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Taken from a thought I had in another thread...

Not to derail the thread, but I think it'd be more interesting as a creative exercise to imagine a world where Trump had run for president, and won, during the first cycle he floated the possibility of doing so - the 1988 election.

Imagine Trump handling the American response to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, desire for German reunification, the Tianamen protests, the fall of the Soviet Union, and Saddam Hussein's aggression in the Middle East. Quite a pivotal and delicate time in world history, and we were lucky to have competent US leadership during that period.

So... what if Trump had been elected that year?

It's easy enough to imagine such a scenario that's just within the realm of possibility. Say the Iran-Contra scandal is a much bigger deal, perhaps not to the point of causing Reagan to resign, but it certainly discredits much of the Republican establishment. Trump decides this is his year, and runs in the GOP primaries, exploiting his outsider appeal (perhaps also carrying the early endorsement of folks like Pat Buchanan). Democrats fumble their advantage by nominating someone like Jesse Jackson, who narrowly loses the general election.

While this may have a lot of interesting effects domestically, I'm primarily concerned with how he might have handled foreign policy, for the reasons laid out above. While Trump certainly didn't have Twitter to telegraph his every impulse to the world, we know that his basic political instincts then were the same as today - he had a strong distrust both of the benefits of international trade and the Western alliance system that America fostered during the Cold War. So... how does he handle things?
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