December 26, 2017

Donald Trump’s Year of Living Dangerously

Featuring Julianne Smith

Source: Politico

Journalist Susan B. Glasser

When President Donald Trump sat down for dinner on September 18 in New York with leaders of four Latin American countries on the sidelines of the annual United Nations General Assembly, anxieties were already running high.

There was the matter of Mexico and his promise to build that “big, beautiful wall,” presumably to keep not just Mexicans but all of their citizens out of the United States too. And the threat to blow up the North American Free Trade Agreement. And then, a month earlier, seemingly out of nowhere, Trump had volunteered that he was considering a “military option” in Venezuela as that country’s last vestiges of democracy disappeared. Amid the international furor over his vow to rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea in the same golf-course press conference, the news that the president of the United States was apparently considering going to war with its third-largest oil supplier had gotten relatively little attention. But the leaders from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Panama invited to the dinner remembered it well.

Read the full article here.

Authors

  • Julianne Smith

    Adjunct Senior Fellow, Transatlantic Security Program

    Julianne (“Julie”) Smith is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and is currently serving as a Weizsäcker Fellow at the Bosch Academy in Berlin....