Trump’s ‘America first’ comments sound alarm for superpower allies
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DONALD Trump’s first major foreign policy address has alarmed US allies, who view the Republican frontrunner’s repeated invocation of an “America first” agenda as a threat to retreat from the world.
While most governments were careful not to comment publicly on a speech by a presidential candidate, Germany’s foreign minister veered from protocol to express concern at Trump’s wording.
“I can only hope that the election campaign in the US does not lack the perception of reality,” Frank-Walter Steinmeier said.
“The world’s security architecture has changed and it is no longer based on two pillars alone. It cannot be conducted unilaterally,” he said of foreign policy in a post-Cold War world. “No American president can get round this change in the international security architecture ... ‘America first’ is actually no answer to that.”
Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister who served as UN envoy to the Balkans in the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, said he heard Trump’s speech as “abandoning both democratic allies and democratic values.”
“Trump had not a word against Russian aggression in Ukraine, but plenty against past US support for democracy in Egypt,” Bildt said on Twitter, referring to lines from Trump’s speech that criticized the Barack Obama administration for withdrawing support for Hosni Mubarak during a 2011 uprising.
Trump’s speech, uncharacteristically read out from a teleprompter, seemed aimed at showing a more serious side of a politician who has said he intends to act more “presidential” after months of speaking mainly off the cuff.
He promised “a disciplined, deliberate and consistent foreign policy” in contrast to the “reckless, rudderless and aimless” policies of Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump’s likely Democratic opponent if he secures the Republican nomination.
The speech included no dramatic new policy proposals that might generate headlines, such as his past calls to bar Muslims from entering the United States or to build a wall on the frontier with Mexico.
Where he was specific, as in rejecting the terms of last year’s nuclear deal with Iran, calling for more investment in missile defense in Europe and accusing the Obama administration of tepid support for Israel, he was firmly within the Republican mainstream.
A major theme — that more NATO allies should spend at least 2 percent of their economic output on defense — is one that has been taken up by the Obama administration.
Nevertheless, Trump’s rhetoric raised alarm in allied countries that still rely on the superpower for defense, particularly the phrase “America first,” used in the 1930s by isolationists that sought to keep the US out of World War II.
Former South Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Sung-han, who now teaches at Korea University in Seoul, said Trump would be “the first isolationist to be US presidential candidate, while in the post-war era all the US presidents have been to varying degrees internationalists.”
“Saying the US will no longer engage in anything that is a burden in terms of its relationships with allies, it would be almost like abandoning those alliances,” he said. “It will inevitably give rise to anti-American sentiment worldwide.”
Xenia Wickett, head of the US and Americas Programme at Britain’s Chatham House think tank, said the speech “suggests Trump would make America’s allies less secure rather than more.
“He talked about allies being confident but all of his rhetoric suggested that America should be unpredictable and that America’s allies needed to stand up for themselves.”
Earlier in the US nomination process, foreign leaders were not shy to publicly condemn Trump.
In December, when he called for a temporary ban on admitting Muslims, British Prime Minister David Cameron called him “divisive, stupid and wrong.” Hundreds of thousands of Britons signed a petition calling for Trump to be banned from Britain for hate speech.
In January, German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel lumped Trump together with the leaders of European far-right parties as “not only a threat to peace and social cohesion, but also to economic development.”
These days, with Trump now seen as likely to win his party’s nomination, European officials are more circumspect in public, but sound no less alarmed in private.
A Trump presidency “would be a disaster for EU-US ties,” said one senior EU official.
“Right now, we and the Obama administration generally understand each other. I don’t think we understand Donald Trump. He has no understanding of the delicate, complex nature of foreign policy on Europe’s doorstep.”
Nevertheless, some policies do have sympathetic audiences abroad.
Ryszard Terlecki, head of the parliamentary group of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, said Trump had a point when criticizing the Obama administration for backing away from plans for increased missile defense.
“This decision influenced very badly the security of this part of Europe. If it weren’t for that, the conflict in Ukraine would not escalate,” he told reporters.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has strongly opposed the Obama administration’s deal with Iran, and Trump’s speech went down well with some right-leaning Israelis.
“Trump wants an America that is decent, strong, loyal — but also no patsy. And he sees in Israel the most loyal ally of the US,” wrote Boaz Bismuth, diplomatic correspondent for the Israel Hayom newspaper.
In the Arab world, where governments and their citizens are also alarmed at the rise of non-Arab Iran, Trump’s strong rejection of the deal with Tehran is a popular position that would have been embraced if expressed by another candidate.
But Trump’s call to ban Muslims from the US has made him anathema in the region.
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