"We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example," Trump said, addressing the nation and the world for the first time as president on Friday. "We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones, and unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the earth," he added, stressing that the US "will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world."
Thinking back to 2008, Darling recalled that "the American people were tired of wars, and that's why they elected President Obama. They were tired of the war in Afghanistan; they were tired of the war in Iraq, and they elected an individual who said he was going to change these policies."
Unfortunately, he noted, in the eight years since, Obama's foreign policy has turned into something that's "hard to understand, because he was more interventionist in Libya, he wanted to take sides in the Syrian civil war, and he was not aggressive enough in Iraq to fight ISIS [Daesh]." Americans "saw a muddled foreign policy – a foreign policy that didn't make any sense, and a foreign policy where Obama promised not to be an interventionist, but proved to be very interventionist — in Egypt, in Libya," and initially, even in Syria.
"The American people don't want that," Darling emphasized. "They want to defeat ISIS, and they want to have less intervention in the Mideast. They don't want to be involved in all these Middle Eastern wars. Donald Trump won by saying he doesn't want to be a nationbuilder – that he doesn't want to be involved in all these civil wars. He wants to make America great again by putting America first, and not putting an internationalist-type agenda of intervening in all of these countries as part of our foreign policy. I think the American people were drawn to the idea of trying to keep many of our troops home and not intervening in civil wars."
