A New York Times columnist wrote a piece on Sunday, praising President Donald Trump for successfully winning the war over the Islamic State, while at the same time criticizing the media for failing to report on the victory.
The conservative columnist, Ross Douthat, said in his column, “A War Trump Won,” that he was positively surprised by the Trump administration’s foreign policy, more particularly in the war on ISIS.
“If you had told me in late 2016 that almost a year into the Trump era the caliphate would be all-but-beaten without something far worse happening in the Middle East, I would have been surprised and gratified,” Douthat wrote.
He further says that IS militants in Syria and Iraq have been effectively routed by President Trump, without any major ground troop invasions or accidentally getting into war with Russia or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.
However, despite his extensive praise of the president, the columnist attacked the media for ignoring the success and focusing on “the narrative of Trumpian disaster.”
“But this is also a press failure, a case where the media is not adequately reporting an important success because it does not fit into the narrative of Trumpian disaster in which our journalistic entities are all invested,” Douthat wrote.
Earlier this month, Iraq declared its war against the Islamic State was over and extremist fighters have been driven from all of the territories they once held.
Douthat added that “Trump has avoided the temptation often afflicting Republican uber-hawks, in which we’re supposed to fight all bad actors on 16 fronts at once. Instead, he’s slow-walked his hawkish instincts on Iran, tolerated Assad and avoided dialing up tensions with Russia.”
The columnist also applauds President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, despite the criticism the move received from the international community.
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