“We must, as a nation, be more unpredictable”, he said, referring to his desire to catch enemies off guard.
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He just will. Trust him.
Trump was more scripted and less bombastic than at campaign rallies but his speech included several campaign-tested positions, though few with specifics.
Those began right at the top. On the ISIS, he said that the dreaded terror outfit’s days are “numbered”.
“America first will be the major and overriding theme of my administration”, the Republican front-runner said in Washington, emphasising the need to view every decision “through the clear lens of American interest”.
Trump also said that the American foreign policy has to be less predictable, especially in the fight against the Islamic State.
“We’ve made the Middle East more unstable and chaotic than ever before”, said Trump, lumping in Obama’s abandonment of USA ally Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, a record of recriminations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a refusal to enforce his own “red line” for military action after Syrian President Bashar Assad unleashed chemical weapons.
“Our allies are not paying their fair share”, he said, pointing the finger at both North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and close Asian allies such as Japan and South Korea. He listed a series of “humiliations” the nation had suffered because of Obama, beginning with the president’s ill-fated 2009 trip to Copenhagen in a failed, last-ditch effort to win the Olympics for Chicago. He criticized Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and his trip to Cuba and called for upgrading the United States nuclear arsenal. “A mess”. “If President Obama’s goal was to weaken America, he could not have done a better job”, Trump added.
Clinton adviser Madeleine Albright, herself a former secretary of state, said Trump’s address was centered on “simplistic slogans and contradictions”.
“I don’t want to go it alone” fighting radical Islam, but the United States should have Arab allies in the region, Graham told Cosby. How much would he spend?
The easiest passages to follow dealt with what he said had been the failures of American foreign policy over a span that started after the fall of the Soviet system and which thus incorporated the years when Republicans were president (both named Bush). “I will not hesitate to deploy military force when there is no alternative”, he offered. “But if America fights, it must only fight to win”, he said.
“I will never send our finest into battle unless necessary, and I mean absolutely necessary, and will only do so if we have a plan for victory with a capital V”, Trump said at one point. “I consider myself the presumptive nominee”.
Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, picked up on Trump’s mispronunciation of Tanzania-he called it Tan-ZAY-nia. It will be held at Washington’s stately Mayflower Hotel (after a last-minute location change blamed on “overwhelming interest”) and will be presided over by Zalmay Khalilzad, a former US ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the campaign. At times, he ad-libbed a “Not good!” or “Bad!” or “A mess!”-as if to signal to his fans that it was really him speaking, not some low-energy impostor with a battery missing”.
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“To our friends and allies, I say America is going to be strong again, America is going to be reliable again”, Trump said. When he was done, the crowd applauded politely and Trump walked slowly off stage, finally done with a formal speech he seemed painfully unaccustomed to delivering.
