Trump Foreign Policy Spurned by Veteran Republican Baker

Source: Bloomberg



While Donald Trump met with Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill Thursday, a Senate hearing provided a forum for critics in his party to take aim at his foreign policy proposals.

At the prompting of Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who dropped out of the presidential race in March, former Secretary of State James Baker said that the world “would be far less stable” if the U.S. left the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or let South Korea and Japan obtain nuclear weapons, proposals floated by Trump during the campaign that made him the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

“We’ve got a lot of problems today, but you’d have a hell of a lot more if that were the case,” Baker, who was secretary of state in President George H.W. Bush’s administration, said without mentioning Trump by name. “NATO has been the foundation of peace and stability in Europe. The more countries that obtain nuclear weapons the more instability there will be in the world.”

Baker, 86, is a quintessential representative of the traditional foreign policy and political establishment for which Trump has shown little regard. Before serving as secretary of state and chief of staff under the first President Bush, he had been chief of staff and Treasury secretary under President Ronald Reagan. Trump and Baker ended up meeting at a law firm later in the day, NBC reported, without giving details.





Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-05-12/trump-foreign-policy-spurned-by-veteran-republican-adviser-baker