What Donald Duck Can Teach Trump About Going to War

Filed 1mo ago · Via Foreign Policy · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Myst

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: HatschiKa · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

A Foreign Policy analysis contrasts President Trump's handling of the six-month Iran war — costing at least $35 billion with no clear endpoint — with Franklin Roosevelt's deliberate campaign to build public support for World War II, including enlisting Donald Duck and other entertainers to sell taxes, bonds, and rationing to Americans. The piece notes the Trump administration's rationale for the conflict has shifted from eliminating Iran's nuclear program to keeping the Strait of Hormuz open, despite the strait having been open before the war started.

The analysis argues that presidents who fail to articulate a clear case for war risk losing public support once conditions on the ground worsen, and that the Iran war has compounded Americans' affordability concerns rather than easing them. Roosevelt, by contrast, used the Office of War Information and public messaging campaigns to justify sacrifice across the economy during WWII.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Selling a war badly is its own kind of tell — if the administration can't articulate why Americans are six months and $35 billion into this, it's worth asking whether anyone in the building actually knows. FDR at least had Donald Duck do the explaining; here the shifting rationale seems to be the entire communications strategy. That's not restraint, it's improvisation with a body count of invoices.

Source: Read the original at Foreign Policy → Scored: Myst · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0