Trump may have gone too far by abandoning the Kurds
By F.H. Buckley
The Trump election was in many ways a rediscovery of nationalism and a rebuke to liberal transnationalism — the idea, popular among elites in the US and Europe, that nationhood and sovereignty should give way to open borders and global governance.
President Trump’s reaction to this transnational folly was a useful first cut. But now, with the US withdrawal from Syria and the abandonment of our Kurdish allies, we are seeing how nationalism can go too far. We need to strike a balance between what is owed to our citizens and what is owed to other people.
The same thing goes for preferring fellow Americans to foreigners.
Right now, we’re in the middle of a government shutdown over funding for a wall on our southern border. At the heart of that debate is whether the country owes greater duties to citizens over non-citizens.
If the citizen-foreigner distinction is meaningless, as many on the left tacitly suggest, then there is no justification for a wall or even a border. If it does matter, however, we should be asking whether the immigrant would make our citizens better or worse off.
Trump made immigration an issue in 2016, and what that came down to was a preference for Americans over non-Americans. He also asked whether our foreign wars were really in the interest of the American people.
Before he came on the scene, neither of our political parties had meaningfully addressed these issues, but many voters thought they mattered, and that was because, like Trump, they were nationalists.
But nationalism can easily become pinched and mindless.
When there is a disaster in a foreign country, America has shown itself the most generous country on earth. When Europe needed to be rebuilt after World War II, we came up with the Marshall Plan. When there is a flood or an earthquake somewhere else, who rushes in to help? We do. And now we are supposed to think that all that was stupid?
Yes, some of our foreign-aid money was stupidly spent. And nation-building abroad under President George W. Bush was a disaster. So it’s a matter of striking a balance; our preference for fellow citizens doesn’t mean we can ignore the rest of the world. And where that comes into sharpest focus is over refugee policies and the Middle East.
We’ve been here before, in the way we admitted refugees after the fall of South Vietnam in 1975. We intervened in the war, fought honorably, then pulled our troops out and cut funding for the South Vietnamese military.
Once the aid was cut, South Vietnam fell to the Communists in a matter of months, and what followed was a humanitarian crisis. About 800,000 Vietnamese, many of whom had supported the US, fled the country as “boat people.” In their leaky boats, some of them didn’t survive the voyage.
Under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, we admitted hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees, and about half of the diaspora from that country — some 2 million people — now live in America. It was our way of repaying a debt to a people we had supported and then left to their fate. Today they are model immigrants.
We’re looking at the same kind of moral obligation, to people in the Middle East who fought our Islamist enemies and whom we will be leaving behind as we pull our forces from the region.
I don’t say that the military pullouts are wrong. They weren’t worth the cost, and they’re coming after 16 years of missteps in the region, of lives destroyed, of many billions squandered. But to those whom we asked to rely on us, we owe something.
They’re not like the caravan of Central Americans at our border, to whom we have no special relationship. If we can reasonably help some of the caravanistas, we should do so; we can’t let their children die of thirst.
But we do ourselves and our fellow citizens a huge disservice by allowing the chaos and costs that come with failing to stop masses from illegally crossing the border and taking up residence here. At the same time, we should be taking a special look at admitting Kurdish refugees if there’s another humanitarian crisis.
The hard-core nationalists will dispute all this. But they’re wrong — just as wrong as the no-borders crowd.
Ενώ προφανώς δεν τίθεται θέμα ηθικού ζητήματος για τον Ομπάμα όταν αποφάσισε μαζί με την οικογένεια των Σαούντ να διαλύσουν την Συρία το 2011, διότι αυτό ήταν "Θέμα έλλειψης Δημοκρατίας στην Συρία".
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήThey are trying to attact Trump from any angle they can. As far as the Kurds, in Syria or Iraq, they only have themselves to blame.
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήΜπηκαν θεματα...ηθικα στην ελιτ της Μαφιας...
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφή