emanuel, a former Chicago mayor and President Barack Obama adviser who is widely rumored to want to run for president in 2028, wrote for The Wall Street Journal on Friday. “When Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination in 2016, he said: ‘We must abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria.’ During his first term, he largely kept his word — but since retaking office he has adopted a trigger-happy approach.”
Emanuel added, “He has ordered strikes on eight countries in 14 months, roughly as many as in his entire first four years. The change is so head-spinning that some on the MAGA right have steam coming out of their ears.”
The longtime politician said that “you need not have lived through the Iraq or Libya debacles to realize that decapitating the Islamic Republic doesn’t guarantee that freedom and democracy will emerge in Tehran. Never has the U.S. managed to foment regime change from the air alone.” On a deeper level, Emanuel described Trump’s war against Iran as symptomatic of a deeper foreign policy incompetence that will last long after he leaves office. From there, Emanuel proposed new foreign policies from Europe and the Indo-Pacific to Africa and the Western Hemisphere.
“As Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney argued recently, the Trump administration has permanently ruptured the international system that was born from faith in America’s word and the architecture we created,” Emanuel wrote. “The next president is sure to discover that there’s no reset button beneath the Resolute Desk. Washington will need to pick up the pieces and create something new.”
Noting that presidential campaigns rarely turn primarily on foreign policy, Emanuel pointed out that they can prove to be a “disqualifier.”
“They want leaders they can be confident will secure America’s interests,” Emanuel wrote. “As we prepare to repair the long-term damage Mr. Trump has done, we need to reassure the American people that we have not only the discipline to follow the rules but a vision and agenda to further our country’s interests around the world.”
Emanuel, who identified with the centrist wing of the Democratic Party, is not the only non-liberal slamming Trump’s foreign policy. Steve Schmidt, a Republican strategist who served President George W. Bush, denounced Trump on Friday for demanding the Nobel Peace Prize and then declaring a series of unprovoked wars.
“He wanted the Peace Prize, and when he couldn’t get it, Trump lost his mind,” Schmidt wrote, quoting a February letter Trump wrote to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre in which the president said “considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”
Schmidt added that Trump told Støre on Thursday, “I’m no longer interested in [the Peace Prize]."
Similar to Schmidt Jonathan V. Last, a conservative pundit for the popular website The Bulwark, denounced people who still support Trump despite his flip-flopping on war.
“Maybe the problem here is my use of the word ‘stupid’ as a catch-all when what I’m really talking about is a basket of failings,” Last argued. “There are people who understand what Trumpism is and affirmatively want a post-liberal society. And then there are those who would say that they do not want authoritarianism, but who threw in with Trump anyway.”