President Trump’s foreign policy centers around unpredictability, a top White House aide said in an interview released Monday.
Michael Anton, a national security official known for his essays during the campaign written under a pseudonym, spoke with Politico about the “Trump Doctrine.”
Anton said that Trump’s foreign policy doctrine is still developing, but that “the only thing maybe predictable about his foreign policy is that he says to the world, I’m going to be unpredictable.”
“He said he thinks that America has been too predictable, and I think he relishes that, to keep adversaries, competitors alike, sort of off balance,” Anton added.
Anton cheered on Trump’s “America First” foreign policy in his writings before the election, and doesn’t think that the recent strike on a Syrian airbase is a departure from this principle.
“He made it plain that he was willing to use U.S. military power in instances when he thought it was in the national interest. And this is an instance in which he determined it was in the national interest,” Anton told Politico.
Later in the interview, he continued on to say: “I would have no problem whatsoever understanding the Syria strike as completely consistent with my own-even my own vision of what the Trump foreign policy ought to be, and certainly with what the president said on the campaign trail.”
Anton compared Trump’s stated “flexibility” with Syria to Abraham Lincoln. “Lincoln once wrote in a letter that he confessed that he had not controlled events, but that events had controlled him,” the national security official said.