Rubio’s revenge: U.S. Secretary of State charts Trump’s surprisingly hawkish foreign policy
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks as U.S. President Donald Trump stands behind him during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Fla., on Jan. 3.Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
After a year of one stunning intervention abroad after another, now might be a good time to finally stop calling Donald Trump an isolationist. That label was always an imperfect catch-all for critics who confused the U.S. President’s disdain for multilateralism with a desire to disengage internationally. In the past year, Mr. Trump has proved them spectacularly wrong.
“Like almost all of his predecessors, Trump has revealed himself to be a highly assertive internationalist rather than an isolationist,” Brookings Institution analyst Michael O’Hanlon wrote this week in Foreign Affairs. “His administration has brokered peace negotiations around the world, if not as successfully as he claims; championed NATO, if offending European partners in the process; authorized the use of force against Iranian nuclear facilities and Venezuela’s sitting president and advocated for greater U.S. defence spending.”
Indeed, whatever you want to call the U.S. Army Delta Force raid that resulted in the arrest of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro – an illegal invasion of a sovereign state, a power play for the country’s oil riches, a law enforcement operation to apprehend an........
