France's President Emmanuel Macron and Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel look on as U.S. President Donald Trump and Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan walk during a photo opportunity at the NATO leaders summit, December 4, 2019. REUTERS/Christian Hartmann/Pool
Julian Borger, The Guardian: 2019: the year US foreign policy fell apart
Donald Trump’s approach to the world is little more than a tangle of personal interests, narcissism and Twitter outbursts
Donald Trump meets the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, at the border village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone, South Korea, on 30 June. Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP
The new decade is about to start under many shadows, but none is more ominous than North Korea’s threat to return to nuclear and long-range missile tests after a two-year lull.
Pyongyang’s pendulum swing from enthusiastic summit diplomacy back to name-calling and threats comes as Donald Trump is increasingly focused on his re-election campaign.
That may be a good thing, as the US president will be wary of provoking a crisis to spoil his narrative of peace and prosperity.
Or it could be a very bad thing: Kim Jong-un could seek to exploit a moment of maximum leverage and miscalculate.
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Update: Trump faces raft of foreign policy challenges in new year (AP)
WNU Editor: Almost all of the news commentary and pundit opinions that I read today on US foreign policy are negative. The above post by Julian Borger from the Guardian is one of the mild ones. As to what is my view .... it is different. The U.S. is slowly disengaging from the wars that it has been involved in for almost two decades, and it is also restoring some of the trade imbalances that have favoured China. A new NAFTA trade deal with Mexico and Canada is also moving forward, and it will be probably be finally signed in 2020. Just those three points by themselves is why I will say that the past year has been a foreign policy win for the Trump administration, even though everyone else has a different point of view.
