Pence Goes Over The Waters Edge
By Paul R Pillar
January 27, 2018
Paul R. Pillar is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University and retired in 2005 from a 28-year career in the U.S. intelligence community. His senior positions included ...Deputy Chief of the DCI Counterterrorist Center, and Executive Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence. He is a Vietnam War veteran and a retired officer in the U.S. Army Reserve. Dr. Pillar's degrees are from Dartmouth College, Oxford University, and Princeton University.
“As recently as a generation or two ago, the mainstream of American politics observed an important limit whereby domestic politics did not operate beyond the nation’s boundaries...The guiding principle ...that “we must stop partisan politics at the water’s edge.” Today one can find discouraging examples of disdain for [this] principle...Early in the trip Pence held a meet-and-greet with U.S. troops at an undisclosed location near the Syrian border. This sort of meeting with American service members overseas is traditionally a way for senior leaders to express, on behalf of themselves and the American people, appreciation for the troops’ work and sacrifices. It is supposed to be an apolitical morale booster. It is one of the last places where partisan attacks should intrude. But Pence used the occasion to lambaste Democrats for the government shutdown. Senior staffers for previous vice presidents, both Republican and Democratic, appropriately criticized Pence for his very inappropriate abuse of the occasion.
Then came Pence’s speech to the Israeli Knesset.... He went all in with the Israeli right wing, who could not have loved the speech more if the Israeli prime minister’s office had drafted it...
The most plausible interpretation of Pence’s primary motivation in designing the speech, replete with biblical references, was that he was speaking to American evangelical Christians whom Pence considers his primary domestic political base and of whom he is himself a member...If there is a positive side to any of this, it may be to lay ever more bare, and to make obvious to more people than ever before, that the direction of U.S. policy on this issue has had far more to do with domestic politics and cross-boundary political intrusion than with any dispassionate and nonpartisan analysis of what would be in U.S. interests.”
https://lobelog.com/pence-goes-over-the-waters-edge/
The author is correct.The base is everything to this maladministration. There isn’t one facet of the foreign policy apparatus of the federal government that isn’t infected with partisan right wing politics. It starts with the systemic destruction of the Department of State. It ends?
