George W. Bush’s former U.N. spokesman said Thursday that “groupthink” in Washington is hurting America, and praised GOP front-runner Donald Trump’s foreign policy vision.

Rick Grenell, now a Fox News contributor and and a partner with Capital Media Partners, said on “The Laura Ingraham Show” that the foreign policy Establishment has viscerally rejected Trump’s Wednesday speech at the Mayflower Hotel.

GRENELL: I thought the speech was a good moment, not only for Donald but for this country — because it really is combining many of the things that we know aren’t working in Washington at the State Department [and] at the Treasury Department. And he’s trying to fix them. And let me give you one example: He’s talking about using budgets and zero-based budgeting to begin to think about foreign policy. And we have to do that. When the State Department has a bilateral issue with another country, they’re not thinking about what Treasury can do, or what Commerce or trade departments can do, to help move that policy forward.

Close

[lz_radio_ad]

They’re just thinking bilaterally, State Department to foreign ministry, and they’re not using all of the tools of the United States. The State Department types absolutely do not want to mix the Treasury’s assets with their liabilities, so to speak. They want to make these negotiations … simply on diplomacy. And it’s always been a problem because … we have a whole bunch of tools that the United States can use to move our diplomacy forward, and we’re just not using them …

Here’s a specific example. We’ve been begging the Chinese to do something about North Korea. North Korea’s nuclear program is a serious issue for the United States. It’s a priority issue because they have now been able to put a missile into orbit, and they can hit the West Coast of the United States. We have been begging in statements and public speeches for the Chinese to do something … Yet we’re not using our economic power and our business might to move the Chinese to actually act against North Korea.

INGRAHAM: If Trump asked you to be his, you know, U.S. ambassador, his U.N. spokesman, would you entertain that, agree to that, turn your nose up at it? I mean, what would you do?

[lz_related_box id=”133176″]

GRENELL: You’re really putting me on the spot here. You know, I care about America enough to where, of course, whoever is president of the United States, I think you’ve got to listen to what their plan is for that agency and what they want to do. Of course, no matter who the president of the United States was — Republican or Democrat or independent — if I felt like the charge that they were asking me to do at the U.N. was something that I could do and wanted to do and would be passionate about, I would do it for sure … You’ve got to represent the United States. You’ve got to be callous to the criticism that somehow you owe anyone.

INGRAHAM: [Trump’s] clearly hitting your old boss, George W. Bush, and hitting Obama. Was that fair?

GRENELL: Look, I think that as a Republican who worked in the Bush administration, we have to be able to look at the failure of intelligence, intelligence gathering, and all of the mistakes of nation-building, and we have to learn from them. That’s a fair criticism.