Carson has no grasp of foreign affairs, says his adviser

Ben Carson, a frontrunner to be the Republican presidential candidate, is struggling to grasp the fundamentals of foreign policy, one of his team has claimed in a scathing assessment.

Carson has said that he is following a biblical maxim by assembling a coterie of experts to tutor him on unfamiliar topics.

However, his foreign policy adviser, an eccentric former CIA agent who runs a network of free- lance spies in San Diego, said that intense tutoring had had little effect on the retired brain surgeon’s knowledge of world affairs.

Duane Clarridge suggested that regular briefings with Carson had failed to make him ‘‘smart’’.

Carson surprised the audience at a Republican primary debate this month when he incorrectly said that China was part of the Syrian conflict. Days later, as the Paris attacks put foreign policy under the spotlight, he could not name a single country he would call on to form a coalition to fight Islamic State.

Clarridge told The New York Times: ‘‘Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East.’’

Supporters of Carson dismissed the remarks.

‘‘All candidates have a learning curve,’’ said Bill Saracino, who has raised US$4 million to promote Carson. ‘‘Bottom line, you have to trust a candidate’s intelligence. I’m not the least bit concerned.’’

Carson’s halting answers on foreign policy have been targeted by critics of his unconventional views. A video emerged recently in which he insisted that the Egyptian pyramids were built by the biblical patriarch Joseph to store grain, not by the pharaohs as tombs.

Carson’s chief adviser, Armstrong Williams, has described Clarridge, 82, as ‘‘a mentor for Dr Carson’’.

The former agent was accused of lying during the 1980s IranContra scandal but was eventually pardoned. Among his past projects was a failed scheme to collect the beard trimmings of former Afghan leader Hamid Karzai in a quest to prove that he was a heroin addict.