One of the interesting things about the election of Donald Trump is that it was tantamount to running an experiment in the realm of foreign policy: what happens if you put a man with no experience whatsoever in charge of the diplomacy of the most powerful nation on the planet?

American foreign policy is famously interventionist, or at least, it has been so since the World War II. And this bias towards intervention—usually of a military nature—amounts to one of the few areas of bipartisan consensus we have have in the US. If you want to be taken seriously, you have to adhere to this worldview at least to some extent. You are called strong and decisive if you decide to invade a country, and you are weak and feckless if you refrain. If the intervention turns into a quagmire after a few years, the press and influential think tanks will have moved on, and what criticism you get will be almost academic.

Americans—except that small portion of the population enrolled in the military—will not be affected by your decisions, so there will be little urgency in remedying the situation. It is not on Boston or Chicago that you will have rained death and destruction, after all. And finally, if you decide that you want to pull back from some conflicts, the high officers of the military whose careers have been built on those interminable invasions will push back vigorously and tell you just how terrible a mistake you are making. You will have a hard time finding high-ranking officers committed to a military retrenchment. And if you decide to order a phased withdrawal over the objections of the military establishment, not only will you be universally criticized in the press, but you will own any and every subsequent reversal of fortune. If you’re a politician worried about reelection or the electoral prospects of your party, the path of least resistance will always be not to pick a fight with the military. Unfortunately, this is a path that almost always leads to military intervention, and to the perpetuation of military occupation after the initial invasion.

Thus, if you are attacked by Al Qaeda, you will be prodded to invade Afghanistan, never mind that the 9/11 attacks were actually planned in Germany by Saudi nationals. And once in Afghanistan, you will be told that you can never leave, lest it should become a springboard for another large-scale terrorist attack. And so we stay, no, not forever, of course—That would be ridiculous. We’ll just stay a few more years, then a few more, then a few more… then a few more. We can’t leave just yet, because… reasons.

Donald Trump didn’t know anything about foreign policy when he was elected. He didn’t know enough to be embarrassed by the questions he had. He was like a first grader willing to ask questions everyone else was afraid to ask because it would make them look stupid:

• Why are we still in Afghanistan again? Why can’t we just leave?
• Why do we need NATO? Why can’t we dismantle it and be friends with Russia?
• Why are we spending so much to defend the Europeans if they won’t increase their military budgets? Are we getting anything for this?
• Why are we spending money to defend shipping lanes that mostly benefit China?

The “Straight” in question here is the Strait of Hormuz.

Most of the oil going through there flows East, not to the US.

So, why is the US assuming the cost of protecting these shipping lanes? I agree with Trump that this is a question that should be asked. Maybe the president of the US should do something about it! After all, isn’t he the commander in chief of the navy that is protecting those shipping lanes? That, of course, would require the president to focus and make the issue a priority, or even negotiate an agreement with China where the US would gradually let the Chinese assume the responsibility and cost of providing security through the Strait of Hormuz. Or maybe the president should decide that we do want to be the ones providing security there, because in the event of a war with China, we can easily cut off their access to oil. Regardless, one would expect the president to figure out this answer by better means than asking strangers on Twitter.

Still, I like the fact that he is asking those questions.

Let’s get back to NATO, for instance. It was an anti-Soviet alliance. The Soviets are gone. Do we need a permanent anti-Soviet alliance if the Soviets are gone? Are we afraid that Russia will invade Western Europe any time soon? Is it not reasonable for Russia to worry about an anti-Russian alliance extending its borders all the way to its frontiers, especially when it looked like we wanted to bring Ukraine into that alliance as well? Did we have to bring the Baltic States into NATO? Was Russia not right to see this as a provocation? It looked like a defensive alliance to us, but how could they have possibly seen it that way? Focusing on Western Europe for a second, would our allies there spend so little on defense if they were truly worried about a Russian invasion? And if they are not worried about such an invasion, why are we worried on their behalf? Maybe, instead of prodding them to increase their defense spending, we should cut ours and leave them be?

These are the aspects of foreign policy in which my instincts are more aligned with Trump than with Hillary Clinton. But I have three problems with him:

1. He seems incapable of studying. Policy realignments should never be done on a whim. And if this is the direction we are going to take, we’d better be sure that we’ve really done a thorough analysis of all potential consequences.
2. He is not consistent in his restraint. He is more than willing to bomb things sometimes just to show that he can. And he doesn’t seem to be able to focus on one issue long enough to achieve the policy goals he supposedly wants to achieve.
3. He engages in puerile fights with other nations on Twitter!

This is dangerous. It's is no way to conduct diplomacy. I really don’t want a president who can be taunted into going to war.

So, all in all my answer to whether I agree with Trump on anything at all amounts to a “yes, but…”