Free Republic

Almost all media commentators seem convinced that Donald Trump’s foreign policy in his second term is a disaster. He is bogged down in Iran, snookered in Ukraine, his tariff agenda has failed and he has alienated his NATO allies. But this consensus has been too hastily formed. Looking at the bigger global picture, Trump’s foreign policy has been a spectacular success. Take the western hemisphere. We have the so-called “Donroe Doctrine,” the updated version of the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine. In 1822, president James Monroe, having welcomed South America’s overthrow of Spanish and Portuguese imperial rule, stated that Latin American nations...

America should fear China's growing military might, a senior Chinese air force official boasted, ominously inviting his U.S. counterparts to a meeting "in the sky." The grim warning from People’s Liberation Army Deputy Air Force Commander Wang Wei was in apparent response to U.S. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s pledge last month to develop weapons that “scare China.” Wang said China, which is becoming increasingly belligerent in the Indo-Pacific region, is rolling out fearsome weapons of its own... ...“Often, you’re going to get quicker with bilateral, trilateral relationships than you are necessarily trying to maneuver very large alliances into place,”...

China is opening up another front in its relentless drive to expand its territorial claims. The latest target of the Communist Party’s seemingly insatiable expansionist agenda is the central Asian republic of Tajikistan. More than 90 per cent of the territory of this Muslim majority country is mountainous. Recent articles in the state-controlled Chinese media, which don’t publish anything without the prior approval of the Communist Party, have called for Tajikistan’s Pamir mountain range, which runs along the Tajik border with Afghanistan and China, to be ceded to China. According to a report in the Times of India, these include...