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Kindle Notes & Highlights
I suggested that, after the Security Council meeting, Haley and the UK and French Ambassadors jointly address the press outside the Council chamber to present a united front. I had done that many times, but Haley declined, preferring to have pictures of her alone giving the US statement in the Council. That told me something.
Obviously, if we acted before Parliament came back into session, I thought that risk would be eliminated.13
A continuing, very significant problem was Trump’s relentless desire to withdraw US military assets from the Korean Peninsula, part of his general reduction of US forces worldwide.
I said our priorities were to destroy ISIS and remove all Iranian forces. We were not fighting Syria’s civil war; our priority was Iran.
Then, in the meeting’s second most-interesting moment, he said that Obama had told him clearly in 2014 that if Russia went no further than annexing Crimea, the Ukraine confrontation could be settled. For whatever reason, however, Obama had changed his mind, and we arrived at the current impasse.
bring peace.
In reality, a defense-only strategy guaranteed more provocations, more conflict, and more damage, to both businesses and other private entities as well as to the US government.
I often thought that if our bureaucrats struggled as hard against our foreign adversaries as they did against each other when “turf issues” were at stake, we could all rest a lot easier.
Trump seemed to think that criticizing the policies and actions of foreign governments made it harder for him to have good personal relations with their leaders. This was a reflection of his difficulty in separating personal from official relations.
America’s economic and geopolitical relations with China will determine the shape of international affairs in the twenty-first century.
It was therefore trade deficits as symptoms of other problems, not as problems in themselves, that warranted more attention, whether Trump fully understood or not.
