Donald Trump Is Finding It Hard To Field A Foreign Policy Team Without A Foreign Policy [View all]

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Donald Trump Is Finding It Hard To Field A Foreign Policy Team Without A Foreign Policy
The president-elect is shuffling through names, seemingly with no ideological aim. His fellow Republicans are confused, too.
11/16/2016 10:52 pm ET
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Sam Stein Senior Politics Editor, The Huffington Post
Ryan Grim Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post


Donald Trump’s transition team remains vexed about how to structure key foreign policy positions with just months to go before inauguration. Causing the logjam is a mix of bureaucratic friction, internal staff disputes and a lack of direction from the top of the ticket.

Occasionally, the disorder has spilled out publicly, with the floating of a variety of names with no apparent ideological consistency for top posts. On Wednesday, news broke that South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (R-S.C.) was under consideration for secretary of state, while several transition sources told The Huffington Post that the previous front-runner, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was losing favor among transition staff.

The Trump transition team attempted to alleviate concerns over the state of operations during a conference call on Wednesday night, announcing that “landing teams” would begin meeting with officials at four separate federal agencies and revealing that Trump would meet with an “unbelievable” group of people on Thursday. The list included Haley in addition to several Republican foreign policy officials, from Henry Kissinger to Gen. Jack Keane.

That Trump is still feeling out who to trust for this critical portfolio is, in part, a function of the way that he operated as a candidate. During the campaign, he skewered neoconservatives who have long dominated Republican foreign policy, charging that President George W. Bush lied to get the country into the Iraq War. And Trump cozied up to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who is regarded by many in the GOP establishment as an arch enemy of the United States. Having run against the Republican foreign policy platform, Trump has found it hard to find Republicans to carry out his foreign policy agenda.

“It’s the creepy Russia stuff that really has foreign policy people creeped out,” said one GOP official who was contacted by the transition office about his interest in working in the administration. He declined. “A lot of the foreign policy people saw the intel on what Putin was doing and none of it looked good.”

Inside the Trump transition team, there is disagreement over how much they should try to repair bridges to the rest of the GOP foreign policy community. Eliot Cohen, a prominent neoconservative who criticized Trump during the campaign, said he was berated during his meeting with transition staff. He subsequently advised Republican foreign policy officials to stay away.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-foreign-policy_us_582d1c98e4b030997bbd8d49?