In an interview to promote her recent book, Senator Elizabeth Warren criticized President Donald Trump’s handling of the upcoming historic summit between the United States and North Korea.
After accusing the president of not having a long-term strategy for dealing with the historically rogue nation, she admonished him to follow the example of the communist Chinese government and have a “long-term, whole of government strategy”, essentially telling him that he should become more like communist leader Xi Jinping — who recently set himself up as dictator for life by removing the presidential term limit rule from Chinese law.
While it is true that the Chinese government clearly has a long-term strategy that does not always take its neighbors’ best interests into account, it is important to realize that the main reason why the Chinese have been able to have such a cohesive, long-term strategy in its international dealings is that the country has been run by a one-party system for the past seventy years.
The communist party controls all aspects of national and international policy without giving voters a say in what does and doesn’t happen inside and outside the country. It is common knowledge that the Chinese government vehemently and often cruelly represses any voices of dissent, sentencing many of its citizens to prison or labor camps for voicing opinions contrary to those embraced by the communist party.
The United States, on the other hand, has a democratic system of government that allows voters to choose their own governors, representatives in Congress and even President. No one party holds power over all three branches of government all the time, making it impossible for the United States to consistently execute a long-term foreign policy plan long-term. As voters decide who they want in power, they also consciously or unconsciously decide what type of foreign policy rules the United States will play by. The elected president then pursues the course of action that he feels is best without regard for what his predecessor did or didn’t do.
Naturally, most mainstream news media outlets haven’t bothered to even mention Senator Warren’s recent comments. Those that did ignored the fact that she told President Trump he needed to be more like Xi Jinping and instead focused on her criticism of the president for removing long-term employees from the State Department without replacing them with equally experienced staff members. However, the comments fail to consider the fact that President Trump was elected by people who knew that he had no interest in maintaining a conventional foreign policy.
Unlike Communist China, it is the voters in the United States who decide what type of foreign policy they want executed by choosing a candidate whose policy is most in line with their own views. The current president is simply delivering on his promises to his voters to do things differently than they have been done in years past. While this is certainly disconcerting for the president’s political opponents who are adamantly opposed to anything he does, the fact is that his unconventional way of doing things has already yielded positive results. North Korea has shown an interest in de-nuclearization, committed itself to a summit with the United States and even shown a measure of goodwill by releasing three American hostages.
Senator Warren and those who agree with her would do well to carefully consider what they are asking President Trump to do. It would be totally impossible for the United States to have a long-term, whole of government strategy without turning into a dictatorship where a single party governs the long-term foreign policy for the country without permitting internal dissent. It is highly unlikely that those who loathe the current president would actually want him to become a dictator for life as Xi Jinping has recently become.
Given that fact, voters on both sides of the political spectrum who have heard Senator Warren’s recent comments should be wise enough to dismiss them outright, knowing that a “whole of government strategy” is far removed from the checks and balances system the Founding Fathers wisely established when writing the Constitution.
~ Liberty Planet
