Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates shredded GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump in a Friday op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.
While Gates went on at length in the piece to savage the foreign policy visions of both Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, he singled out Trump in particular.
“At least on national security, I believe Mr. Trump is beyond repair,” Gates said. “He is stubbornly uninformed about the world and how to lead our country and government, and temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform. He is unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief.”
For Gates, the next crisis the new president will have to confront will likely be international, and both presidential candidates seem woefully unprepared to enter the world stage.
First, there’s China. Chinese cyberspying is out of control, as is theft of U.S. intellectual property. The Chinese military is also making aggressive moves in the South China Sea, refusing to back down from its campaign to push other countries with competing claims out of the region.
“On this most complex challenge, neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump has said or done much to give anyone confidence,” Gates wrote. “All we really know is Mr. Trump’s intention to launch a trade war with a country holding over $1 trillion in U.S. debt and the largest market for many U.S. companies; and Mrs. Clinton’s opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which she helped to craft and the failure of which would hand China an easy political and economic win.”
Next is Russia. Secretary of State John Kerry was duped into trusting Russia that a ceasefire agreement with the U.S. regarding Syria was just around the corner in Syria. Then, of course, there are the Russian cyberattacks on U.S. political actors and possible covert attempts to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
North Korea and Iran present their own challenges, both of which neither Trump nor Hillary has addressed.
As far as ISIS is concerned, both candidates, according to Gates, have strategies that appear to be “what President Obama is doing now—with more ideological fervor and some additional starch.”
In foreign policy, Clinton and Trump have a serious credibility problem, but for Gates, Trump fares far worse because of his freewheeling, cavalier nature and his apparent ignorance of world matters.
Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense for George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, has been a constant thorn in the side of the Obama administration, taking to the press at nearly every opportunity to complain about the White House’s micromanagement of the Pentagon, or Obama’s decision to fill the National Security Council with young, inexperienced ideologues, who prefer being on the right side of history to sensible policy decisions.
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