In 2016, When Donald Trump was running for President of the United States, he stated that he would steer the United States away from international engagements. Being a businessman – and not a politician – he was particular about cutting costs, and thought America should withdraw as much as possible from its role as the policeman of the world.
He let allies like South Korea and Japan know that they would have to pay for any security provided to them by the United States. He even told them they were free to acquire nuclear bombs if they liked.
Trump also famously suggested that the US should “outsource the Syrian War” to Putin. But all these were before he finally became POTUS and the media wouldn’t even let him have a honeymoon period.
From day one, bloopers were imagined in everything Donald Trump said or did. Frequently, almost all mainstream media coverage of Trump was negative, and even positive stories were ingenuously spinned into remarkable negatives- this has continued. Trump was forced to rely on a tiny but relentless pack of mediums – his Twitter account, Breitbart, Drudge and Fox et al to tell his story.
But against the massive publicity canopy of the mainstream media, these rightwing outlets faced and still face a superior force of sorts. If Trump made a statement condemning something, he would be condemned for it. And if he held back from making a statement, he would be condemned for it.
Even the nature of his hair, a natural endowment which Trump’s billions cannot alter even.if he wanted to, was added to the mix of criticisms poured on Trump.
Then came the ‘gift’ of Stormy Daniels. In the eyes of some anti Trump strategists, Stormy Daniels would be Donald Trump’s Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones combined.
So the powerful mainstream media piled on the heat. And Trump felt, and is still feeling the heat. Now, if you have studied international relations long enough, you would know that world leaders often undertake bold projects like wars to deflect attention from domestic pressures.
When the mainstream media turned what should have been Donald Trump’s private life into a circus show, he felt he had to continually do things to deflect negative media attention meant to pitch the public against him.
When Stormy Daniels’s case began to fuse with the investigations into alleged Russian meddling, it only made Trump more determined to deflect attention, since whatever he did, the media would not give him much positive press.
So, Donald Trump started very bold international moves.
He entered a Trade War campaign against China, a campaign that is as high stakes as international campaigns go. He started a series of sanctions against Putin’s Russia, something that would have been unthinkable during his campaign, given Trump’s admiration for Putin.
Where he was all for US leaving Syria, he seems to be on the verge to reversing himself and entrentching US troops.
But arguably the boldest intervention Trump has undertaken so far is his struggle against Kim Jong Un. The struggle led to exhchange of insults, dangerous military maneuvers and threats of a global nuclear holocaust.
President Trump combined verbal and military threats with tough sanctions, defying strongman Kim Jong Un. He lobbied China relentlessly to take a thougher stance against its ally, North Korea.
Following this cocktail of events and the collapse of the North Korean nuclear test site, Kim Jong Un has had no choice but to de-escalate the Korean-American crisis more than any other North Korean leader. Trump, literarily channeled some of the domestic pressure he was getting from the US mainstream press to Kin Jong Un, and it is producing positive results that the media must report.
- North Korea has asked for and gotten a date for a summit between Kim and Donald Trump.
- North Korea and South Korea have agreed on a formal peace, after decades of being technically at war.
- The possibility of unification of the Koreas has been given a gigantic boost.
- 3 US citizens that were detained by North Korea have been released.
- North Korea has offered to dismantle its nuclear arsenal in exchange for security assurances from the Unites States.
- North Korea has even attempted to show good faith by dismantling its collapsed nuclear test site ahead of the Trump-Kim Jong Un summit.
And the way things have gone, its almost impossible not to give Donald Trump the credit. In fact President Moon of South Korea has led the chorus of calls for Donald Trump to be given the Nobel Peace Prize, to the chagrin of the mainstream press in the US who must report it.
The fact is, the mainstream press should also get a lot of the credit for turning Donald Trump into a hero as far as Korea is concerned: they thought they were pushing him to destruction, but have pushed him toward one of the greatest foreign policy legacies any American president can dream of: that of being the person to turn the next chapter in the Korean story.
Any time the mainstream press creates a distracting storm for Donald Trump by overflogging the Stormy Daniels issue, he turns to US foreign policy as a button of release and attention. He uses his own tools, which include a fair amount of aggression, and sometimes the tool just works in a way that no expert would have expected it to work- successfully.
True!
Kudos to Trump