Trump Is Building Toward War While Alienating All Our Allies (Slate)
The rising tensions with Iran are getting very alarming.
Slate May 14, 2019 4:15pm
By FRED KAPLAN
...On Monday,Pompeo crashed a European Union meeting in Brussels—unexpected and uninvited—to harangue Western leaders on the threat from Iran. EU officials very much favor preserving the Iranian deal and are deeply bitter at Trump for riling tensions in the region and, beyond that, for forcing them to reimpose sanctions—essentially hijacking their own foreign policies and undermining what they see as their legitimate national security interests.
Pompeo’s drop-in occurred almost simultaneously with Trump’s warm White House welcome of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—an illiberal ultra-nationalist who has done more to damage democratic forces and subvert the EU than any other leader on the continent. For Pompeo to seek European unity on Trump’s unpopular Iran policy, while Trump was meeting with the leading internal opponent of the EU, aggravated the tensions.
So let’s sum up. Trump is playing escalation games with Iran—games that could lead to war, whether Trump wants that or not—while doing nothing to seek diplomatic alternatives or to make a case that war is justified, in fact alienating U.S. allies whose support would be useful (if not vital) in a war and, at the same time, ginning up a trade war with China, which, in its early phases, is already wreaking havoc with markets and threatening to damage an otherwise-healthy American economy.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/iran-trump-bolton-escalation.html
Worth the read of entire article
