Donald Trump gave his first
foreign-policy speech on Wednesday, attacking President Obama and Hillary
Clinton for their “reckless, rudderless and aimless” strategies while vowing,
if elected, to take a more restrained, non-interventionist approach.
“Our goal is peace and
prosperity, not war and destruction,” Trump said. “The best way to achieve
those goals is through a disciplined, deliberate and consistent foreign policy.
“ ‘America first’ will be the
major and overriding theme of my administration,” Trump said.
“No American citizen will ever
feel that their needs come second to a citizen of a foreign country . . . I
will be America’s greatest defender and most loyal champion.”
If the theme was familiar, the
delivery was not. A newly presidential Trump adopted a serious tone and relied
on a teleprompter instead of speaking off the cuff, as he has on the campaign
trail.
“We will no longer surrender this
country or its people to the false song of globalism . . . I’m skeptical of
international unions that tie us up and bring America down. And under my
administration, we will never enter America into any agreement that reduces our
ability to control our own affairs,” he said, citing the North American Free
Trade Agreement.
Modal Trigger
Setting up a November showdown
with Clinton — who is more hawkish than Obama — Trump sought to portray himself
as a disciplined leader who would steer clear of nation-building at the expense
of US interests.
He charged that the Clinton-Obama
team created chaos by meddling abroad, citing the overthrow of President Hosni
Mubarak in Egypt, the intervention in Libya and stepped-up military action in
Syria.
He singled out then-Secretary of
State Clinton’s handling of the deadly attacks on the US compound in Benghazi,
Libya.
“I challenge anyone to explain
the strategic foreign-policy vision of Obama-Clinton,” Trump told an audience
at The Mayflower hotel in Washington, DC. “It has been a complete and total
disaster.”
He also pointed to the threat
posed by ISIS, the US’s relationship with Israel and the danger radical Islam
poses to the world.
He pledged his presidency would
focus on “regional stability — not radical change” — in the Middle East.
Trump blamed administrations
after Ronald Reagan’s — which included that of Republican George W. Bush — for
veering “badly off course.”
“We failed to develop a new
vision for a new time. In fact, as time went on, our foreign policy began to
make less and less sense. Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance,
which led to one foreign-policy disaster after another,” he said.
“They just kept coming and
coming. We went from mistakes in Iraq to Egypt to Libya, to President Obama’s
line in the sand in Syria.”
Trump urged no restraint when it
came to wiping out terrorists.
“Simple message for ISIS: Their
days are numbered. I won’t tell them where, I won’t tell them how . . . We, as
a nation, must be more unpredictable,” Trump said.
Fresh off a sweep of five East
Coast primaries, Trump sought to expand on foreign-policy views that have
lacked detail and led critics to contend he wasn’t presidential.
Trump spoke to an invited
audience of conservative-leaning national-security experts, as well as
foreign-policy writers and politicians.
Marisa Schultz and Bob Fredericks
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