Doug Bandow offers a more restrained view than Patrick Buchanan of Donald Trump’s foreign policy speech. From Bandow, at forbes.com via davidstockmanscontracorner.com:
Yesterday Donald Trump offered his foreign policy vision. It was the sort of mishmash one might expect, given what he’s said on the stump. He seemed to be starting the traditional march toward the center for November, but he is no Neoconservative and broke with pro-war Republican orthodoxy in important ways.
Trump’s views suggest the good, the bad and the ugly. Thankfully not as ugly as the positions taken by most of the Republican Party presidential contenders and congressional leaders as well as Democrat Hillary Clinton. Nor as bad as policies implemented by President Barack Obama over the last seven years. But not as good as the provocative thinking of Rand and especially Ron Paul.
The speech, delivered in Washington, D.C., was standard campaign fare, intended to demonstrate that the candidate was serious, or at least knew the names of a couple foreign nations. For Republicans these addresses almost always mean flaunting hawkish views: decrying the exceedingly dangerous state of the world, denouncing the irresponsible Obama administration for withdrawing from that world, demanding a massive increase in military outlays, and promising to bomb at least one and perhaps several dangerous nations or organizations bent on global murder and mayhem.
Unsurprisingly, Trump offered some of the usual bland generalities. For instance, he explained, he would “always put the interest of the American people and American security above all else.” Moreover, he sought “to develop a new foreign policy direction for our country, one that replaces randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy, and chaos with peace.” Who in U.S. politics advocates placing American interests last and following a policy of chaos?
Still, there was considerable good in the talk.
After the Cold War, he noted, America’s foreign policy veered off course: “Logic replaced with foolishness and arrogance, which led to one foreign policy disaster after another.” Hard to argue with that, though many Republicans do. Moreover, said Trump, it was a mistake to believe that the U.S. could impose Western-style democracy on countries “that had no experience or interests” in the process. Things certainly haven’t worked out well in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or Somalia.
Indeed, he noted that “the legacy of the Obama-Clinton interventions will be weakness, confusion and disarray, a mess. We’ve made the Middle East more unstable and chaotic than ever before. We left Christians subject to intense persecution and even genocide.” It actually is the Bush-Obama-Clinton interventions and the region always has been a mess, but point taken. “Our actions in Iraq, Libya and Syria have helped unleash ISIS,” especially the invasion of Iraq by you-know-who. Indeed, Trump added, “After losing thousands of lives and spending trillions of dollars, we are in far worse shape in the Middle East than ever, ever before.” True.
Trump was particularly critical of unnecessary war-making: “unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not be my first instinct.” War and aggression. Those are words not often spoken by Republican presidential candidates. Moreover, “a superpower understands that caution and restraint are really truly signs of strength.”
Almost alone among the GOP contenders he criticized the Iraq debacle, whose “biggest beneficiary has been Iran.” And which yielded ISIS. Trump even paraphrased John Quincy Adams: “The world must know that we do not go abroad in search of enemies.” That would be a dramatic change from the Clinton-Bush-Obama years.
To continue reading: Donald Trump Offers Foreign Policy Vision: Contradictory, But Still Best of a Bad Lot
