Wednesday on FBN’s “Mornings with Maria,” Rep. Rick Crawford (R-AR) said President Donald Trump’s foreign policy approach regarding Iran was comparable to Douglas MacArthur’s post-World War II reconstruction approach to Japan.
The Arkansas Republican congressman said the hope was to make “lemonade out of lemons.”
“[I] guess the question really is, we’re not debating defense spending,” host Maria Bartiromo said. “We understand that we have to replenish our arms after this war. But will Republicans stay united on this issue going into the midterms?”
Crawford replied, “I think you have to sort of look at the way the president is conducting operations in Iran, and I think it’s not necessarily an apples comparison. But if you think about the way he is treating this, it’s not unlike the way MacArthur engaged with Japan post-World War II. I mean, you could play it the other way and go, well, we’re going to — what happened in Germany at post-World War I, where they just almost subjugated the German people and humiliated the German people, and that led to Hitler and the rise of Nazism, and I think MacArthur was determined not to repeat that.”
“If you take those lessons from history, it’s quite clear that President Trump has a different vision of how to treat an adversary, and could turn this into maybe lemonade out of lemons here, and do some good for not only the Iranian people, but certainly for the American people, and stabilizing the region,” he added. “So, I think there is an historic context here that’s being lost. But that’s what I think the message needs to be in order to galvanize not just the Republican Party, but the American people.”
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