Category Archives: Trump Administration

Did you believe Trump would not enter wars in Mideast?

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June 26, 2025 — Many people believed candidate Trump when he swore to avoid military entanglement.   In my January blog post,  at inauguration time, I wrote these two sentences, as a supposed lookback from the end of Trump’s 1st year:

“Pundits were soon chastising each other for having taken Trump’s isolationist foreign policy to imply a renunciation of military intervention abroad.  They suddenly remembered George W. Bush’s reversal, early in his presidency, of the very high bar that candidate Bush had set for military interventions, when rejecting nation-building in October 2000.” read more

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Foreign aid looks good, now that it’s gone

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May 24, 2025 — Joni Mitchell sang, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.”   She was lamenting loss of the environment.  Aid to developing countries (Overseas Development Assistance) may now be in the same category.

  1. How much does the US spend?

For the last 80 years, Americans have spent more on humanitarian assistance, economic development programs, and other foreign aid than any other country: $72 billion by the US government in 2024, and more by private NGOs. read more

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No Mar-a-Lago Accord

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March 23, 2025 — What is to be made of proposals for a “Mar-a-Lago Accord” coming from some Trump devotees, notably Stephen Miran?  (He is the new Chair of President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers.)

Sometime during the next 3 years and 10 months, Trump could well find some event that he will want to trumpet under the name of his Florida residence.   But the Mar-a-Lago Accord about which people are talking, regarding the dollar, doesn’t stand a chance.

  1. The return of international coordination?

The proposal comprises an effort, coordinated among large countries, to intervene to depreciate the dollar, in hopes of improving the US trade balance. That much resembles the successful 1985 Plaza Accord, which is said to be its inspiration.
One could imagine a sensible proposal for concerted intervention to bring down the dollar from its height, coordinated with American steps to cut its budget deficit and steps by Germany and China to increase their budget deficits, thus helping to address the fundamental causes of the international trade imbalances. But this is not that. read more

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