Trump’s Foreign Policy Speech Draws Nazi-Era Comparisons

Donald Trump gave one of his first policy speeches of his presidential campaign last week, and the reactions from the liberal media are rolling in.

Bloomberg on Trump’s America First slogan:

Donald Trump has given up on winning historically literate voters. Consider the theme of his major foreign policy speech Wednesday: “America first.”

This slogan is most associated with aviator Charles Lindbergh, who spent a great deal of time in the late 1930s gushing at how wonderful the Third Reich was. Before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh helped form “America First” committees that campaigned to keep the U.S. from fighting the Axis Powers. Lindbergh rose to become a demagogue and accused President Franklin Roosevelt of colluding with a Jewish lobby and Britain to drag America into World War II.

For years this phrase was toxic. Pat Buchanan has used it from time to time, but “America first” and the idea it represented — American neutrality towards the Nazis — has been largely banished from respectable discourse.

Now Trump is bringing the phrase back to the mainstream. He deploys it at his campaign rallies. And in his major foreign policy speech Wednesday, there it was right at the top. The real-estate magnate promised to “always put the interests of the American people first.” He said: “That will be the foundation of every single decision I will make. ‘America first’ will be the major and overriding theme of our administration.”

In fairness to Trump, the world is very different than it was when Nazis ruled Berlin. Historian Ron Radosh told me that Trump was channeling the memory of the isolationists of that era, but he also allowed that Trump “differentiates himself because clearly unlike Lindbergh, he is not an enemy of Jews or the Jewish state.” (Though on the substance, Radosh added that he did not think it was “good for Israel to have a president who is so isolationist.”)

 

National Review regarding action in Libya:

Here is Trump in 2011 — at a point when Obama had not yet acted, and when it was abundantly clear that al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood were the backbone of Qaddafi’s opposition:

I can’t believe what our country is doing. Qaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all [over] the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is, it’s a carnage. . . .  

You talk about of things that have happened in history, this could be one of the worst. Now we should go in, we should stop this guy which would be very easy and very quick. We could do it surgically, stop him from doing it, and save these lives. This is absolutely nuts. We don’t want to get involved and you’re gonna end up with something like you’ve never seen before.

This was exactly the line pushed by Mrs. Clinton, a Democrat Trump has heavily funded (including a whopping $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation) and whom he praised — a year after Qaddafi’s overthrow, while jihadists were running wild and attacking Western targets — for doing a “a good job” as secretary of state. It was also the line pushed by such GOP establishment progressives as Senator John McCain, the Republican politician Trump has most heavily funded, who described the Libyan “rebels” in Benghazi as “my heroes” — right before they predictably went from murdering Qaddafi to murdering Americans. Today, Libya is a failed state, a jihadist haven that threatens Western Europe, precisely because President Obama followed Donald Trump’s advice.

CNN on Trump’s recent foreign policy speech:

After Donald Trump gave a much-anticipated foreign policy speech Wednesday, some of the most glowing reviews that he received were from a place that doesn’t often see eye-to-eye with American politicians.

Trump’s speech was more than well-received in Russia. In Moscow’s Red Square, passersby speaking to CNN praised the New York tycoon. And Russian politicians from President Vladimir Putin on down have been quoted saying favorable things about the GOP frontunner.

Putin recently called Trump “a brighter person, talented without a doubt.” Trump returned the compliment saying: “I like him because he called me a genius. He said Trump is the real leader.”

And in his address in Washington Wednesday, the billionaire businessman expressed hope about the potential for improvement in American-Russian relations.

“I believe an easing of tensions and improved relations with Russia, from a position of strength only, is possible,” Trump said, though he added that the United States should be willing to walk away from the negotiating table if Russia is too demanding.

The message is one that is warmly received on the streets of Moscow.

Breitbart’s sunnier view on Trump’s foreign policy speech

Trump criticized President George W. Bush as well, saying, “It all began with the dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western Democracy.”

The real estate mogul said the Obama administration’s foreign policy has overextended America’s resources and let America’s allies get away without paying a fair share. He added that America’s allies don’t believe America is dependable, and rivals no longer respect America because there is no clear foreign policy strategy.

Trump promised this will change when he is president.

“First, we need a long-term plan to halt the spread and reach of radical Islam,” Trump said, also noting that “we have to rebuild our military and our economy.”

“Finally, we must develop a foreign policy based on American interests,” Trump added. “No country has ever prospered that failed to put its own interests first. Both our friends and enemies put their countries above ours and we, while being fair to them, must do the same.”

Donald Trump can’t seem to win, not for lack of trying,  but because the press is unwilling to give him a shot. Given his constant riding poll numbers,  however,  it may not matter.

Sources:

Breitbart

Bloomberg

National Review

CNN