openpolitics.com

And if, God forbid, a major terrorist attack occurs in the United States, he could well repeat the mistake of the Bush Administration, reacting in ways that benefit only the jihadis and enemies of America.

.. Constructed in response to the disaster that was the Iraq War, the Obama doctrine abjures direct U.S. military intervention in countries that don’t represent a direct security threat to the United States, such as Syria. It favors working quietly through allies and proxies, such as Kurdish peshmerga forces, and even, where necessary, Iranian militias, to attack America’s enemies, and also through deploying U.S. military and technological assets that can be operated from afar, such as cyber-spying systems, reconnaissance planes, and drones.

.. The record shows that the Obama Administration has launched, or helped enable, military strikes in more countries than the Bush Administration did, extending the campaign against Islamist extremism to places like Mali and Libya. But, whereas the Bush Administration will always be known for the large-scale wars it initiated in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama seems to prefer “waging war in the shadows with a light footprint and if possible limited public scrutiny,”

.. Trump, of course, could choose to reverse this approach, sending in the 101st Airborne whenever it suits him. But that doesn’t seem likely. Like Obama before him, he will be dealing with an American public that is tired of foreign wars

.. His transition Web site says only that a Trump Administration would “work with our Arab allies and friends in the Middle East in the fight against isis. Pursue aggressive joint and coalition military operations . . . international cooperation to cutoff their funding, expand intelligence sharing, and cyberwarfare to disrupt and disable their propaganda and recruiting.”

.. This happens to be a pretty accurate description of what the Obama Administration has been doing in concert with Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and other countries. Flynn and Mattis have both criticized Obama’s campaign against isisas half-hearted, but how much further would they, and Trump, go?

..  “Reality will force him to adjust how he approaches many of these issues. That’s just the way this office works.”

.. Trump, for example, has said he would “dismantle” the nuclear deal with Iran and adopt a more confrontational approach to Tehran generally. But how would that effect the war on isis, in which Iranian-trained militias have played a key role?

.. At some point, Trump will also have to face fiscal reality. He has promised to rebuild a U.S. military he claims has been depleted, but he also wants to introduce big tax cuts at a time when the federal budget is already straitened by the rising demands of programs like Social Security and Medicare, along with interest on the national debt. One of the virtues of Obama’s light-footprint approach is that it is relatively cheap

.. Obama said, “We’ve accomplished all this at a cost of ten billion dollars over two years, which is the same amount that we used to spend in one month at the height of the Iraq War.”