http://www.nationalreview.com/node/434717/print The World According to Trump
By Charles Krauthammer — April 28, 2016
Foreign policy does not determine American elections. Indeed, of all Western countries, we are the least interested in the subject. The reason is simple: We haven’t had to be. Our instinctive isolationism derives from our geographic exceptionalism. As Bismarck once explained (it is said), the United States is the most fortunate of all Great Powers, bordered on two sides by weak neighbors and on the other two by fish.
Two world wars, nuclear missiles, and international terrorism have disabused us of the illusion of safety-by-isolation. You wouldn’t know it, though, from the Democratic presidential race, where foreign policy has been treated as a nuisance, a distraction from such fundamental questions as whether $12 or $15 is the proper minimum wage.
On the Republican side, however, foreign policy has been the subject of furious debate. to which Donald Trump has contributed significantly, much of it off-the-cuff, contradictory, and confused. Hence his foreign-policy speech on Wednesday. It was meant to make him appear consistent, serious, and presidential.
He did check off the required box — delivering a “major address” to a serious foreign-policy outfit, the Center for the National Interest (once known as the Nixon Center). As such, it fulfilled a political need.
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