Trump’s Overseas Fiasco: An Epic Fail on World Stage
Michael Goodwin sees President Trump’s European trip through rosecolored glasses (“Awaygame victory for The Donald,” May 28).
The trip was a disaster. He chastised our European allies and pushed the prime minister of Montenegro out of the way in front of cameras.
While other European leaders walked, Trump showed he was a tired old man by using a golf cart to get around, and he was too tired to hold a press conference. Reba Shimansky Manhattan
Time will tell whether or not Trump’s Sunni Arab gambit will bear fruit in terms of rooting out radical Islamic extremism.
Nonetheless, a new alliance has been forged between multiple Mideast states, including our forlorn ally Israel, that are determined not to allow Shia Iran to become the region’s hegemon.
Trump’s start in undoing the damage of President Barack Obama’s feckless foreign policy has buoyed hope in American leadership again. James Hyland Beechurst
Trump’s trip was a complete failure. He was a hit with the Saudi dictatorship, but he embarrassed us in Israel by leaving disrespectful, high-school-yearbook-like comments at Yad Vashem and by appearing to not know Israel was part of the Middle East.
At the NATO meeting, he could have made his point about defense spending diplomatically. Instead, he alienated the members he criticized.
He couldn’t even walk the streets of Taormina with other foreign leaders.
What an embarrassment for the United States. Reva Cooper Brooklyn
Notwithstanding the crassness of browbeating our allies to their faces, Trump had a point: NATO has long been a drain on US resources, effectively a cross-Atlantic subsidy for European welfare programs.
On the other hand, the Saudi leg of the trip was a national embarrassment. Visibly sucked in by the pageantry and calculated flattery of his ego, Trump rhetorically prostrated himself before the thuggish Gulf regimes by omitting any mention of their human-rights records and parroting their own propaganda, casting them as champions against radical Islamic terrorism when they are anything but. Eric Hagemann Brooklyn