Trump's administration doesn't understand the meaning of power - The Washington Post - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...7-b503-9d616bd5a305_story.html
foreign policy trump threat soft power power hard power
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The problem with the Trump administration’s foreign policy — as represented in its proposed budget — is that it does not fully understand our threats or the meaning of power.
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The existence of the Islamic State is, indeed, a threat. But terrorism is often parasitic, attaching its agenda to local grievances and attempting to ride its proxies to greater power.
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This makes the fate of failed, fragile and lawless states directly and unavoidably relevant to the conduct of the war against terrorism and the defense against other threats.
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American interests must be defined broadly enough to include things such as the effective delivery of social services in Afghanistan, the surveillance for pandemic disease in rural Tanzania, the construction of classrooms in refugee-stressed Jordan, the settlement of conflict in Libya and the promotion of economic progress in northern Nigeria.
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Encouraging these outcomes represents another, very real type of American power, exercised from afar (apart from the irenic army of health, development and diplomatic professionals).
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It is an absurd misnomer to call the exercise of power in these areas “soft.” The matter is simple: Will the United States merely respond to security threats? Or will it also try to shape the security environments in which threats emerge?
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This is the context in which the Trump administration is proposing a nearly 29 percent cut in State Department funding for development and diplomacy, for peace-building and conflict prevention. “It is not a soft-power budget,” explains budget director Mick Mulvaney. “This is a hard-power budget.”
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It is really a softheaded, hardhearted budget. If it passed in anything close to current form, no amount of explosive power could undo the stupidity or remedy the harm.