Trump's Plans for the Rest of the World Are Truly Unhinged

Yahoo

05-03-2025

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President Trump spent only 15 minutes of his nearly two-hour speech Tuesday night on foreign policy—but those minutes were as full of falsehoods, distortions, and personal insults as the rest of what must be the most angrily divisive presidential address to a joint session of Congress.
His first lie on the subject was that, because he and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had removed 'wokeness' from our military, recruitment rates are higher than any time in the last 15 years. In fact, according to a headline in Fox News, of all places, 'Army recruiting is up, but data show trend began before the election.'
According to that data, there were more recruits in August 2024, three months before the election, than there were in December, one month after the election (a lot more: 7,415 compared with 5,877). Nor did recruitment in January 2025 surpass the numbers of August 2024.
The reason is that, back in 2023, the military put 1,200 more recruiters in the field and set up a six-week pre-boot camp to help lower-performing recruits meet the required standards.
This highlights an ominous fact for the future: the nation is having a hard time recruiting physically and mentally fit men and women to join the military. However, steps to adjust for that were taken in the final year-and-a-half of the Biden administration—and higher numbers were met in that time than in the time since Trump was elected.
The second howler of the night was Trump's characterization of what he is now calling the Golden Dome system to defend the United States from nuclear attack. He said that President Ronald Reagan wanted to create such a defense, but the technology didn't exist. 'Now we have the technology,' Trump claimed, 'it's incredible, actually. And other places—they have it, Israel has it. Other places have it. And the United States should have it too.'
All of those sentences are false. Israel's Iron Dome program is designed to intercept missiles with a range of 40 miles traveling at twice the speed of sound. The sorts of missiles that would attack the United States would fly at a range of 6,000 miles, traveling at 10 times the speed of sound. The technology required for the one is completely different from the technology required for the other.
The U.S. already has plenty of air- and missile-defenses at least as good as Iron Dome—the Patriot, the Standard Missile, and others. No country has a defense of the sort that Reagan had, and Trump has, in mind. We have spent more than $10 billion a year for the last 40 years trying to develop such a defense, to little avail. At best, we are now able to hit one mock warhead with one anti-missile missile in a carefully planned test. The test managers have never even tried to hit two with two, or a dozen with a dozen—because they know they cannot.
The third distortion came with Trump's announcement that he would create an office of shipbuilding in the United States. He didn't say what such an office could do that the U.S. Navy could not. We'll wait for details. But then he segued, as if it followed that promise, with a pledge to reclaim the Panama Canal, which he said President Jimmy Carter gave away. In fact, the biggest defenders of the treaty that Carter signed, transferring the canal to the country of Panama, were the top U.S. military officers, because they knew they could not easily defend the canal in the face of rising anti-American sentiment—and they knew actual ownership of the canal wasn't necessary to use it. Trump has said in recent months that China has taken over the canal's ports and that U.S. ships have been overcharged while transiting through. Neither claim is true.
He then said that he was putting Secretary of State Marco Rubio in charge of getting the canal back. 'Good luck, Marco,' he said, to laughter. 'Now we know who to blame if anything goes wrong.' As if Rubio hasn't experienced enough humiliation in the first six weeks on the job, his failure to make progress on this task—all the while realizing, deep down, that it's a mad mission—may eclipse all prior demoralization.
Then came Greenland. At first, Trump seemed to soften his earlier commitment to 'get' Greenland. He said, as if speaking to that country's citizens, 'And if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America. We need Greenland for national security and even international security. And we're working with everybody involved to try and get it. But we need it really for international world security. And I think we're going to get it.' Then he added, 'one way or the other, we're going to get it,' thus renewing his threat.
Greenland does occupy potentially valuable geostrategic territory, near the Arctic, alongside possible ship and submarine routes by Russia or other adversaries. However, Greenland and its present owner, Denmark, are both NATO members. The U.S. has a massive military base on Greenland and other bases nearby. There are no local protesters to U.S. presence. The U.S. does not need to own the place.
The Ukraine portion of Trump's speech was filled with exaggerations. He said the U.S. has donated $350 billion to Ukraine, while all of Europe—which should have a higher stake on the country's defense—has given only $100 billion. In fact, the U.S. has given $175 billion—half as much as Trump claimed—of which $66 billion was in military aid, much of which was paid to American defense manufacturers. Meanwhile, the European Union and its member states have provided about $200 billion—more than the United States.
But then came an interesting, possibly hopeful twist—the only one in the entire speech. He read parts of a letter from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky saying he is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible, ready to work under President Trump's strong leadership. 'I appreciate that he sent this letter,' Trump said, signaling a possible do-over of the Oval Office meeting last week where he and Vice President J.D. Vance screamed at Zelensky for being insufficiently thankful to his hosts.
Trump then said he'd spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who told him that Russia is ready for peace too. 'Wouldn't that be beautiful?' Trump mused. We'll see what kind of peace Putin wants. We'll also see if Zelensky's letter moves Trump to reverse his decision to halt all arms transfers to Ukraine—even the arms in the pipeline.
That would be less likely. When he itemized (though incorrectly) the billions that the U.S. has spent on arms for Ukraine, many Democrats started applauding—for the first and only time in the speech. Trump looked over to them and muttered, 'You like that?' Then he said, 'Pocahontas says yes'—Pocahontas being his belittling nickname for Sen. Elizabeth Warren. To her credit, the camera showed her smiling and nodding in response.
As usual, Trump spent more time and energy chiding Warren, other Democrats, and especially former President Joe Biden—calling him 'the worst president,' among other insults—than he spent criticizing any of the country's adversaries.
To any foreigners watching the speech to glean Trump's priorities, that said it all—and it wasn't at all assuring.