For Americans, Peace Trumps War

Presidential politics, big picture, is mainly about two things: prosperity and peace, a/k/a national security.

On the prosperity side Donald Trump is beginning to attract unexpected mainstream praise for the economic, specifically monetary, policy element of his prosperity agenda. Matt O’Brien, at the Washington Post, writes On this [Federal Reserve Policy] issue, Donald Trump knows a lot more than other Republicans. Sad!  At The Week Jeff Spross writes Donald Trump is shockingly sane on the Federal Reserve. Now Politico reports Trump’s economic policies start to make sense, former Fed board member says. The Washington Post‘s Jim Tankersley already scooped that One part of the Republican Establishment actually loves Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, referencing supply-side thought leaders Steve Forbes, Arthur Laffer, Larry Kudlow and Steve Moore, founders of the officially neutral Committee To Unleash Prosperity (of whose Supply Side Blog I serve as editor in chief).

Moving on, next, to peace Donald Trump has unsettled American policy elites, Republican eminences, and world leaders. He has done so by publicly toying with some borderline heretical (or as the New York Times more elegantly puts it, orthodoxy defying) proposals like the possibility of renegotiating our commitment to NATO and of withdrawing our nuclear defense commitment to Japan and Korea (suggesting they develop their own nuclear deterrent a là France’s force de frappe).

Last week Trump gave his first major foreign policy address. The status quo elites missed the punchline.

The last time a presidential candidate created such consternation was when Ronald Reagan proposed shifting from the doctrine of containment of the Soviets to “We win, they lose,” proposing a judicious, not bellicose, confrontation. Is Trump off the rails? Or on to something?

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Read the full article at Forbes.com.

Ralph Benko, internationally published weekly columnist, co-author of The 21st Century Gold Standard, lead co-editor of the Gerald Malsbary translation from Latin to English of Copernicus’s Essay on Money, is American Principles Project’s Senior Advisor, Economics.