Nikki Haley’s right: The world’s burning on Biden’s watch. But Trump laid the kindling | Opinion

Editor’s note: Contributing columnist David Mastio is covering the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee for McClatchy Opinion.

Former Donald Trump rival and United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley gave a masterful speech to unite the Republican Party by making a molehill out of a mountain. In her carefully crafted words, fundamental differences and inconvenient facts disappeared. If I wasn’t prepared for the performance, I might now be a Trump voter.

It is true, you “don’t have to agree with Trump to vote for him,” but it sure helps if you ignore his record.

On Trump’s abdication of the pro-life position in the party platform she was silent. On traditional Republican precepts of faith in a market economy and open trade with the world called into question by Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as vice president, she was silent. NATO got not a word. Of her transformation from Trump lieutenant to critic and back to the MAGA tent, she said nothing.

It was only on foreign policy where Ambassador Haley made her case concrete.

She used her credibility on global affairs to describe a world that has seemingly been set ablaze by President Joe Biden’s weakness. Of the botched withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the sickening Hamas attack on Israeli civilians funded by Iran, Haley said such things would never have happened on Trump’s watch.

“A strong president doesn’t start wars. A strong president prevents them,” she said.

And if that were all there was to it, then Haley might be right. If you care about a strong foreign policy you could vote for Trump — but only if you forgot the role that Trump played in setting those three disasters in motion.

In Afghanistan, it was Donald Trump who started the countdown on our withdrawal from that country without putting a serious plan in place to remove our troops, U.S. citizens and loyal Afghan allies alike. There’s no excuse that an old foreign policy hand like Biden didn’t fix Trump’s mistake. Nevertheless, Trump can’t deny his role.

As for Ukraine, Trump’s attacks on NATO, our most vital alliance, signaled to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the alliance was riddled with fissures. Maybe that didn’t matter while a tough and unpredictable Trump was at the helm, but it did matter when someone with a reputation for appeasement walked into the White House. Trump tore down the bulwark of Western security that we would need when someone like Biden took power.

Moreover, Trump’s first impeachment revealed that the Donald blackmailed Ukraine for dirt on his political rivals, something no president would do if Ukraine was a vital American interest. It was Trump who signaled to Putin that he could invade Ukraine without consequence as much as Biden did.

And with Iran, Trump indeed tore up Barack Obama’s ill-considered nuclear agreement and took a tough stance on the Shia theocracy that is the world’s chief terrorism funder. But Trump didn’t do anything of consequence to stop Iran from restarting its nuclear program.

The near-term prospect of a nuclear weapon is one factor that may have given Iran’s mullahs the confidence to back Hamas in a big enough way for them to pull off the Oct. 7 terror attack.

Nikki Haley is right that Biden’s weakness has set our world aflame, but she can’t hide the fact that Donald Trump put the kindling in place and handed the matches to the world’s most odious regimes.

David Mastio, a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star Opinion correspondent. Follow him on X: @DavidMastio or email him at dmastio1@yahoo.com