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Take the Donald Trump Foreign Policy Challenge!!

It’s the last day of the International Studies Association annual meetings. I’m sleep-deprived, hung over, moderately sunburned, and pretty sick of international relations theory. While this throwback to my college days is moderately nostalgic, it is usually not a good state for blogging. Trying to tackle or critique the finer points of a nuanced argument ...

By Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

April 4, 2012, 2:16 PM

It's the last day of the International Studies Association annual meetings. I'm sleep-deprived, hung over, moderately sunburned, and pretty sick of international relations theory. While this throwback to my college days is moderately nostalgic, it is usually not a good state for blogging. Trying to tackle or critique the finer points of a nuanced argument takes energy and analytic skills, and after losing Twitter Fight Club 2012, I'm feeling wanting in both.

It’s the last day of the International Studies Association annual meetings. I’m sleep-deprived, hung over, moderately sunburned, and pretty sick of international relations theory. While this throwback to my college days is moderately nostalgic, it is usually not a good state for blogging. Trying to tackle or critique the finer points of a nuanced argument takes energy and analytic skills, and after losing Twitter Fight Club 2012, I’m feeling wanting in both.

But, just when it seems like there’s nothing I’m capable of blogging about in such a state, along comes Donald Trump.

When we last left The Donald in the world of foreign policy, he was uttering such inane, ignorant statements that I even invented an award in his honor. Today, Politico reports that Trump offered the following opinion on Laura Ingraham’s radio show:

I happen to think that the President is going to start a war with Iran. I think it will be a short-term popular thing to do, and I think he’s going to do that for political reasons, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know if anyone says this as openly, but I think he’s going to start a war with Iran. And, that will be short-term popular. If you remember Bush, Bush was unbeatable for about two months, and then all of the sudden the world set in when he attacked Iraq. And he went from very popular to not popular at all. But I think that Obama will start in some form a war with Iran, and I think that will make him very popular for a short period of time. That will make him hard to beat also.

Now I could go on a long-winded rant about Trump’s stupidity, but I think it’s more fun to treat this as a challenge to my readers. See, it’s not just that Trump makes a few errors in that paragraph, it’s that with one partial exception, every single statement he just said was factually wrong.

So, rather than ask my readers to point out the myriad ways in which Donald Trump is in error, here’s my challenge — what sentence in the above paragraph contains the most truth value?

Get to it, dear readers — while I go search for Advil.

UPDATE: So I see that Trump has said other controversial things today. I will leave it to readers to judge whether the veracity of his later comments are greater than his foreign-policy musings.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner