Donald Trump's phone call with Taiwan president risks China's wrath

[Dill]

(12-03-2016, 08:45 AM)JustWinBaby Wrote: What makes you think "dramatic" shifts in policy weren't driven by career staffers?  Do you really think they don't have A, B and C (and D, E, and F) scenarios?  Do you honestly think the Wolfwitz doctrine was borne in a vacuum?

Do you honestly think the POTUSes are so narcissitic and vain that they don't heavily weigh the advice of people who have lived and breathed these issues for decades?   Do you not understand how ineffective and feckless foreign policy would be if it was unpredictable and nonsensical every 4-8 years with a new POTUS?

Obama himself said it's different when you're actually sitting in the chair - what does that mean to you?

I just told you what makes me "think" dramatic shifts in foreign policy were not driven by this mysterious group you call career staffers (perhaps a confusion of civil service with foreign policy experts?).

Policies leave a paper trail. I have given you two specific examples of foreign policy which began with individuals outside the US government's foreign policy institutions--Nixon's China opening and Bush 43's Iraq policy. The documentary record is pretty clear on this. Was Nixon a "career staffer"? Were career staffers determined not to be the first US president to lose a war or was it LBJ?

 If you are going to continue claiming "career staffers" must be behind foreign policy shifts then you ought to offer something to support of your claims beyond bald assertion. Otherwise you are just doubling down on a guess.   And I suspect that behind that guess is a fundamental misunderstanding of how foreign policy agendas (including your A,B and C scenarios) are set and carried out in every new administration.

I have hardly said the Wolfowitz doctrine was "born in a vacuum"; I told you it was connocted by neo cons mostly outside government and imposed upon a partly resisting intelligence community and military by someone who got the power of the presidency--someone who ignored "the advice of people who have lived and breathed these issues for decades"--certainly the advice of James Baker and others who had served his father so well.

That's what "sitting in the chair" means when you come to power with an agenda and the experts don't agree with it. You can ignore them.