Donald Trump must pull back from the brink
DONALD TRUMP has never been the most consistent of people but Thursday’s use of a 22,600lb Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb against underground Islamic State (IS) positions in Afghanistan was a reminder of how little we really know the US President.
For months during the election campaign Trump promised to lead a non-interventionist foreign policy. He promised to neutralise IS but avoid foreign wars.
On a “thank you” tour to his supporters in December he summarised his foreign policy by saying, “We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with. Instead, our focus must be on defeating terrorism and destroying IS, and we will.”
He added that he wanted to spend money on rebuilding roads, bridges and airports, rather than on overseas wars.
He was repeating his mantra on non-intervention as recently as March. And then suddenly he pounds a Syrian air base in response to the gassing of children, moves an aircraft carrier towards North Korea in response to nuclear weapon testing and drops the biggest non-nuclear bomb America has ever deployed on IS.
THERE must be many Trump voters who now feel he stood on a false prospectus. They thought that US servicemen and women would be coming home to defend America, not fighting other people’s wars. So what has changed Trump’s mind?
Trump might say Thursday’s bomb is consistent with the promise to destroy IS. But IS is not a military threat to America, Europe or indeed anyone outside Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. For the rest of us the threat is a purely terrorist one.
You don’t counter a terrorist threat by dropping a bunkerbusting bomb in Afghanistan unless you believe that IS operates, in the style of a James Bond villain, from an underground nerve centre where all attacks are planned and controlled. This is clearly not the case.
As we have seen with attacks