MEDIAWATCH: Fake crises overshadow the real ones

President Trump has spent the past few weeks grandstanding over a crisis that seems to exist only in the heads of him and his allies. He repeatedly cast the arrival of Central American asylum seekers at the American border as an almost apocalyptic invasion of terrorists, criminals, and other malefactors. (Reporters traveling among the “caravan” of migrants found mostly families fleeing gang violence and poverty.) In an ostentatious election stunt, he dispatched active-duty troops to a dusty corner of Texas to unfurl miles of concertina wire for the cameras. (The Pentagon wound down the operation within days of the polls closing.), reports The Washington Post

On Monday, Trump warned that he might even permanently close a crucial California border crossing if he doesn’t get federal funding for his still-nonexistent border wall, which most security experts believe would make little difference. But as the president fulminated over immigration and border security — red-meat subjects for his base — it’s worth considering what he wasn’t talking about.

On Friday, a U.S. government report acknowledged that climate change is real — and is doing damage to both the country and the world. The White House apparently hoped to bury the report by releasing it the day after Thanksgiving rather than next month. When that didn’t work, Trump used a cold spell over the weekend to claim yet again that global warming is a hoax and later explicitly said he didn’t believe his own administration’s findings.

On Sunday, a dangerous military escalation flared between Russia and Ukraine, prompting alarmist headlines about World War III. Trump tweeted nothing about it, choosing instead to once more attack his nation’s traditional allies in Europe, grousing over their supposed unwillingness to “pay their fair share for Military Protection.” In reality, a growing chorus of European leaders is calling for the continent to beef up its defenses in the face of Moscow’s menace — and Washington’s unpredictability.

Yemen
On Monday, the heads of five major international aid groups urged the United States to halt its military support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. Thanks to years of conflict and an intractable Saudi blockade, 14 million Yemenis are on the brink of famine. “We have no means left to avert a catastrophe in Yemen,” the leaders warned in a joint statement. “Every humanitarian effort can no longer prevent mass starvation if the war is not brought to an end immediately and urgent efforts undertaken to ensure food, fuel, and other vital supplies reach those in greatest need.”

All three are urgent international issues, all ones in which the United States can play an important role. But Trump, as ever, is uninterested in statecraft. Confronted with record-low approval ratings and a vast thicket of controversies, he has chosen to circle the wagons and continue ginning up the same grievances and nationalist rancor that brought him to power. But for a president convinced that he’s putting America first, his blind spots may ultimately cause the country more harm than anything else.

Climate change
On climate change, Trump has not merely surrendered the field to other governments but ignored the existence of the battle. Experts fear that his administration’s actual climate policies — promoting coal, rolling back regulations and weakening rules such as emissions standards — are going to make things worse.

Trump’s reluctance to rebuke Russian President Vladimir Putin or condemn his annexation of Crimea, critics argue, has encouraged an adventurous Kremlin to test the waters of expansion — all too literally in the case of this weekend’s clash with Ukrainian warships in the Sea of Azov. His deference to Putin at a summit in Helsinki this year baffled many analysts, who contrast Trump’s acquiescence with the tougher stances of senior foreign policy officials in the administration.

Arms sales
On Yemen, Trump has said precious little about the world’s most dire humanitarian crisis. Instead, he has sought to defend one of the war’s leading belligerents, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, from international censure. In a widely condemned statement issued last week by Trump — entitled “Standing with Saudi Arabia” — Yemen was acknowledged only as a proxy zone for Saudi and Iranian conflict. There was no mention of the human catastrophe unfolding there. Trump also highlighted Saudi Arabia’s oil output and purchases of American arms as reasons to not to punish the reckless prince for his alleged role in the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

None of this can justify the horrors of the war, nor the White House’s inaction as mass starvation looms. For Trump, it’s also bad politics: A growing faction in Congress wants to rein in the conflict; a new poll commissioned by the International Rescue Committee found that a majority of both U.S. liberals and conservatives opposed continuing arms sales to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen.

Meanwhile, the migrant caravan that scares and angers Trump is the product of a real crisis, but not one that he will acknowledge. In a column for The Washington Post, former U.S. secretary of state George Shultz and former Mexican treasury secretary Pedro Aspe outlined measures Washington could pursue to help stabilize the Central American countries that are so dangerous for their own citizens.

“Instead of blaming the migrants who are fleeing violence and corruption in Central America, we should recognize why they are leaving and do something about it,” Shultz and Aspe wrote. “If we succeed in improving economic conditions and reducing drug-related violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, then we can expect that the citizens of those countries will choose to stay home.