It was not love at first sight.
Advertisement
Coming off a five-state victory in Tuesday night’s primary elections, the business tycoon-turned-politician is inching closer to grasping his party’s nomination for president of the United States, and in his speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., criticized us foreign policy for focusing on “nation building”, specifically in the Middle East.
The billionaire then tore into Obama’s foreign policy, panning the Iran nuclear deal and claiming the President has “weakened our military by weakening our economy”.
Josef Braml of the German Council on Foreign Relations said Trump’s foreign policy speech suggested he was seeking stability, interested in “making “deals” with autocrats and engaging in realpolitik”. In this view, Trump is the ugly mirror image of Bernie Sanders, whose anti-poverty campaign, Sanders’ supporters argue, is the only effective inoculation against Trumpism, present and future.
In a major foreign policy speech short on specifics that left Washington experts scratching their heads, Trump warned that Europe and Asia may have to defend themselves. A protestor outside the Mayflower Hotel, the event site, held a “Trump [equals] Nazi” sign, and others chanted in the hotel lobby before the event. That has been the GOP’s unifying foreign policy message for eight years: not what the country should do but what the Democratic administration is doing wrong. Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of the center’s publication, The National Interest, has written that “a Trump presidency would likely be a foreign policy debacle”.
In the Republican presidential frontrunner’s telling, even the knottiest problems in geopolitics are simple exercises in brinksmanship-ready to be solved at speed once a steely negotiator like President Trump is sitting behind the big desk in the Oval Office.
“He’s got to do a lot more than give a speech”, Zakheim, who was out of town on vacation, told me by phone Wednesday. “We want to bring peace to the world”. If anyone with better foreign policy credentials and insights had tried to do that, he or she might be poised to win the nomination. “They must also be good to us”.
Manafort spent about an hour at the Heritage Foundation headquarters in Washington last week meeting policy experts at the conservative think tank.
In his own fashion, Trump was reassuring.
Last month during a trip to the U.S., the German Foreign Minister took the opportunity to reject “politics of fear” and insist that “building walls is a very bad idea – no matter who pays for them” – a clear reference to Trump’s plan to build a wall along the border with Mexico.
In today’s multi-polar world, there is need for the U.S., Russia, and regional actors to come together in various settings, and also include other interested parties while seeking solutions to the conflicts, he said.
To start, someone should probably inform Trump America nearly always puts itself first when it comes to foreign policy.
Some were – or wanted to be – relieved by what they heard.
Mr Trump is not a man for geopolitical details, but his anger at the lack of “respect” shown to America by foreigners is palpably honest.
“To fly the banner of “America first” shows that he has historical amnesia or just doesn’t understand history”, said Mr Burns. “It can not be conducted unilaterally”, he said, referring to Trump’s “America first” message.
For me, perhaps the most credible reason given so far is that Wall Street – unintentionally – created Donald Trump.
His foreign policy speech too echoed that message – depicting a need to ease the U.S. financial burden overseas, focus more on nation-building at home and make sure United States companies pay a price for outsourcing jobs to countries where labour is cheaper.
Advertisement
“We have to be unpredictable, and we have to be unpredictable starting now”, he said.
