A “restrained” Trump holds an emergency meeting about North Korea with the Japanese prime minister–in public at Trump’s Florida country club.
NPR’s institutional compulsion to find “both sides” of every topic ill-equips the radio network to deal with the unique challenge of the Trump administration—as in NPR’s refusal to describe lies as “lies” (FAIR.org, 1/26/17) and its reliance on increasingly far-right think tanks to defend the far-right president (FAIR.org, 2/7/17). This problem was again on display in a piece by NPR national security correspondent Greg Myre (2/18/17) that dubiously described Trump’s foreign policy approach as “restrained.”
Myre began by framing weapon tests and military exercises—of the sort that would be considered utterly unremarkable if carried out by US armed forces—as deliberate and overt acts of aggression aimed at testing Trump, because they were performed by official enemy states. That these acts were both unusual and provocative was never questioned; it was simply asserted, so that the US, per usual, can be positioned as the party responding to threats rather than the one making them:
President Trump has been in office less than a month, and US adversaries have already tested him on several fronts. So far, Trump’s responses have been out of the traditional foreign policy playbook, and he’s largely refrained from the bluster of his campaign, when he threatened radical action against a host of rivals—and even some allies….
Yet in his first few weeks, Trump has opted for limited, moderate responses to events that had the potential to escalate.
Here NPR uses “traditional foreign policy playbook” interchangeably with “moderate,” the implication being that the baseline aggressiveness of US foreign policy seen under Barack Obama, George W. Bush and earlier presidents was not blustering or extreme.
“What gives the US the right to determine the missile capacity of other countries?” is not a question NPR would ever busy itself with. But even granting the US’s inalienable right to involve itself in the affairs of these countries, the piece veers into outright spin for the Trump White House:
After the ballistic missile test by Iran, the Trump administration added additional sanctions to 25 individuals and companies, which was seen as a modest response. Trump tweeted that “Iran was playing with fire.”
But since taking office, the president has not yet given any indication that he will tear up the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, as he promised to do during the campaign.
Myre asserted that Trump’s response was “seen as a modest response,” but doesn’t say by whom. Certainly not by the Iranians, who called Trump “an extremist” and responded with further military drills. Or by the Washington Post (2/2/17), for that matter, which described Trump’s first week of US/Iran relations as marked by “taunts and threats.”
Nor was there discussion of Trump’s ban on travel from seven Muslim-majority nations, which Iran also saw as an act of aggression, so much so that it—along with Iraq, the US’s supposed partner against ISIS—banned Americans from traveling to their countries in return.
The NPR story mentioned the US-backed Yemen catastrophe, but only in the context of the botched January 29 raid, which it euphemistically said had “mixed and disputed results,” without mentioning that those results included the death of dozens of civilians, including an eight-year-old US citizen.
NPR glossed over the January raid by insisting it was “planned during Barack Obama’s final days,” but even this was misleading. Lots of things are “planned” by the military; whether a president greenlights them depends upon their disposition and, yes, restraint. Members of Obama’s inner circle have denied “planning” such a raid at all.
On the subject of Yemen, Myre ignored completely the devastating US-backed Saudi war against the Shiite-led government that has killed over 10,000, which Trump has signaled he will double down on.
The piece continued:
The US military campaigns in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan have remained on the same trajectory that Trump inherited from Obama, though the new president has ordered a revamped plan for the battle against the Islamic State.
Again, the wisdom of the CIA’s billion-dollar-a-year fueling of the Syrian conflict was never examined, nor is the decade-and-a-half-long occupation of Afghanistan. These are all routine, normal, moderate—out of the “foreign policy playbook.”
But this recap of Trump’s foreign policy “restraint” excluded Trump’s greenlight for Israel to ramp up of settlements in the West Bank, and his abandonment of decades of US support for a two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict—radical departures from the “traditional foreign policy playbook.”
Other actions not typically associated with “restraint” that were missing from this piece: Trump hanging up on the president of Australia and threatening to invade Mexico.
Never mind; NPR’s main focus appeared to be reassuring the listener that on the topic of Russia and the broader operation of American empire, things are mostly back to normal. If Trump’s foreign policy involves support for the total colonization of Palestine, increased tensions with Iran, further bombing and starving of Yemeni civilians and threats against Mexico—well, those are the sort of things that happen on the margins of empire, and don’t really register on NPR’s “restraint” radar.
