Why efforts to 'whitewash Trump’s foreign policy record' miss the mark: Pompeo aide

23 September 2024

Many of the right-wing conservatives who have endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris over former President Donald Trump —including former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) and former U.S Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — in the 2024 election have cited her views on national security and foreign policy as a key factor.

Harris' supporters on the right are troubled by Trump's disdain for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and his affinity for authority figures like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and they fear that military aid to Ukraine will end if Trump returns to the White House.

But according to P. Michael McKinley — who spent 37 years in the U.S. Foreign Service and served as an adviser to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — some former Trump officials "appear to be on a campaign to whitewash his administration’s foreign policy record."

In an op-ed published by Politico on September 23, McKinley observes, "In recent weeks and months, there's been a flood of articles and interviews from them that present versions of the same argument: Donald Trump's foreign policy legacy is better than you think. The most prominent are by Robert O'Brien, Trump's last national security adviser, and his secretary of state Mike Pompeo."

McKinley adds, "But there have been others, including by former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby and former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster."

According to McKinley, the "common purpose appears to be twofold: reassure a broader audience that a second Trump presidency would be more mainstream than many fear, and, by extension, to present his first administration as one of successes which restored American leadership on the international stage.

But McKinley stresses that after serving three years in the Trump Administration himself, he "can say that both contentions are wrong."

"In a vastly more complex global landscape than when he was first president," McKinley argues, "a second Trump term could do real harm to America's international economic, diplomatic and security interests…. Trump Administration policies…. undermined our strategic rationale for working inside broader security collectives. This weakened commitments to the alliances that had kept the United States secure. Trump's transactional approach to NATO and open questioning of the alliance's Article 5 commitment to mutual defense lessened faith in America's steadfastness."

McKinley adds, "In East Asia, Trump’s insistence on greater burden-sharing with South Korea and Japan pushed the bilateral relationships near the breaking point.

P. Michael McKinley's full op-ed for Politico is available at this link.

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