http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/never-trump-hillary-clinton-foreign-policy-establishment-213898 On the Lonely Island of ‘Never Trump’
Across Washington, stalwarts of the GOP foreign-policy establishment find themselves suddenly adrift. Could they really vote for—gulp—Hillary?
By Julia Ioffe
May 17, 2016
My wife said, ‘never,’” said Brian Hook, looking pained and slicing the air with a long, pale hand. He stood, tall and sandy-haired, pink tie perfectly knotted, in the cavernous foyer of the Mellon Auditorium, which, that day was hosting the Peterson Institute’s Fiscal Summit.
“Never” isn’t a word one expects to hear from a Republican lifer contemplating a possible job in a possible Republican administration. Hook has a long, distinguished conservative résumé. He was a foreign policy adviser to the Romney and Pawlenty campaigns; a special assistant to President George W. Bush, whom he also served as an assistant secretary of state and as a senior adviser to the United Nations ambassador. In any normal year, he’d be in line for a plum post.
Not this time. It was a rainy afternoon outside, one in a long chain of rainy afternoons, as if it hadn’t stopped raining since Donald Trump clinched the GOP nomination in Indiana. And Hook is one of a small, die-hard set of the Republicans who have been wandering outside this season, getting wet, locked out of their own house. "Even if you say you support him as the nominee,” Hook says, “you go down the list of his positions and you see you disagree on every one.”
Trump’s path to the Republican nomination has been littered with discarded conservative principles, and in its wake has left a party establishment bewildered by the realization that precious few Republican voters seem to care about those principles. As Trump completes his hostile takeover of the party, the GOP political class has been scrambling to find ways to coexist with a standard-bearer whom it reviles. Last week, Trump met with Speaker Paul Ryan and various other Republican leaders on the Hill, all of whom were managing, in one way or another, to cozy up to the presumptive candidate.
But for one group of Republicans, “never” has become the operative word. This is the party’s foreign policy establishment, a close-knit set of thinkers, diplomats and strategists with an internationalist ideology deeply rooted in a belief that America has a leading role to play in a changing and dangerous world. For them, Trump’s Lindbergh-style isolationism and defiant ignorance of the world’s complexities is simply too horrifying to support. They have emerged as the vanguard of the #nevertrump holdout movement—and, as their party leaves them to embrace the front-runner, they’re increasingly a cohort in search of a home. Will it be four more years of working in think tanks? Could the answer be Hillary Clinton?
Last fall, when the rest of their party was still treating Trump as a temporary nuisance, prominent Republicans in foreign policy—Robert Gates, Michael Hayden, former Bush National Security Council member Peter Feaver—began sounding the alarm over a candidate whose lack of knowledge about the world beyond America’s borders was exceeded only by his dangerous ideas about it. Trump didn’t know what a nuclear triad was; he wanted to pull out of NATO. He suggested that South Korea and Japan should develop their own nuclear weapons, casually brushing aside the generational bipartisan achievement on nonproliferation. He wanted to ban all Muslims from coming to the United States; he advocated killing the families of terrorists, in direct violation of international law. (He has since backed off that idea.) He rebuffed attempts by Republican foreign policy think experts who offered their expertise. Why would he need them?
In March, 121 of these Republican foreign policy specialists banded together and published an open letter opposing Trump, saying he would “make America less safe.” The move was intended to register their alarm and land a solid, even fatal blow by saying he’d lost the faith of a constituency whose support he’d need to govern. But it didn’t stop him. When he rolled out his foreign policy vision the following month, it was under Charles Lindbergh’s “America First” banner. He extolled America’s allies—but it was the Russian ambassador who sat front row, center. The ambassadors of Britain, France, Germany were nowhere to be seen. The Republican hawks were horrified.
Never. Republican foreign policy wonks could never, would never work with such an administration. (And even if they wanted to, a wife might veto it.) But now they’re left with a question: Where can they go?
***
continued
