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.
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.