This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 17th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Donald Trump rode to the White House on an America First platform.

But turning that slogan into policy has made

American foreign policy worse, even as many scholars have struggled to figure out

exactly what even the slogan is supposed to mean. The new Cato book, Fuel to the Fire, how Trump

made America's broken foreign policy even worse and how we can recover, details both

the problems of and a way out of the incoherence of current US foreign policy.

Trevor Thral and John Glazer are co-authors of the book we spoke this week.

There are a lot of people right now with respect to the Syria situation and the US

de-escalation, shall we say, in northern Syria who might otherwise have absolutely no interest in that situation at all, were it not for

the fact that this particular president has done it.

Can you speak to that at all?

Well, I think the main problem is that

Trump is allergic to the normal process of making policy and so he kind of makes a disaster out of even relatively simple policy shifts.

Furthermore, his initial announcement that he was going to withdraw or actually just relocate about 50 or 100 troops from the Syrian Turkish border. He framed it in language about ending

endless wars and and that kind of thing and yet that's that wasn in his policy.

And one of the reasons we wanted to write this book

was to kind of set the record straight on that score

because Trump sometimes adopts the language of restraint

and non-intervention despite not actually carrying it out competently or even doing the exact opposite of what

restraint would prescribe.

...