An open letter signed by over 50 members of the Republican foreign policy community, including former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, has called Donald Trump unfit for office and pledged to work to stop him from receiving the Republican nomination.
“We the undersigned, members of the Republican national security community, represent a broad spectrum of opinion on America’s role in the world and what is necessary to keep us safe and prosperous. We have disagreed with one another on many issues, including the Iraq war and intervention in Syria. But we are united in our opposition to a Donald Trump presidency,” the group said.
“His vision of American influence and power in the world is wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle. He swings from isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence.”
Other notable signatories include Max Boot, Niall Ferguson, Robert Kagan, Robert B. Zoellick, and Ray Takeyh.
The letter is the latest sign of a split GOP in a wild election year, in which a Trump nomination has become a more realistic possibility. Donald Trump won seven of Tuesday’s 11 GOP state primaries.
The GOP foreign policy community that wrote the open letter also decried Trump’s stance on Muslims in the United States. “His hateful, anti-Muslim rhetoric undercuts the seriousness of combatting Islamic radicalism by alienating partners in the Islamic worldmaking significant contributions to the effort,” the group said.
“Furthermore, it endangers the safety and Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of American Muslims.”
According to Exit polls conducted by ABC News on Super Tuesday, 60 percent of GOP voters in five states favor Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States. In Alabama and Arkansas, that figure rises to 80 percent.
As extreme as Trump’s positions are on these and other issues, they are reflective of a deepening split in the GOP between Trump’s supporters and the establishment GOP.
Whether Trump will actually follow through on any of his promises remains unclear. The Open Letter states that, “He is fundamentally dishonest.” And that, “Mr. Trump’s own statements lead us to conclude that as president, he would use the authority of his office to act in ways that make America less safe, and which would diminish our standing in the world.”
Some in the Republican establishment are even considering voting for Clinton in the general election if Trump wins, according to a report by Michael Crowley in Politico. “In interviews with POLITICO, leading neocons — people who promoted the Iraq War, detest Putin and consider Israel’s security non-negotiable — said Trump would be a disaster for U.S. foreign policy and vowed never to support him. So deep is their revulsion that several even say they could vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump in November,” Crowley writes.
According to that report, Eliot Cohen, a former top State Department official under George W. Bush, said that Trump’s election would be “an unmitigated disaster for American foreign policy…he has already damaged it considerably.”
