A former senior advisor to George W. Bush has criticized Donald Trump‘s ambiguous stance on global issues, calling them “silly.”
Karl Rove also expressed concern over presidential candidates Trump and Kamala Harris‘ handling of America’s mounting list of security challenges.
With long-frozen conflicts in the Middle East at risk of spilling into all-out war, Beijing’s recent provocative actions towards Taiwan and the Russia-Ukraine war becoming increasingly marked by nuclear threats, foreign policy should arguably stand foremost in Americans’ minds.
However, this has so far played second fiddle to the domestic issues of inflation, immigration and abortion in the campaigns’ of both candidates heading into the final stretch of the 2024 election.
“Mr. Trump occasionally asserts he alone can keep the peace—a claim so vague as to be silly,” Karl Rove wrote in a Wednesday column for The Wall Street Journal.
While Trump has spoken about the foreign policy issues in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and the Indo-Pacific on the campaign trail, he has faced criticism for offering only brief and cryptic insights into his actual foreign policy agenda.
He notably promised that brokering a deal between Russian president Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky would “be easy,” and that he could have this done within 24 hours, without outlining how this would be achieved.
Newsweek reached out to the Trump campaign for a response to Rove’s comments.
However, Rove, who served as Senior advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff during the Bush administration and briefly as an advisor to Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, said that this approach is insufficient, given the growing list of threats facing the U.S.
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He cited the July report from the bipartisan Commission on the National Defense Strategy, which stated: “The United States faces the most challenging and most dangerous international security environment since World War II,” and questioned the country’s preparedness for the growing possibility of a “near-term major war.”
Vice President Kamala Harris is no different, according to Rove, and “largely ignores” the tenuous national security environment, “raising doubts about her as a prospective commander in chief.”
Despite the warnings of Rove and the intelligence community, foreign policy sits far behind domestic issues in voter priorities only twenty days out from Election Day.
According to a recent poll by Gallup, conducted Sept. 16-28, the economy is chief among voter priorities, with 52 percent of the 941 registered voters surveyed considering it “extremely important” in deciding their vote, a further 38 percent deeming it “very important.”
U.S. democracy sits in second place, followed by terrorism, the candidates’ potential Supreme Court picks and immigration, with foreign affairs down at number 14.
Rove called the country’s “faltering security” one of the three issues that the candidates have so far appeared to ignore, or pay insufficient attention to, alongside the inflating national debt and the imminent bankruptcy of the country’s social security programs.
“America is headed for trouble on multiple fronts,” Rove wrote, “and both Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump are whistling past the graveyard.”
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