Presidential frontrunner Donald Trump sent shockwaves through the foreign policy establishment on Wednesday when he delivered a major address at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington.
“America is going to be strong again; America is going to be great again; it’s going to be a friend again,” Trump said. “We’re going to finally have a coherent foreign policy, based on American interests and the shared interests of our allies.”
“The world must know that we do not go abroad in search of enemies, that we are always happy when old enemies become friends and when old friends become allies. That’s what we want: We want to bring peace to the world.”
Trump castigated Obama and political rival Clinton for advancing the foreign policy objectives of the establishment. “Our foreign policy is a complete and total disaster. No vision. No purpose. No direction. No strategy,” he said. ‘We’ve made the Middle East more unstable and chaotic than ever before.”
He took the Obama administration and specifically former Secretary of State Clinton to task for the destruction of Libya and the murder of thousands of the North Africa nation’s citizens. The intervention, he argued, allowed the Islamic State to gain a foothold in the country.
The Republican frontrunner criticized Europe and Asia for not taking responsibility for their own defense and promised to repair the nation’s relationship with Russia.
He said “unlike other candidates for the presidency, foreign aggression will not be my first instinct” and described the war against the Islamic State as much a philosophical struggle as a military one. “Our friends and enemies must know that if I draw a line in the sand, I will enforce that line in the sand—believe me,” he promised.
Reaction from the political class and the corporate media was sharply critical.
“Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his grave,” mused South Carolina Senator and leading neocon, Lindsey Graham. “This speech was unnerving. It was pathetic in its content, and it was scary in terms of its construct. If you had any doubt that Donald Trump is not fit to be commander in chief, this speech should’ve removed it,” Graham said. “It took every problem and fear I have with Donald Trump and put in on steroids.”
Graham said Trump aped Rand Paul. “It was like a guy from New York reading a speech that somebody wrote for him that he edited that makes no sense… It was not a conservative speech. This was a blend of random thoughts built around Rand Paul’s view of the world.”
Trump’s FP speech not conservative. It’s isolationism surrounded by disconnected thought, demonstrates lack of understanding threats we face
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) April 27, 2016
R. Nicholas Burns, a former senior State Department official under Bush who now advises Clinton, said, “He’s casting these thunderbolts and threats at our allies, and yet there was almost a kid-glove treatment of Russia and China.”
Former General Wesley Clark criticized Trump for his suggestion tensions between the United States and Russia and China must be dialed down. Clark, a former NATO supreme commander during Bill Clinton’s bombing of Yugoslavia, last year called for putting “disloyal” Americans in concentration camps.
“This isn’t a real estate negotiation” — Clinton supporter Gen. Wesley Clark (Ret.) on Trump’s foreign policy plan https://t.co/Ztjyg1eggQ
— New Day (@NewDay) April 28, 2016
Fareed Zakaria, a member of the CFR and Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission who in the past denounced the Constitution as archaic and irrelevant and called for starving the Syrians into submission, dismissed Trump’s speech as “incoherent” and a “mishmash of populist pandering.”
.@FareedZakaria on Trump’s foreign policy speech: A mishmash of populist pandering https://t.co/ZIFf0xymcv https://t.co/D0541eudlG
— CNN Tonight (@CNNTonight) April 28, 2016
In addition to criticism by The New York Times, The Washington Post and most of the rest of the establishment media, Media Matters, the Democrat think tank funded by arch globalist George Soros that acts as the de facto propaganda arm of the Obama administration, cited David Rothkopf, the editor and publisher of Foreign Policy magazine.
The takeaway is that the establishment is petrified by Donald Trump’s plan to revamp American foreign policy, rollback NATO, force Europe and Asia to pay for their own defense, efforts the establishment denounces as isolationism (actually noninterventionism) akin to that of Charles Lindbergh prior to the Second World War.
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