Donald Trump Says "No Thanks" to Most of the Republican Foreign Policy Establishment

by Rebecca Bynum (May 2016)
 

In an article published Saturday, The Hill claims that a number of Republican foreign policy experts are rebuffing the Trump team’s efforts to reach out to them. The establishment cabal is plainly in a fix: if they join team Trump and Trump loses the general election, they will be ostracized by the loyalists who are waiting in the wings to seize back control of the party. If they remain with establishment and Trump wins, they will be shut out of all the top positions in his administration. Of course it is already too late for the policy experts who signed an open letter vowing to work “energetically” to prevent Trump’s election.

Donald Trump won’t miss them one little bit.

These are the architects of the foreign policy disaster which has burned through two trillion dollars of taxpayer money, caused thousands of our finest young men to lose their lives and ruined the lives of thousands more who have come home horribly maimed and crippled, both emotionally and physically. These are the people who were so naïve about Iraq and Muslim polities generally, they were preparing a trade show immediately to follow the downfall of Saddam Hussein. “We will be greeted as liberators,” said Vice President Cheney at the time, seeing in his mind’s eye the wonderful ally and trading partner Iraq would become according to all the experts he listened to, including the esteemed Bernard Lewis who famously said, “We must bring them democracy or they will destroy us.”

Donald Trump doesn’t need “experts” like these.

Furthermore, neither the Bush nor the Obama administrations have, in fifteen long years, formulated anything close to an effective strategy to deal with the rising tide of Islamism. President Bush simply threw the military at the problem and the military responded with adapting their tactics for fighting insurgencies. They had no guiding strategy to follow.

The surge showed that given enough manpower, we could hold down the violence between Sunnis, Shi’a and Kurds in Iraq, but the minute that heavy hand was lifted, the fighting returned. No one ever questioned the wisdom of a) trying to keep Iraq united, composed as it is of three former Ottoman vilayets, or b) whether that Islamic in-fighting was really contrary to US interests. Rather it was taken for granted by these “experts” that Iraq must remain united whatever the costs to America. The interests of the Iraqi people were thereby raised above the interests of the American people.

Donald Trump says no more. His guiding principle will be American interests first.

Furthermore, the Bush Administration embraced the outright lie that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, thereby blinding themselves to the legitimate ideology and motivation of the enemy. Terrorism is propaganda “by other means” after all. But the message of the terrorists, no matter how many times and in how many circumstances they endeavored to explain it by patiently citing the Koran chapter and verse, fell on resolutely deaf ears. As a result, these “experts” have been blindsided at every turn. The link they deliberately avoided was the link between religion and politics, constructed by the Islamists. The latter’s strategies were dismissed from the debate at the Republican classical circles and the International Republican Institute.

Donald Trump intends to confront Jihadism head on and he will bring an informed American public with him.

According to The Hill, “If Trump does become the GOP’s nominee, some GOP hawks have flirted with a willingness to support Hillary Clinton the likely Democratic pick.” And by the comments cited in this piece as well as the open letter vowing to fight Trump to the bitter end, the Republican establishment have shown their true colors. They would prefer the Republican Party lose the general election to Hillary Clinton so they might sweep back into power as the party’s saviors, then to maintain an iron grip on that same power they so disastrously wielded before.

Republican voters are in the process of saying, “no thanks.”

 

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The Real Nature of Religion, published by New English Review Press.

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Rebecca Bynum contributes regularly to The Iconoclast, our Community Blog. Click here to see all her contributions, on which comments are welcome.