Here, are some highlights from Donald Trump’s major, scripted foreign policy speech (video below).
America first will be the major and overriding theme of my administration.
Our resources are totally over extended. President Obama has weakened our military by weakening our economy. He’s crippled us with wasteful spending, massive debt, low growth, a huge trade deficit and open borders. Our manufacturing trade deficit with the world is now approaching $1 trillion a year.
We’re a humanitarian nation, but the legacy of the Obama-Clinton interventions will be weakness, confusion and disarray, a mess. We’ve made the Middle East more unstable and chaotic than ever before. We left Christians subject to intense persecution and even genocide.
Hillary Clinton also refuses to say the words radical Islam, even as she pushes for a massive increase in refugees coming into our country. After Secretary Clinton’s failed intervention in Libya, Islamic terrorists in Benghazi took down our consulate and killed our ambassador and three brave Americans. Then, instead of taking charge that night, Hillary Clinton decided to go home and sleep. Incredible
We’re getting out of the nation-building business and instead focusing on creating stability in the world.
We need a long-term plan to halt the spread and reach of radical Islam. Containing the spread of radical Islam must be a major foreign policy goal of the United States and indeed the world. Events may require the use of military force, but it’s also a philosophical struggle, like our long struggle in the Cold War.
We must develop a foreign policy based on American interests. Businesses do not succeed when they lose sight of their core interests and neither do countries. Look at what happened in the 1990s. Our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania — and this was a horrible time for us — were attacked. and [sic] 17 brave sailors were killed on the USS Cole.
We desire to live peacefully and in friendship with Russia and China. We have serious differences with these two nations, and must regard them with open eyes, but we are not bound to be adversaries. We should seek common ground based on shared interests.
Some say the Russians won’t be reasonable. I intend to find out. If we can’t make a deal under my administration, a deal that’s great — not good, great — for America, but also good for Russia, then we will quickly walk from the table. It’s as simple as that. We’re going to find out.
We have a massive trade deficit with China, a deficit that we have to find a way quickly, and I mean quickly, to balance. A strong and smart America is an America that will find a better friend in China, better than we have right now. Look at what China is doing in the South China Sea. They’re not supposed to be doing it.
I will not hesitate to deploy military force when there is no alternative. But if America fights, it must only fight to win.
Trump is competing against a low bar in the case of Hillary Clinton, who on the subject of foreign policy, much of America views with abject disdain. A few of my recent posts give you a little Clinton flavor.
I hope Mr. Trump will take a cue from, among other blue chip white paper sources, The American Conservative (TAC). In my recent front page inside cover graphic for The American Conservative I wrote readers about TAC’s approach “In domestic as well as foreign affairs, The American Conservative promotes a conservatism of realism and reform; a conservatism of ideas over ideology and principles over party. In an age of trillion dollar deficits, crumbling communities, and endless wars and rumors of war, we can no longer allow American public life to be guided by fantasies.
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