Aides said Trump’s Wednesday foreign policy speech is the first in a series of policy addresses the GOP front-runner will deliver.
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There was nothing new – no significant additions to his talk on the stump and in several earlier interviews; no substantive qualifications to earlier pronouncements; certainly, no retractions; all of which brought forth this tweet from The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza: “To say this Trump foreign policy speech is light on specifics is an insult to specifics”.
Donald Trump’s vision for America’s place in the world, spelled out in a rare policy speech Wednesday, offered a gauzy overview that left even some favorable to his campaign calling for more specificity.
He identified five challenges that American foreign policy faces now.
“This man Trump blew everybody off the spectrum, he won every single county in Pennsylvania”, said Ash Khare, a former regional state party official in northwestern Pennsylvania.
He said USA foreign-policy mistakes in Iraq, Egypt, and Libya have helped to “throw the region into chaos”. “It has to be first”.
The conservative-leaning Center for the National Interest, which advocates a realist approach to worldwide relations, hosted the address.
Trump defended his call to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. But he also disagreed with the foreign economic policy consensus of the years since World War II, criticized the neoconservative policies of the George W. Bush administration – notably for the invasion of Iraq – and took issue with trade policies that have been relatively consistent since the Eisenhower years. The country can not be strong, he argued, without major reforms in those areas. He said he would not dance to any “false song of globalism,”, and would resist any global obligation that would “limit our abilities to control our own affairs”.
Trump reiterated his support for reevaluating long-standing security arrangements, like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
NAFTA, Trump said, “has been a total disaster for the United States and has emptied our states of our manufacturing and our jobs”.
The US had been taken advantage of by its allies, he contended, but he would make them pay their fair share, while assuring them that they could trust the US. “The countries we are defending must pay for the cost of this defense – and, if not, the USA must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves”. “We have no choice”, he added.
At the same time, Trump said, the US has become an unreliable ally under Obama. Lindsey Graham said on Twitter that the businessman’s speech was “pathetic in terms of understanding the role America plays in the world”.
It all began with the unsafe idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western democracy.
“We’re getting out of the nation-building business”, he said. Trump is expected to use a teleprompter, despite the fact that he has mocked his rivals for doing the same, declaring at one point: “If you’re running for president you shouldn’t be allowed to use a teleprompter”.
Mr Trump vowed to get rid of the Islamic State group “very, very quickly” if elected, but said he would not provide details so as to catch the jihadists off guard. I have a simple message for them: Their days are numbered.
“Tomorrow’s going to be, I think, interesting”, Trump told reporters Tuesday night.
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We must as a nation be more unpredictable.
