Ivan Eland
The three popular pillars of Donald Trump’s electoral success have been grievances about immigrants, unfair trade practices by other countries, and American “forever wars” overseas.
The last one of these beefs was legitimate and fueled by the interventionist U.S. superpower’s major quagmires or debacles in Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iran, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan.
As an example, a recent op-ed by John F. Sopko, who, as special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012, chronicled the profligate waste of lives and money during the latter half of the two-decade U.S. fiasco in Afghanistan, convincingly argued that bureaucratic incentives in the U.S. military and other agencies to claim success rendered the truth of failure to long be kept from American taxpayers. That problem can be found in the other American catastrophic failures as well.
To his credit, during his first presidential term Trump had concluded the Afghan War was a loser, signed an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan, but failed to carry it out before he left office. Joe Biden, his successor, after a short delay, agreed with Trump about the war and took a big hit in the popularity of his new administration when the U.S.-supported Afghan regime collapsed rapidly during the American troop withdrawal, leading to some chaos and more American and Afghan deaths.
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