In Donald Trump’s first scripted speech about foreign relations in Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C. promised a “disciplined, deliberate and consistent foreign policy.”
However, some foreign policy experts say that there was a lack of specifics in his speech. As a result, Trump’s speech was panned by most experts on foreign policy and foreign relations.
CNN’s foreign policy expert Fareed Zakaria started by saying that Trump “really stuck to his guns which was populist, nationalist, protectionist,” but when he expanded the speech was “rambling to the point of being incoherent”:
He said the allies can rely on us but we will be completely unpredictable. He said we will spend what it takes to rebuild the military, but we’re going to pay down the debt. We’re going to spread western civilization, but we’re not going to spread democracy.
Zakaria ended his statement saying, “I don’t know that it’s going to convince anyone. Certainly it didn’t strike me as a careful analytic laying out of a Trump’s foreign policy.”
That sentiment was echoed even among Trump’s allies.
Doug Bandow, a foreign policy scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, who shares many of Trump’s beliefs about scaling back America’s role abroad, said that the speech struck him “as a very odd mishmash.”
“He called for a new foreign policy strategy, but you don’t really get the sense he gave one.”
Friends Read Free