Don’t Get All Excited About Donald Trump’s Humble Foreign/Immigration Policy, Just Yet During the 2012 presidential campaign, I nicknamed Mitt Romney "the invertebrate," due to his constant flip-flopping. Just because Donald Trump is loud and obnoxious, doesn't mean that he has any more backbone than Romney had. Trump attracted millions of supporters, based on his initial stand on immigration, but already, he has been flip-flopping on that issue.
Down in St. Louis County, Missouri, my identical twin brother, “Countenance,” who was separated from the rest of us at birth, and who grew up to be a brilliant political analyst, says that Trump, if elected, will be modest in foreign policy matters. (There were at least five of us, not all boys.)
As Plato could tell you, the most brilliant analyst is often wrong. On top of that, Countenance cites my VDARE colleague, Steve Sailer, as an authority. I am on record as having called Steve America’s most brilliant journalist-intellectual, but by his own admission, he is a lousy political analyst.
In any event, I recall back in 2000 a Republican presidential candidate who proposed a “humble” approach to foreign policy, who instead became the worst practitioner of foreign policy adventurism since Lyndon Johnson.
In 2000’s defense, one might say, ‘Yeah, but then 9/11 happened.’
But something always happens.
I tell an editor I’ll have a manuscript done for him tomorrow, but something happens, and tomorrow becomes next week, or next year. In 2006, I pitched an article to an editor that I’d deliver “in a month.” He’s still waiting on it, and I still fully intend to deliver it. When I promised the article, we each had a full head of hair, and cute little kids. Now, we have little hair left, and grown-up kids.
The best-laid plans of mice and men, and all that.
In 2008, we had a Democratic candidate who seemed largely indifferent to foreign affairs, who turned out to be worse than the 2000 GOP candidate I just cited. Mr. 2008 devoted much of his regime—which shows no sign of ending in 2017—to insulting, destabilizing, and even killing our allies, while strengthening our enemies, and sowing seeds of chaos worldwide. As I write, he is leading us into a military confrontation with the Russians in Syria.
Donald Trump gives citizens only one reason to vote Republican next year: His promise to build a wall on our Southern border, and to deport millions of illegal aliens. However, he has already badly stumbled at least twice on that front: On July 24, when he said he would support an amnesty of millions of foreign criminal invaders, which would eliminate America, and on September 8, when he said we would have to take in millions of violent foreign grifters calling themselves “refugees.”
The Oval Office confers incredible power—or the appearance thereof—on its occupant. Much of that power seems to be the power to do evil, i.e., kill people, and foreign affairs is where one can do the most evil. Foreign affairs is also the field in which it has been easiest to get around Congress. (Plus, as Pat Buchanan would say, where domestic affairs are concerned, a Chief Executive’s hands are tied by countless, intractable entitlements.) Whatever one may say while campaigning, one cannot imagine what it feels like to suddenly control the most meddlesome foreign policy apparat in the history of deracinated, emasculated, personkind. Plus, one can honestly argue that one must move mountains, in order to restore the valleys one’s predecessor has destroyed.
Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.
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