QOTD: Richard Engel
by digby
MSNBC had their expert reporters do some fact checking of the debate last night and NBC’s top foreign correspondent Richard Engel came in looking rather shell shocked by what he’d heard. He had a lot to say but this stuck out at me because it tracks with one of my greatest fears about all this lunacy:
A lot of things Donald Trump was proposing were frankly destabilizing, dangerous, dangerous to the United States, dangerous to the world order, if you will. The United States foreign policy is based on agreements often long negotiated agreements sometimes negotiated over decades and longer.
If you listen to the debate he’s basically saying that he’s a business man and he’s going to tear up the old agreements and negotiate better deals. If you’re a foreign country and you’re listening to this and you’re listening to this and you have an agreement whether NATO or a nuclear deal or a protection agreement or a sovereignty agreement or a trade agreement and you suddenly think, “is the leading world power just going to tear up the agreement that we’ve had for decades?” What is that going to mean for me? Are my neighbors going to invade?
There are dozens of reason why Trump must be defeated but this, I believe, is number one. If he wins we will wake up the morning after the election to a changed world and it’s unlikely to be changed in a positive way. In fact, it’s likely to be the beginning of a very dangerous military build-up.
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