Your editorial of Dec. 28 (“
The Trumpian tantrum headline surely calls to mind Charles Lindbergh’s pro-Nazi isolationism just before World War II. Unless you are attempting to co-opt those of us who marched against the Vietnam War in the 1960s; perish the thought.
Your somewhat selective survey of Middle East history (should we really bother at this juncture about King Abdul Aziz in the 1940s? Or the CIA’s covert intervention against Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953?) declines to address the most disturbing facets of Trump’s impulsive isolationism: How exactly do we, or our long-time Kurdish allies, benefit from consigning the Kurds to the tender mercies of the Turkish Islamist strongman Erdogan? And how do we, or the oppressed Syrian people, benefit from leaving them in the bear-hug of a ruthless Russian dictator, one that is still busy subverting our own democracy? Or in the murderous clutches of their own president-for-life, Bashar al-Assad? Or in the suffocating embrace of his spiritual sponsors, the Tehran ayatollahs? Or in the lethal care of their murderous Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon?
Likewise, do we really benefit from alienating, at the same breath, both our homicidal bosom-buddy Crown Prince MBS and our sole faithful ally in the Middle East, Israel? Or, can an impulsive foreign-policy-by-Twitter, with scant input from either our remaining military experts or our dazed Democratic allies, really be effective?
To those of us who remember the magnificent tenure of Morley Ballantine, long-time publisher, editor and guiding spirit of the Durango Herald, your editorial is not only a mystery, but also an insult to our barely intact intelligence.
Tom Givón
Ignacio
