Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Experts see Trump as unfit
Candidate’s foreign policy statements cause alarm
WASHINGTON — To the extent Donald Trump has articulated a coherent foreign policy, it appears a dark shoot-from-the-hip unilateralism that puts him at odds with thinking that has dominated the Republican Party for generations.
As Trump starts his general election campaign, many Republican foreign policy and national security advisers and thinkers who have spent decades promoting America’s pre-eminent role in world affairs remain deeply skeptical of his views.
They say they are aghast that the GOP nominee boasts of reading little and ignoring expert advice, and instead gleaning his knowledge of global events from Sunday TV talk shows.
“Donald Trump still has the habits of a reality show host. He says things as dramatically and as provocatively as possible,” said Dimitri Simes, president of the Center for the National Interest, a Washington think tank founded by President Richard Nixon.
Trump rang establishment alarms — again — last week when he urged Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s deleted State Department emails, apparently daring a foreign adversary to hack a federal agency or a U.S. presidential candidate. (Trump later said he was being sarcastic.)
The episode, along with his fresh criticism of U.S. alliances during the Republican National Convention, cemented doubts for many who still had hopes Trump would tamp down his rhetoric for the fall race against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“When he entered the race, the overarching concern was lack of experience and an inability or unwillingness to define what his policy would be,” said Elliot Abrams, a Middle East expert and military hawk who served as deputy national security adviser to George W. Bush.
“Now, particularly after the convention, he has defined it. And it would destroy the greatest single asset we have, which is our alliance structure,” he added.
It was hardly Trump’s first break with orthodoxy.
Trump not only has expressed admiration for Russia’s authoritarian leader, Vladimir Putin. He has said he might recognize Russia’s military annexation of Crimea, which America and its allies consider illegal, and might lift U.S. sanctions imposed on Moscow for its regional aggression.
Trump has challenged the importance of NATO, the transatlantic military alliance born out of World War II, and shaken one of its pillars by saying he might not defend a member nation under attack from Russia or other invaders, as the treaty requires.
He has called for using torture against terrorism suspects, and has said America has no standing to lecture other nations on human rights and the rule of law, as administrations have done since the depths of the Cold War.
He also has suggested upending decades of U.S. efforts aimed at stopping the spread of nuclear weapons by suggesting Japan and South Korea should build their own atomic arsenal rather than rely on the U.S. nuclear umbrella.
By embracing these and other controversial positions, Trump has turned America’s postwar political dynamic on its head. Many foreign policy experts now view the Democratic nominee as a more stable hand on national security than the wobbly GOP.