Commander-in-chief Trump? Scary
It won’t matter to his supporters, but in the first presidential debate against Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump proved again that he cannot be trusted with even the basic responsibilities of American foreign policy, much less control of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
It’s been nine months since Trump, in a December primary debate, revealed his astonishing ignorance about the nuclear triad — the combination of bombers, missiles and submarines that forms America’s nuclear deterrent.
He’s had nearly a year to bone up; instead, he again showed that he has no grasp of anything related to national security.
Asked at the debate whether he agreed with America’s longstanding policy that reserves the right to use nuclear weapons first in the face of an overwhelming attack — a position even President Obama has refused to change — Trump delivered his usual gibberish.
“I would like everybody to end it, just get rid of it,” he said. “But I would certainly not do first strike. I think that once the nuclear alternative happens, it’s over. At the same time, we have to be prepared. I can’t take anything off the table.”
What does any of that even mean? Who knows. It sounds like the regurgitated remnants of a briefing on nuclear weapons, only fragments of which remained in his mind like random bits of fluff stuck to a lint roller.
The reality, of course, is that Trump has no idea what nuclear weapons (or as he calls them, “the nuclear”) actually do, why the United States has them or how deterrence works. He couldn’t be bothered to learn any of this in the course of the past year. But he and his surrogates assure us he’ll be ready in just four months to assume control of an arsenal capable of killing hundreds of millions of people in a matter of minutes.
Trump fared no better in other foreign policy matters.
For example, after Clinton said that Trump’s childish vow to attack Iranian boats if they “make gestures at our people that they shouldn’t be allowed to make” — he said they would be “shot out of the water” — showed bad temperament, Trump tried to reassure the nation that such a trigger-happy act of aggression wouldn’t be enough to start a war.
And besides, he added, “they were taunting us” — thus actually affirming just how poor his temperament and judgment really are.
He reiterated his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal — well, that’s something — but then made the weird charge that the deal should have included a demand that Iran get control of North Korea. Iran, of course, has no ability to tell the North Koreans what to do. He even argued that but for the deal, Iran was about to collapse, a charge no serious opponent of the Iran deal (and I was one of them) would make.
He then added that “they” should have “done something with respect to Yemen and all these other places.” Yemen? Trump’s improvised babbling — despite his blustery claim that he’s read the deal — showed yet again that he has no real idea what’s in an agreement he claims to oppose.
The key to decoding a Trump performance is to realize that terms like “Iran” and “Yemen” and “nuclear weapons” and “North Korea” are just words Trump picks out of a hat and assembles in random order when trying to appear intelligent. Even as he unspools a stream of nouns and adjectives — always interspersed with “I” and “me” — he’s scrambling to figure out how to turn the subject back to himself and his polls.
Hillary Clinton presented a foreign policy that was unremarkable, and that was the best thing about it. Her pausing in mid-debate to reassure our allies that all Americans are not as recklessly ignorant of our responsibilities as Trump is was a genuinely presidential moment in an otherwise depressing evening.
Conservatives will have much to contest in Clinton’s policies, but if we all start by assuming that a President should understand nuclear weapons, that our commitments to U.S. alliances in Europe and Asia must remain firm and that superpowers do not start wars over rude gestures, then there is also plenty of room for cooperation as well.
By the end of the debate, Trump had come unhinged, red-faced and spouting non sequiturs. That was after 90 minutes on a stage with a fellow American. Imagine him after days of an international crisis with our worst enemies. The danger is beyond calculation.