Donald Trump left most experts unimpressed following
his foreign policy speech in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday,
Politico reports.
"It struck me as a very odd mishmash," Doug Bandow, of the libertarian Cato Institute, said. Cato finds agreement with Trump on limiting the United States' role abroad, but Bandow said, Trump "called for a new foreign policy strategy, but you don't really get the sense he gave one."
Former Reagan national security adviser Robert "Bud" McFarlane said the speech was "lacking in policy prescriptions," and its "strident rhetoric masked a lack of depth."
Experts said Trump's speech was contradictory, including saying "America First" would be his "major and overriding" theme as president just before lauding the U.S. role in World War II. "America First" isolationists actually opposed the country's role in the war, Politico notes.
And Trump assailed President Barack Obama for not following through with his "red line" threat to bomb Syria while criticizing the chaos caused by U.S. interventions in Libya and Iraq.
Trump was "completely contradictory, in the sense that the first message is that we should make allies pay not just for the cost of having troops in their countries but for the entire defense that the U.S. provides to Europe and Asia, which he estimated at trillions of dollars. And then in the next breath, he said that the U.S. can't be relied on and needs to be a better ally," Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution said.