For our Republican friends, this is called “diplomacy.”
You might recall, but likely don’t care, that Presidents prior to 45 actually did this kind of work for the benefit of our country to keep the world safe.
We may also recall, presidents before 45, all the way back to 40, have been sending billions to IRI in hopes of working something out with them, and the problem is bigger and more serious now than ever. It’s called “appeasement”.
In return, we’ve achieved 2 things: helped keep a monstrous dictatorship in power, and helped dash Iranian peoples hopes for regime change and democracy.
There now.
Bush and Cheney didn't exhaust diplomatic options with Afghanistan and Iraq. They both rushed to go to war with them, because they had ulterior economic and geopolitical motives. The same was true with President Polk and Mexico, and so on. The results? The US lost and the Taliban won in Afghanistan, Iraq is friendly to the US but impoverished and unstable, as is Mexico. American Presidents are not always the diplomatic statesmen we imagine, and Donald Trump was not an aberration, especially when compared with other conservative Presidents.
