Politics

Neocon Robert Kagan Spurns Republican Party, Hosts Fundraiser For Hillary Clinton

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Jonah Bennett Contributor
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Noted neoconservative Robert Kagan is set to hold a major fundraiser for presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, which is yet another sign of the GOP foreign policy establishment’s contempt for Donald Trump.

Although much of the GOP national security community has already come out against presumptive nominee Trump, this disagreement has not translated into massive, outright support for Clinton. Kagan’s move, however, could signal an opening of the floodgates for defectors.

Kagan’s fundraiser will take place July 21 in Washington, D.C.’s Logan Circle and will include a discussion on America, NATO and the EU, Foreign Policy reports. Tickets cost $100 and VIP tickets cost $250.

This isn’t the first time Kagan has expressed fondness for Clinton, and so his support in the form of a fundraiser is not particularly surprising, especially since he abandoned the Republican Party in February and endorsed Clinton.

“For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Clinton,” Kagan wrote in The Washington Post. “The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.”

His sympathy for Clinton traces back to at least 2014.

“I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy,” Kagan told The New York Times back in 2014. “If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

Kagan isn’t the only one making aggressive statements and throwing support to the Democrats because of Trump’s refusal to go along with the neoconservative line.

Republican and former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft endorsed Clinton Wednesday, saying, “She brings deep expertise in international affairs and a sophisticated understanding of the world, which I believe are essential for the commander-in-chief.”

Even back in March, major GOP foreign policy leaders showed signs of turning on the Republican Party and its presumptive nominee because Trump has refused to go along with interventionist, internationalist foreign policy.

“Hillary is the lesser evil, by a large margin,” former State Department official Eliot Cohen told Politico. He also claimed Trump would constitute “an unmitigated disaster for American foreign policy.”

Max Boot, a military historian at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Vox he’d choose Clinton over Trump, as he is “literally losing sleep over Donald Trump.”

A sizable group of GOP foreign policy leaders wrote an open letter in March published on War on the Rocks, in which they presented themselves as “united in our opposition to a Donald Trump presidency.”

Trump has repeatedly emphasized a foreign policy that places more obligations on other states to contribute to conflicts or international alliances, specifically NATO. For example, Trump has blasted a host of NATO member countries that have failed to meet the requirement for defense spending of two percent of GDP.

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