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That was a literal reference I was thinking of when I said it.
Obama set a red line, and then hemmed and hawed about whether it was crossed and what the consequences would be, and as a result we sent so much crap to Syrian rebels that it sparked Chinese manufacturers to create knockoffs of the fanny packs that were issued by the CIA to sell to other Syrians who wanted to imitate the style. And we're still talking about it today.
Trump does the same thing over and over until we don't even bother talking about it on this forum anymore.
Yeah, the Bush example can at least be blamed on the chaos and damage (and the lies) that followed.
In the case of Obama it was notable even though the public was war-weary and he was avoiding entanglements.
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There is good and bad in this. I honestly think a factor in Russia's last few rounds of aggression were "Kennedy School term paper" thinking, spoken out loud by Obama and Biden. Having an opponent clearly lay out their priorities, thinking, and risk tolerance gives you a powerful amount of information that just doesn't exist with Trump, especially if he's weaponizing leaks like the Tucker Carlson thing.
As with everything, there is a defense of some alternate universe version of what Trump does. But that never functions as a defense of what Trump actually does because jumping into a war with Iran because you were feeling yourself after Venezuela and were listening to people like Netanyahu and Mark Levin is just so much dumber that you'd honestly rather have the Kennedy School people in charge.
The likely outcome of all of this is that Trump gets a worse deal than Obama did while admitting that the US almost certainly wouldn't use military force. Maybe his "strategy" is more high variance but it hardly seems worth it.
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