For me the bottomline of the Trump administration is that he has started zero new wars, sparing hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. As an outsider I hope that the US will not go back to its foreign military interventions.
I can also tell you that many people in the middle east are sad to see Trump leave. His strong stance on Iran and some of the new alliances and shakeups in the region regarding Israel, though possibly done through some brute force, have certainly changed the status quo, possibly for the better.
Just yesterday Trump administration sanctioned Gibran Bassil, a corrupt Lebanese politician who is very close with Hezbollah. I hope Biden has the same sense to chase these guys down...
Well, you can't please everyone - you gotta pick a side. Iran's track record of spending money across the region to foment wars is quite clear... Are all sides saints in these struggles? - certainly not... But I pick the lesser of the evils...
As if Israel and Saudi Arabia aren't spending even more money and fomenting their own wars. The fact is that Obama's Iran deal could have been a shakeup of the middle east and led to lasting peace. With Trump's tilting everything towards Israel and Saudi Arabia I don't see any end game for Iran besides catastrophe and potentially war. Maybe the idea is to oppress Iran for decades with superior weapons and money like Israel has done to Palestine. But even if they are able to pull that off it is an evil strategy.
Well he did serve half as long as the others, and we did come pretty close to a few. I don't think it's a very good metric regardless though, because it depends hugely on external factors and world politics which the President doesn't have as much control over. As war-mongering as Bush may have been, 9/11 was an external force. If something similar would've happened during Trump's presidency on US ground, I have zero doubt he would've started another war.
Iraq had what to do with 9/11? Not the excuse, what did it actually have to do with 9/11, as compared to say Saudi Arabia.
The media got mad when Trump wouldn't attack Syria, and said using missiles made him seem Presidential. Makes you wonder what the media and the rest really want.
So did Trump, so if you are just looking at that and not, say, the Balkans, I'm not sure why Trump gets any extra credit here.
Of course, there's probably some dispute over whether intervening to prevent genocide, either in general or in the specific manner it actually occurred under Clinton in the Balkans, is really a negative.
He definitely didn't start it, but there were US missiles landing on at least 3 continents. I was a child at the time, but it was such big news that I still remember two of those occasions.
The 2011 military intervention in Libya happened under Obama. It was led by France and UK, with US support, and wouldn't have happened if Obama had not green-lighted the operation. 10 years later the country is still in the middle of a civil war, de facto cut in two opposing camps that each control roughly half of the country.
Of course, compared to Iraq invasion it was a small scale operation, but is still generally considered Obama responsibility (although of course primarily Sarkozy and Cameron responsibility).
It's not so simple, I think, to say that by avoiding war he saved lives.
The US withdrew from Syria, and it does appear to me that for a moment that were a sense of morality from Trump there, he genuinely did not like the idea that lives would be lost as a consequence of his actions. That is commendable, though perhaps something that should have been considered in advance of such a situation rather than reactively.
But what was the consequence of not intervening? It created a vacuum, into which stepped many military powers, and many people have died or been displaced. We also have to consider the long-term consequences of an isolationist foreign policy.
There is a balance to be found between war-mongering and exerting influence to shape the world positively. Particularly, you have to avoid leaving a vacuum that can be exploited.
At the least we can say he didn't start an arbitrary new war, and that is a small but significant positive.
What moral calculus allows deaths from a pandemic, even if the by-product of negligence and mismanagement, to be placed on the same moral plane as deaths from bombs, drones, tanks and bullets, or the displacement of tens of millions of people from the War on Terror, or the slave markets and anarchy that still persist after the NATO bombing of Libya championed by Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, or the world’s worst humanitarian crisis from the U.S.-supported bombing campaign of Yemen that began under Obama?
Trump has not created the virus and followed the independent advice of Dr. Fauci. The UK, Spain and Belgium (all with the advantage of socialized healthcare) did even worse judging by per capita deaths. So he can't be that bad.
I also think its quite disingenuous to compare his handling of the virus to the suffering and deaths caused by wars that only serve to establish economic and power advantages.
> and followed the independent advice of Dr. Fauci
Care to point out to me where he did this? As far as I can tell, he wants to fire Fauci, has continuously disregarded his advice, and loves undermining him:
People are dying from Covid in every country, regardless of who's in charge and what the approach is. Maybe I'm just crazy, but I really don't think that people would just magically stop dying under Biden.
Even China is doing pretty well, with a current daily rate in the low single digits, compared to the hundreds to low thousands of the USA and the similarly poor performance of European and South American countries: https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/cn
That is good, but counts for very little when he has helped sow the seeds of numerous other wars, especially by rolling back most climate change fights.
He got lucky with foreign policy, and he did start a war against immigrants and people whose skin color is not white in the USA itself, led by Stephen Miller.
> If you define "criminal" as "any person who has committed a crime", and "crime" as "any illegal act that can be punished by law", then yes.
A criminal is a person who commits a crime.
It is possible, by ceasing to commit crimes and making restitution to society, to return to a state of non-criminality. But while one is still committing a crime, no amount of hand-waving or pearl clutching can make a non-criminal out of someone who is actively committing a crime.
For an illegal immigrant, this would mean either lawful settlement or deportation. Until an illegal immigrant either earns the right to settle or leaves the country, that person is still a criminal.
To carry with the driving violation analogy, if you've ever gone above the speed limit but not been ticketed, then you are still a criminal. You have not ceased committing that crime.
I know people who systematically drive over the speed limit. I disapprove of it, but I wouldn't call them criminals.
You can justify doing that by being sufficiently pedantic about definitions, but I don't think you gain anything in the public debate by lumping "people who speed" in the same category as burglars, murderers, etc. In most discussions, it's not productive to view these people as belonging to the same group.
Our disagreement is not in reasoning but in axioms. Your deduction based on the dictionary definition of "criminal" is valid (I say dictionary definition and not legal definition because, afaik, "criminal" is not a legal term).
But I don't accept dictionaries as the ultimate authority of the meaning of words, just a handy guide. The meaning of a word is whatever people tend to understand that word as. I cannot prove this on the spot, since I'd have to invest time into organizing a survey, but I'm fairly confident that, if you ask a thousand people whether someone who drives over the speed limit is a criminal, a majority of them would say "no" (phrasing of the question will matter probably though).
You can insist on the dictionary being the ultimate source of truth, that is fine. But all that achieves is setting yourself up for gratuitous, avoidable miscommunications. If your theory of language makes communication harder, it seems to undermine the point of language.
What do we call someone who breaks laws, then? We already have other words to designate serious offenders, like "felon" or "convict". And we have offense-specific terms, like "murderer" or "rapist".
The word "criminal" might connote a gravity that offends your sensibilities, but it's accurate. The disconnect arises because modern man sees himself as mostly above the law: Some offenses aren't offenses because (nearly) everyone commits them. We all (hopefully) learn from a young age that this is preposterous: "If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?"
I think you'll find that honoring the actual meaning of words makes communication easier, not harder.
Crossing the country "border" is simply a misdemeanor(like driving without insurance). But if you're a refugee there is no "illegal" way to cross. You can cross where ever then once you make it over you can apply for refugee status.
