The Obama-loving, Trump-hating media could not wait to condemn Trump’s warm greeting of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his friendly meeting with Vladimir Putin during the G-20 meeting in Osaka, Japan. But the president took an even greater pounding for his meeting with Kim Jong Un in North Korea.
To begin with let’s make it clear that bin Salman, Putin and the pudgy guy with the funny haircut are all tyrants. But is that a reason for Trump to keep them at arm’s length? No, not at all.
Take the case of the Saudi crown prince. He has been accused of ordering the assassination in Turkey of occasional Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi who had lived in the U.S. in self-imposed exile from Saudi Arabia since 2017. Had Khashoggi been beheaded inside Saudi Arabia, it would have made only a blip in the media about the murder of a dissident journalist.
But the assassination took place in Turkey and that’s where Recep Erdogan, Turkey’s Islamist dictator, comes in to play. Erdogan is viewing for dominance of the Middle East with Saudi Arabia and Iran. So, he jumped at the opportunity to all but declare war on the Saudis. And the world-wide media took up his damnation of the Saudi crown prince because Khashoggi was a journalist.
Saudi Arabia is a key ally of the U.S. in the conflict with Iran. The Obama-loving, Trump-hating media would have us cut our ties with the Saudi kingdom because bin Salman ordered the assassination of Khashoggi. To the media, Trump giving bin Salman a warm greeting is akin to giving Adolf Hitler a loving hug.
Saudi Arabia has, to say the least, been an unusual ally. We should not forget or forgive the fact that members of the royal family bankrolled the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in NY and the attack on the Pentagon. But that was then and this is now. And the Saudis continue to establish and support Wahhabi madrassas in the U.S. which ate breeding grounds for Islamist terrorists.
But Saudi Arabia and the U.S. need each other in the conflict with Iran. That is why Trump was right in embracing bin Salman. And Trump did not bow down to the crown prince like Obama did so shamefully to the Saudi king in 2009.
And how about Putin? There is no doubt that he interfered in the 2016 election in a bid to help Trump win. And the Russians are our adversaries in the Middle East as strong supporters of the Assad regime in Syria and the Mullahs in Iran. Russia is one of the three most powerful nations in the world and is bristling with an array of nuclear weapons which are being continually modernized. Putin has also seized the Crimea and is supporting a rebellion in the Ukraine. Shame, shame on him.
The media and the Democrats want Trump to punch Putin in the eye every chance he gets because Vladimir tried to help defeat their beloved Hillary in 2016. But it is far better for Trump to have a warm relationship with the tyrant of a nuclear armed adversary than to blacken his eye as the media seems to want the president to do. Personal relationships between adversaries do count, and the relationship between Trump and Putin is an important one.
By the way, in our condemnation of Putin for interfering in our election, let’s not forget that Obama interfered in Israel’s election in a bid to oust his personal enemy Benjamin Netanyahu from the Israeli premiership.
That brings us to the pudgy guy with the funny haircut. Kim Jong Un is no joke! Most Western pundits predicted a very short rule for young Kim when he assumed power upon the death of his father in 2011. However, he soon became just as powerful as his grandfather and father before him. On top of that, Kim has acquired a number of nuclear weapons and has the intercontinental missiles to deliver them.
After some saber rattling between Trump and Kim, the two seem to have established a personal friendship with each other. That friendship may or not result in Kim scrapping his nuclear arsenal, but it is far better for the two to be friends than to threaten each other with mutual devastation.
Now Trump has become the first sitting U.S. president to step foot inside North Korea. Before Trump even got back home, the talking heads and their Obama-team foreign policy and intelligence wonks popped up all over the TV news channels condemning the President for giving Kim a tremendous propaganda a victory while getting nothing in return. The print media columnists who hate Trump did the same. There’s no doubt that Kim scored a tremendous propaganda victory when Trump stepped into the North and patted the pudgy guy with the funny haircut on the back. So what!
Obama spent his eight years in office trying to assure the leaders of the Islamic world that the U.S. was their friend and that it was not an adversary of the Palestinians. He had a standoffish relationship with Putin, he bowed down to King Abdullah, and he had absolutely no relationship with Kim Jong Un.
Trump on the other hand knows that it is very important to have a warm relationship with an ally like bin Salman and a friendship with enemies like Putin and Kim who have the ability to do us great harm. For that, Trump deserves the nation’s salute.
When the unbiased history of the Trump Presidency is written, it will likely reflect that President Trump did more to ensure peace in the world than did the Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning Obama. I’m still unclear about just how Russia influenced the 2016 election in favor of Trump; it seems to me that Russia had a vested interest in bring the proven leftist (soft on Communism) Hillary into the Oval Office, but not Trump. Perhaps that particular fake news has been repeated so often that is has transmuted into fact.
It’s far more likely that the unbiased history will record that Trump was a narcissistic buffoon who disliked following the law, mistakenly thought his guts had a brain, and who occasionally got a policy issue right. It will also record that the backlash against his administration led to the election of candidates further to the left than anyone thought possible.
Unless the Democrats have someone in hiding other than their current collection of wack-job wanna-be’s, I’d say Trump has another 5 plus years.
But you keep hoping, Ross!
Yes, Howie.
Trump, being a seasoned businessman from New York City, is paying close attention to the well known Godfather I principle.
Kim doesn’t want to end up like Khaddafi in Libya; he has to be able to trust that another Obama or a Hillary bent on regime change won’t ascend to power. It also doesn’t help that the opposition party seems to be cheering for war….war with Iran, war with N. Korea, just start a war, by gosh! I mean, how hard is it to back your president when he’s trying to achieve peace? Some things should really be non partisan.
This is what you get when you elect a businessman. “Hey Kim, we could continue the unpleasantness, or we could get together and all make peace, make a bunch of money, and everybody’s happy (except for China, probably).
Kim has the road map on how to bring his country into the first world, how to make his country prosperous and well fed. He just needs to know that the next US administration won’t screw him. I suspect we’ll see no change…..no provocation from NK, but no real disarmament, until after the election. At least then Kim knows he’ll have a peace partner for the next four years.
The Saudi crown prince and the Saudi government are engaged in horrible war crimes in Yemen. They’re bombing civilians from planes stamped “Made in USA” with bombs stamped “Made in USA.” Not long ago, the Saudis dropped a bomb on a school bus in the middle of a civilian market. The Yemen war isn’t well known here but it is well known in the Middle East.
Kim is a crazy killer. His regime is the most repressive in the world. And, what has the president’s relationship gotten anyone except good press and international recognition for Kim.
As for Putin, I recall a presidential campaign where George W. Bush said he looked in Putin’s eyes and saw someone he could work with and John McCain said he looked in Putin’s eyes and saw “KGB.”
Ask yourselves this: What would you think if Obama or either Clinton toadied up to these murderous dictators?
Yes, American presidents have to deal with some really nasty people when conducting foreign policy. I understand that. But you didn’t see too many talking about how close they were personally to a bunch of murderous bastards.
You mean like when Obama bowed to the Saudi King? Or shipped $1.7 billion in cash to Iran? What about Roosevelt pallin’ around with Stalin? George W. Bush seemed to have a cordial relationship with Putin. Nixon historically visited China and had a series of well publicized meetings with Mao (perhaps the greatest mass murderer in history). We’re all familiar with Carter’s relationship with Yasser Arafat. The Shah of Iran was friendly with multiple administrations. And, John McCain found the still communist Vietnam to be “warm and friendly” when he visited in his later years.
As a businessman Trump has no doubt had to deal on numerous occasions with odious and reprehensible people. He is quite capable of putting his personal feelings aside to achieve a larger goal.
Fat, don’t forget Obama palling around with Castro in Cuba. No outrage by the left about that.
We have to deal with things as they are, not as we wish they would be.
Tom,
Can we at least agree that what has passed for diplomacy in the last 30 years with regard to North Korea, and Iran, and China, hasn’t worked? If those problems were solved, you wouldn’t be griping about Trump’s style of handling it.