Whoever is sitting in the grownups chair in the white house really doesn't matter much though. There are only two reasons why there hasn't been a recent war.
- The people representing the vested interests of the US ruling classes don't currently want a war.
Or
- They aren't capable of starting a war at the moment but they would like one.
He's been escalating drone strikes since he took office, so much so that they revoked a rule on reporting casualties from strikes.
There have been 2,243 drone strikes in the first two years of the Trump presidency, compared with 1,878 in Mr Obama's eight years in office
So basically 3 strikes per day every day for 2 years.
I've been trying to tell people that on here for a while and they just get pissed off and write smartass replies about how Trump is supposedly destroying the empire and other stupid shit about how he hasn't started any wars.
He almost got us into a war with Iran when he illegally had a general assassinated and when he bombed them back in 2017.
Trump absolutely is not this "anti-imperialist" president, or whatever the fuck these geniuses think he is.
Trump has been an utter disaster for US Imperialism. Just his negative effect on soft power alone.
I think you mean Obama was an utter disaster for US imperialism. The US has been getting their asses handed to them on a silver platter in Afghanistan for the past 7 years at least. Obama was heavily criticized for "looking weak" and "dragging his foot" on Syria, as well as not pushing NATO further to do anything about Russia when they took back the Crimea and invaded Ukraine. These were foreign policy mistakes on his part that neolibs and conservatives were screaming about back in his second term. The biggest argument about ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are mainly due to the fact the US has lost those wars and they are just wasting money by still occupying those countries.
Trump's biggest mistake was the Iran deal, yet it benefited anyone who cheerleads US imperialism, given that his sanctions managed to cripple them economically and they can't deal with COVID as a result of it. Trump has come close to starting an all out war with Iran by illegally assassinating a general and I guess all of you forgot about when he bombed them in 2017 and all the armchair leftists were screaming that we were on the brink of war.
All this talk on this site about Trump being bad for imperialism, seriously, did any of you pay attention to this shit back when Obama was in office???? The liberal media didn't criticize him for it cause he's their Reagan, and they built a cult of personality around him. However, if you were looking at conservative media, they were yelling "boots on the ground" regarding Syria all through 2014.
Trump has escalated drone strikes and he took out a law that forced the military to report on civilian casualties. That's the only reason you aren't seeing much of this in the media anymore. He isn't ending the war on Afghanistan either. He said it himself last year, in his own words like a used car salesman: "if we can make a deal", then the troops go home. That deal? A permanent US military base in Afghanistan.
So many on this site don't know jack fucking shit about foreign policy and it's clearly obvious when Trump is praised for being some disaster to US imperialism. The empire has been in a decline for a while now. If this were 2003-2004, Assad would be dead by now and Syria would be a puppet state to NATO.
People get too hung up on the idea of a single good or bad president having control over US foreign policy, when the truth is that the military industrial complex is a better organized, more competent body that will go to war wherever it damn well pleases regardless of who was the president. Obama flat out did not want to get involved in Syria - there were US troops in Syria before the end of his term. The idea that one president being dumb could somehow foil the plans of the biggest group of war profiteers on the planet is absurd.
Yeah I think the choices Obama or whoever are making are less "what do you want for dinner?" and more "do you want carrots or peas?"
Forgive me for the parenting technique analogy, but the point is there is no real choice from the executive, the war machine has its own momentum and bureaucracy. Players like Bush may have more influence but only because they or their immediate connections are part of that bureaucracy.
Thank you foreign policy understander. Bless us with the correct series of opinions to have
Does it count as anti-imperialism if you destroy the U.S by getting it entangled in an even more destructive and unwinnable forever war?
