Robert Gates Reminds NBC That Trump Is One President Who Hasn’t Started Any Wars

June 15, 2020 (EIRNS)—Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates (2006-2011), did not join the war hawk U.S. military officials who find the U.S. National Guards so inhuman and threatening to human liberty, when President Donald Trump deployed the Guards to help keep law against rioters.

NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd asked Gates, on June 14, whether his opinion of the U.S. President has changed since September 2016, when he described Trump as “stubbornly uninformed about the world and how to lead.” He replied, “I would say this, Chuck. First of all, unlike his three predecessors—and I write about this in the book Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World—at least he hasn’t started any new wars, and he has robustly funded the military.”

Gates also gave Trump credit for having tried a new approach to break the logjam of decades on the Korean Peninsula. Although it hasn’t worked, said Gates, “that was a bold move, and everything else had failed in the previous 25 years.”