Trump doesn't read. He has repeatedly refused national security meetings while he was a candidate. It isn't that Trump didn't have the information about the assassination of American troops, it was that he didn't bother to know it.
September 2019
By Shannon Bugos
Less than one year (click here) after President Donald Trump informally announced that the United States would withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the State Department announced on Aug. 2 that the move was officially complete. The treaty’s death leaves just the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) in place to limit U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons deployments, and that pact is due to expire in February 2021.
For several years, the United States has alleged that Russia was in violation of the INF Treaty by testing and deploying a banned missile system, and Washington pinned its treaty withdrawal squarely on Russia. “Russia is solely responsible for the treaty’s demise,” said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in announcing the U.S. move. “Over the past six months, the United States provided Russia a final opportunity to correct its noncompliance. As it has for many years, Russia chose to keep its noncompliant missile rather than going back into compliance with its treaty obligations.”...
Trump is not a competent leader.
June 29, 2020
By Carl Bernstein
In hundreds of highly classified phone calls (click here) with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America's principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials -- including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff -- that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations....
All this is happening because Trump is an absentee president. It isn't as though he even cares about these developments. He just has no will to confront major powers unless it is to defame and demean allies. They are easy to pick on without worrying about real confrontation.
Besides, I think Trump believes if he can only get the strongmen of the world to understand how much better life would be if they were all capitalists along with him, the world would have peace.
June 29, 2020
By Eva Dou and Shibani Mahtani
China on Tuesday (click here) adopted a contentious national security law that will allow Beijing to override Hong Kong’s judicial system and target political opponents in the city, stripping the territory of autonomy promised under the handover agreement with Britain and raising the prospect of further retaliation from Washington.
The move has strained China’s relations with the United States and other Western nations, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying on Friday that Washington would place visa restrictions on Chinese officials responsible for curtailing freedoms in Hong Kong. On Monday, China said it would impose reciprocal measures on unspecified American officials, while the U.S. Commerce Department suspended some of Hong Kong’s preferential trade treatment under U.S. law....
