The good news for ordinary Americans is that Donald Trump is advocating “the U.S. decrease its role in NATO’s,” and “certainly decrease it’s spending” in The North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
All horrible news if you are of the professional ghoul class. Remember, the D.C. Comitatus doesn’t like less of anything because it means less of them.
The forces aligned against Donald Trump say his “global posture” will be “starkly at odds with longstanding U.S. policy.” Sounds promising. As reported by CNN, “the Republican front-runner’s brain trust on global affairs” is a group lacking name recognition and “clear policy-making track records.” The writers take it to mean “there are still unanswered questions about the international direction they would hope to lead the country in.”
Trump, unfortunately, is employing Dr. Walid Phares, who was the Fox News Channel’s Middle East and terrorism expert. He had advocated a muscular military response in Libya. And some other
The advisers already with Trump include Phares, a professor at National Defense University and and adviser to the U.S. House of Representatives on terrorism. The Lebanese-born Phares, who previously advised 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, was also a high-ranking official in a Christian militia tied to massacres during Lebanon’s civil war.
Carter Page, the founder of Global Energy Capital, has experience as an investment banker in London and Moscow. George Papadopoulos, who worked for former Republican candidate Ben Carson, is an oil and gas consultant focused on the geopolitics of the energy trade, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Joe Schmitz, a lawyer, is a former Defense Department Inspector General and a former executive with the Blackwater security firm, associated with the killing of Iraqi civilians.
And Gen. Joseph Keith Kellogg, at one point a COO at Oracle, led the 82nd Airborne Division and served as chief operating officer of the multinational Coalition Provisional Authority that ran Iraq from 2003 through 2004.
Trump has criticized American involvement in Iraq and said that he was an early opponent of intervention there.
He acknowledged that Kellogg and his perspectives on the conflict diverge.
“He does have a different opinion, but I do like different opinions,” Trump told CNN.
And he said more broadly of his advisers: “It doesn’t mean that I’m going to use what they’re saying.”
UPDATE (3/22): Stephen Miller’s a star. See my coverage of his first interviews in “Donald Delivers Economic Expertise @ Free-Market Speed,” and these recent tweets:
#Trump's Stephen Miller bitch-slaps Megyn Kelly's nightly neocon #MarkThiessen. Long overdue … https://t.co/yc4ISLeffH
— Ilana Mercer (@IlanaMercer) March 22, 2016
Stephen Miller: Political class is terrified the gravy train is going to end. Its been hard out there for ppl everywhere but DC. #Trump2016
— American Hank (@_HankRearden) March 17, 2016