I found this to be a very interesting article, in that the content addresses the types of changes we may see in our government, and the writing reveals just how much liberals don't understand about the alternative point of view. Here are my thoughts on the author's perspective, point by point.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/12/ankara-berlin-trump-obama/511202/
Titled: What Their Reactions to Monday's Attacks Reveal About Trump and Obama
Monday’s horrors—the attack on a Christmas market in Berlin and the assassination of a Russian diplomat in Ankara—offer a natural experiment. Since they occurred during the brief window every four or eight years in which America has both a president and a president-elect, they provoked two sets of statements, one from the outgoing administration and another from its soon-to-be successor. The differences are revealing. So far I agree, it is an interesting opportunity for comparison.
The first difference, unsurprisingly, is that the Obama administration exercised caution. It said the Berlin atrocity “appears to have been a terrorist attack.” Team Trump, by contrast, simply called it a “horrifying terror attack.” The White House avoided speculation about the Turkish assassin’s motive. Team Trump, by contrast, called him a “radical Islamic terrorist.” Caution is a good thing, compared to impulsiveness, but it is not in itself a virtue. Being overly cautious when a strong response is called for is a mistake. If avoiding speculation is a virtue, we should keep that in mind later. There is no speculation here about the Turkish assassin being a radical Islamic terrorist, he was shouting Allah Akbar and talking about jihad as the attack took place.
More significantly, the two administrations used the attacks to tell radically different stories about who was being attacked, and why. The Obama administration identified the victims as members of a nation. Its five-sentence statement about the Berlin attack used the words “Germany” or “German” four times. And the White House linked the United States and Germany strategically, declaring that, “Germany is one of our closest partners and strongest allies.” It is not confirmed that all the victims were German, although I see that as a reasonable speculation.
Team Obama’s response to the Ankara assassination was also state-centric. It offered its “condolences to the Russian people and Government” and declared, “we stand united with Russia and Turkey in our determination to confront terrorism in all of its forms." Russia and Turkey are not “partners” and “allies” of the United States in the way Germany is. Still, the Obama administration implied a world in which even nations with sharply different interests cooperate against their common foe: “terrorism in all its forms.” Taken together, the Berlin and Ankara statements gesture toward a liberal internationalist order of the kind the United States helped build after World War II: an inner circle of cooperation linking the United States and its closest NATO allies surrounded by a broader circle represented by universal bodies like the UN, in which countries band together across ideological and geopolitical lines to battle the transnational scourges that threaten them all.
We are not "united with Russia and Turkey in our determination to confront terrorism in all of its forms." That statement is a direct lie. Turkey is supporting ISIS in its fight again their long time enemy the Kurds, and Russia is shooting down civilian airliners in Ukraine, and supporting Syria's slaughter of civilians in Aleppo. Even though it sounds nice and cooperative to those who wish for a "liberal internationalist order," there is no truth in that statement.
Team Trump’s statement was utterly different. It described the victims as members not of a nation but of a religion. Its statement about the Berlin attack didn’t refer to the victims as Germans. (It didn’t mention the words “German” or “Germany” once.) Instead, it defined them as people killed “as they prepared to celebrate the Christmas holiday.” The Obama team’s statement made no assumptions about the victims’ faith: It simply noted that the attack had occurred at “a Christmas Market.” The Trump statement, by contrast, implied that the victims all celebrated Christmas. And it linked those killed in Berlin to other “Christians” who “ISIS and other Islamist terrorists continually slaughter … in their communities and places of worship as part of their global jihad.”
Since the attack took place at a location described even by liberal news agencies as a "Christmas market" it is reasonable to deduct that the victims present celebrate Christmas, and mindless speculation to assume otherwise. The location is also significant because it leads to the reasonable deduction that it was deliberately targeted as a symbol of Christians, with victims who are more likely to be Christians, but Trump did not even speculate they were targeted because they were Christians.
The contrast grows even sharper when you add in Team Trump’s response to the Ankara attacks. Unlike Obama’s statement, which said nothing about the assassin’s faith, Trump’s called him “a radical Islamic terrorist.” The Trump statement also said nothing about working with either Russia or Turkey, let alone working with them against “terrorism in all its forms,” which implies that terrorism has forms other those rooted in Islam. The facts are that the shooter was shouting "Allah Akbar" during the attack, making him an Islamic terrorist. So Obama let out a key detail that Trump included. Most conservatives would read this line as a criticism of Obama if they didn't know the source. Trump is not the president, and even if he was, he is not obligated to work with Russia and Turkey to respond to an incident that in no way involves the US. While it is possible that terrorism can have forms other than those rooted in Islam, the terrorist attacks they are responding to are rooted in Islam, so ignoring that is implying a lie.
What do these statements tell us? That Team Obama defines the struggle against terrorism as a conflict pitting countries of all religious and ideological types against a common stateless foe, while Team Trump defines it as a conflict between Christendom and Islam. (That’s how ISIS defines it too. The Islamic State also views the world in terms of religious civilizations rather than nations). The natural implication of Obama’s worldview is that preventing terrorism requires cooperation between very different nations. The natural implication of Trump’s is that preventing terrorism requires keeping Muslims out. Neither of Trump’s statements acknowledges the possibility that Christians might perpetrate terrorism or Muslims might be victims of it. (Indeed, on the very same day as the attacks in Ankara and Berlin, a gunman opened fire at a mosque in Zurich, Switzerland, injuring three.) The message to Muslims in Germany and the United States is the same one Trump has peddled for more than a year now: You are the enemy within. Since we are in a battle against ISIS, we had better begin to understand and acknowledge how they see the world, and learn to view things the same way if we are going to overcome them. They target Christians because they are Christians, which is the central fact about this religiously motivated conflict. We aren't fighting ISIS because they are Muslims, we are fighting them because they are terrorists. We are at peace with other Muslim countries, they are not at peace with other non-Muslim countries.
