No love lost between Trump and Republican national security experts | McClatchy Washington Bureau

Even with the Republican nomination seemingly locked up, Donald Trump remains radioactive to the party’s top national security strategists, who warn that his “incoherent” approach to world affairs could prove dangerous for the United States.

In March, 121 members of the GOP’s national security brain trust signed on to a scathing open letter opposing Trump for president, calling his sense of U.S. influence around the globe “wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle.” This week, in interviews and on social media after Trump’s decisive win in Indiana, more than a dozen of those signatories reiterated that stance, leaving Trump with a shallow pool from which to seek advisers on diplomacy and defense.

That seems to suit Trump just fine. He’s portrayed GOP foreign policy architects, especially those who planned the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as liars and losers, and has suggested there would be no place for the old guard in his White House.

Trump also bragged on CNN earlier this week that his international business deals give him more foreign policy experience than “virtually anyone” in the presidential race; he backpedaled only slightly when reminded that Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state.

“Any person who is standing to be president who thinks that he can handle all the foreign policy himself or herself is showing both an arrogance and ignorance that is astonishing,” said former Arizona Congressman Jim Kolbe, who now serves as a senior trans-Atlantic fellow for the German Marshall Fund and who signed the anti-Trump letter.

Trump’s bravado sends chills through Republican national security circles, where worries are mounting that the party’s platform on such high-stakes issues as fighting the Islamic State lies in the hands of an untested, hurriedly gathered team that includes figures known for advancing conspiracy theories and anti-Muslim bigotry.

Signees of the anti-Trump letter said they expected some among their ranks to warm to him as the election nears, whether for personal gain or out of a sense of duty, but the core of the group remains vehemently opposed to supporting a man whose foreign policy vision they consider dangerously naive and without serious thought as to consequences.

“To defeat ISIS, you will inevitably have to work with our Arab allies,” said letter signee Roger Zakheim, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former staffer on the House Armed Services Committee. “This is somebody who is – and, if he carries out his policies, will be – hated throughout the Arab world for how he’s said he would treat Muslims or Arabs if they come into the country.”

John Noonan, a conservative Miami-based national security analyst who advised GOP politicians Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, summarized the views of many signatories: “Never means never.”

Trump’s foreign policy, he said, “is little more than jingoistic sloganeering.”

“It means the abdication of America’s special role in the world, and I won’t sign my name to it,” Noonan said. “He can find other advisers to ignore.”

Of Trump’s named foreign policy advisers, few are known in the Washington national security realm. Two regularly make incendiary anti-Muslim remarks about the threat of Shariah law and one is a 2009 graduate who was mocked for including his attendance at a model United Nations conference among the credentials he listed on LinkedIn.

At least two come from the private sector, including Carter Page, whom Politico described as a former investment banker with pro-Kremlin views on Russia and a penchant for referencing Kanye West and Oprah Winfrey in his foreign policy blog posts.

Another adviser is terrorism analyst Walid Phares, whose anti-Muslim statements include suggestions that Obama administration officials were in cahoots with the Muslim Brotherhood and that American Muslims were intent on spreading Shariah law. Politico also dinged Phares for resume inflation, calling him out for reportedly exaggerating his role at the National Defense University in Washington.

“It’s not a first-tier team by any stretch of the imagination,” sniffed Patrick Chovanec, a New York-based China specialist who was among the signatories to the anti-Trump letter. “I don’t have any problem with people challenging orthodox thinking in foreign policy – that’s great – but it’s got to be sensible. It’s got to be more than just, ‘I read in the National Enquirer that. . . . ’ ”

Matthew Kroenig, a former Defense Department official and foreign policy adviser to the 2012 Romney campaign who signed the letter, said the Trump camp’s lack of expertise showed when the candidate struggled to articulate his foreign policy plans. He cited the Iranian nuclear deal, which Ted Cruz vowed to tear up and Hillary Clinton would preserve. Trump’s views remain unclear.

“Trump has said, ‘Bad deal,’ but that he won’t get rid of it, but that he’ll try to renegotiate it,” Kroenig said. “I don’t know how you keep something in place while renegotiating it.”

For Paul D. Miller, the former director for Afghanistan and Pakistan on the National Security Council under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the trepidation comes not from a single policy issue but from Trump’s broader worldview. Miller, who joked that he was the first to sign the letter because of how fast he hit the reply button, called Trump a demagogue and a neo-fascist who posed “a threat to the American way of life.”

Several cited what they called Trump’s strongman tendencies, as evidenced by his mutual admiration with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Let’s really take a second and think about why a man like Vladimir Putin would embrace Donald Trump,” said letter signee Daniel P. Vajdich, who was a senior national security adviser to Cruz’s campaign. “He clearly wants to see the United States weakened and he sees Donald Trump as a mechanism for that.”

Still, Vajdich said that while he would never work for Trump, he would understand if others did, if Trump became president. At that point, Vajdich said, offering expert advice on world affairs goes beyond electoral politics and is about the public’s interest.

“Look, you would want to surround him with competent and smart people who can hopefully – hopefully – guide him in the right direction,” he said. “But it’s too early for that. Right now it would just be enabling him.”