Opinion Pieces Examine President-Elect Trump’s Foreign Policy Team

Washington Post: Trump is unifying the fractured GOP foreign policy establishment
Hugh Hewitt, host of The Hugh Hewitt Show, NBC News political analyst, and author

“Candidate Donald Trump never had much in the way of support from the traditional Republican foreign policy establishment. President-elect Trump is changing that. He has surprised again, assembling a team of national security heavyweights, both impressive and diverse. … Rex Tillerson, the nominee to lead the State Department, is a new name to foreign policy but a man with decades of experience dealing with heads of government and state. … Trump is — quite surprisingly — unifying the fractured GOP foreign policy establishment. Winning does that. As does the dire situation of the world. … The result is reassuring. Most of Trump’s incoming team has three or four or even five times as much serious national security experience coming into their new jobs as has, say, Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes going out. … The grown-ups are back. And they have agreed to support the new guy” (12/19).

New York Times: Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Team: Built to Fail
James Mann, resident fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and author

“With the announcement that he will nominate the Exxon Mobil chief executive Rex Tillerson as his secretary of state, President-elect Donald J. Trump has rounded out a foreign policy team that is, to put it mildly, profoundly different from that of any of his six Republican predecessors since World War II. It’s also unlikely to last particularly long. … [Previous presidents’] teams included people with experience at the top or second levels of the cabinet and national-security apparatus in previous administrations. The Trump team has none. … It’s not just their lack of experience that will make for an unstable foreign policy ship. Mr. Trump has, perhaps by design, chosen people who do not know one another, and appear to disagree in personality and worldview. … It’s up to the president to decide where and how his team should advance. If Mr. Trump doesn’t, then his team of rivals and outsiders will quickly devolve into a battle royal” (12/17).

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