President-elect Trump’s behaving like a 70-year-old Hamlet these days: Will he or won’t he name Mitt Romney his Secretary of State? Or will it be Rudy Giuliani, David Petraeus, Bob Corker or an “outsider.”
This is big and Trump must know it since he’s delayed this appointment even as he makes numerous others. American foreign policy hangs in the balance now more than it has for many decades, and Trump’s nominee for State will signal its likely character for the next four years.
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Foreign policy turns on who takes the chair on the seventh floor in Foggy Bottom, but one question figures more than any other. What are Trump and his chief diplomat going to do about Russia?
Again, Trump strikes the Hamlet pose. Will he deliver on his often-repeated commitment to a new détente with Moscow? Or will he drop his criticism of NATO and take up the confrontational, Cold War-like stance he’ll inherit from the Obama administration on January 20?
This is a hard read for the moment. And all the Trump–Putin “bromance” business is of no consequence whatsoever.
On one hand, Trump has given no indication he will abandon his idea of rebuilding relations with Moscow based on shared interests. While a lot of his thinking on foreign affairs is either hazy, self-contradicting, or simply not in evidence, the record suggests strongly that his position on Russia is solid and serious.
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On the other, no one now in the running to lead the State Department seems to be on Trump’s we-can-be-friends wavelength. On Wednesday the Washington Post quoted a Trump spokesperson saying Romney and Giuliani are the sum total of the president-elect’s shortlist, and both are hawks.
Romney is on record saying he considers Russia the No. 1 threat to America’s national security—this dating to his 2012 debates with Obama. Giuliani has been critical of President Obama for not using the term “Islamic terrorists” to describe ISIS and al-Qaeda and others who seek to destroy the west.
In an Op-ed in The Wall Street Journal last December, he said, “…it is foolish to refuse to call these Islamic terrorists by the name they give themselves or to refuse to acknowledge their overriding religious rationale.”
Of the two, Romney’s the wiser choice by magnitudes. He’s seasoned in global affairs, at least relatively, and can stitch Trump into the GOP’s mainstream.
As to Giuliani, the record suggests he can’t tell foreign affairs from Shinola. Serving as a tough-minded mayor given to law-and-order policing tactics is not, sorry, applicable experience. The best that can be said is Giuliani will do whatever President Trump tells him to do.