Same Old Sidelined by Trump

When Donald Trump was asked why he hasn’t sought counsel from the “wise men” of foreign policy, he said he wouldn’t be calling people who failed and who helped create the current global mess.

If anyone had any lingering doubts that this would not be the case — that maybe a Trump White House would feature a few familiar faces from the Bush administration — then Trump’s foreign policy speech last week should have certainly put those doubts to rest.

“In the Middle East, our goals must be — and I mean must be — to defeat terrorists and promote regional stability, not radical change,” Trump said, before promising that “we will not longer surrender this country, or its people, to the false song of globalism.”

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These words are about as stark a departure from the neoconservative foreign policy of George W. Bush’s presidency as possible. Whatever the foreign policy of a Trump administration would look like if he wins, one can be sure the following “wise men” of foreign policy who either worked for or influenced George W. Bush will be watching it from the sidelines.

Donald Rumsfeld
Rumsfeld was Bush’s secretary of defense from 2001 to 2006. Rumsfeld was in ultimate control of the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his handling of both was criticized severely. General Sir Michael David Jackson, who led British coalition forces at the time, said Rumsfeld’s invasion plans were “intellectually bankrupt” and that Rumsfeld himself was “one of those most responsible for the current situation in Iraq.”

Paul Wolfowitz
Wolfowitz was the deputy secretary of defense under the Bush administration from January 2001 to June 2005. Described in The New Yorker as “a major architect of President Bush’s Iraq policy and, within the administration, its most passionate and compelling advocate,” Wolfowitz was arguably the single biggest foreign policy influence in Bush’s presidency. Donald Rumsfeld said in a 2011 interview that Wolfowitz was the first in the administration to discuss Iraq after 9/11.

Wolfowitz was also a signatory of the statement of principles of the Project for the New American Century, a pro-globalization neoconservative think tank founded in the late 1990s. After leaving the Bush administration, Wolfowitz went on to helm the globalist World Bank. He is now a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, another pro-globalization neoconservative think tank.

Richard Perle
Perle was chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee under Bush from 2001-2003. After leaving office, Perle tried to distance himself from the war in Iraq. “Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened,” he claimed in an interview.

But Perle’s protestations against neoconservative responsibility for Iraq ring resoundingly hollow. Perle was a signatory of PNAC’s 1998 letter to Bill Clinton, which called for regime change in Iraq. Even if actual neoconservatives were not making important Iraq decisions — a dubious claim at best for which there is evidence to the contrary — it is likely the U.S. would never have invaded Iraq after 9/11 if not for the influence of thinkers like Perle.

Perle is currently on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group, an annual private conference of the West’s political and financial elite which is shrouded in secrecy and thought by some to be a driving agent in continued globalization.

Douglas Feith
Feith, who served as under secretary of defense for policy from 2001-2005, actually worked for Perle during the Reagan administration, and it was Feith who returned the favor and brought Perle into the Bush administration.

Feith played a central role in the buildup to the Iraq War. He helmed the Office of Special Plans (which he created with Wolfowitz), a Pentagon unit tasked with providing raw intelligence about Iraq to the administration. After it was dismantled, the office was criticized by both Congress and the CIA for providing faulty intelligence.

Feith was also singlehandedly responsible for the policy of de-Baathification in Iraq, a woefully short-sighted policy which in the long term created increased political instability and in part led to the creation and success of ISIS, as many former Baathist officers from Saddam’s army ended up commanding ISIS units.

Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol
Kagan, a self-described “liberal interventionist,” was, along with Wolfowitz, arguably one of the Iraq war’s chief architects. Historian Andrew Bacevich has described Kagan as “the chief neoconservative foreign-policy theorist.”

Kagan co-founded the Project for a New American Century with Bill Kristol, whose most recent claim to fame is probably as head cheerleader for the #NeverTrump movement. If Kristol’s career of espousing globalization and foreign intervention weren’t enough, his open calls to vote Democrat over Trump are certainly enough to ensure he will not be invited to a Trump foreign policy summit.

Before the Iraq war was fully underway, Kristol in his eminent wisdom predicted the endeavor would be a “two-month war, not an eight-year war.”