Trump takes on the world

Donald Trump can’t explain the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah. He has confused the Kurds with the Quds Force. And he’s said he gets military advice from television talk shows.

But he did know enough to negotiate a killer deal for a new golf club and resort in Dubai.

Trump’s Republican rivals are primed to pounce on the obvious gaps in his foreign policy knowledge at Wednesday night’s presidential debate. But the billionaire mogul will rebuke them, in part, by insisting that he is actually the candidate with the most foreign experience — albeit in the business and tourism realm.

“Trump has met more foreign heads of state than any other candidate,” claims Roger Stone, a longtime GOP political operative and Trump adviser who recently parted ways with the businessman.

Another advisor estimated that Trump travels overseas 15 to 20 times per year, and that his businesses require him to understand the financial and security situations in multiple countries. In recent years Trump has visited properties spanning from Turkey to India to the Republic of Georgia, and he says he’s also visited such Middle Eastern countries as Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Last May Trump was in the United Arab Emirates for the opening of a new golf club and resort in Dubai.

Trump insists that his overseas business interests, which includes holdings on at least five continents, give him a special insight into how the world works and relationships with the people who really make things happen.

For Trump, foreign policy is a simple matter of applying the art of the deal on a global stage. He treats foreign policy as an endless negotiation with friends and enemies alike, in which the game is to screw or be screwed. He says the Iran nuclear deal was “incompetently negotiated,” complains that our allies should pay more for military protection, and insists Arab nations should cough up more cheap oil.

“Foreign policy is the art of negotiating,” Stone said. “This is Trump’s strong suit.”

“I know the best negotiators in the world and I’d put them, one for each country,” Trump said in his June campaign announcement speech. “Believe me folks, we’ll do very, very well.”

Trump’s opponents — some of whom have spent hours huddling with experts to absorb foreign policy minutiae, only to find themselves trailing a man who can’t be bothered with them — hope that as voters and the media take the front-running Republican more seriously they’ll find his extreme ideas and confused facts woefully lacking. After Trump’s campaign arranged a national security speech on a decommissioned battleship in Los Angeles on Tuesday night, he delivered a superficial 15-minute speech with grand promises about a strong military but no specifics.

For all his globe trotting, Trump was in the dark about some foreign policy basics in an embarrassing interview last week with the conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt, who also stumped him with questions about Hamas, Hezbollah, and the identity of the infamous Iranian general Qassem Suleimani.

Nor has Trump’s travel always reflect well on his instincts.

In May 2012 Trump visited the former Soviet republic of Georgia to open a luxury apartment tower in the Black Sea Coast town of Batumi. In a press conference there, he proclaimed the country’s controversial president, Mikheil Saakashvili, “one of the great leaders of the world right now.” Several months later, Saakashvili’s party was routed in national elections and he was driven from the country. Trump also said he expected Georgia’s economy to grow faster than 10 percent in the coming years; since then it’s GDP growth rate has been below 5 percent

During a press event opening the Trump Towers Mall in Istanbul that year, Trump praised Turkey’s then-prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as “very highly respected throughout the world and in the United States.” In fact, by then U.S. officials had grave concerns about Erdogan’s repressive policies and tilt towards Islamism.

Trump advisors say that, a month after telling an interviewer that he draws military advice from television talk shows, the improbable GOP front-runner still does not have a foreign policy kitchen cabinet. Trump has named the conservative former U.N. ambassador John Bolton as one source of advice. A Bolton aide said he talks to any candidate who asks and doesn’t discuss those interactions.

Trump says Hewitt hit him with “gotcha” questions, and that he would delegate foreign policy management to subordinates fluent in such details.

Still, he has written and spoken at length about America’s place in the world, arguing, in short, that the U.S. has been getting a raw deal.

Trump tends to frame foreign policy issues as a matter of economics. His plan to defeat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, involves seizing oil fields in Iraq and Syria to choke off the terror group’s black market oil revenues. (Never mind that ISIS draws most of its income from other sources, including foreign donations, kidnapping and other criminal activity.)

Trump is particularly fixated on the Middle East’s oil, and what he considers America’s “right to take” it, given America’s role in its discovery and initial extraction — not to mention Washington’s military protection of oil producing Arab states.

Although Trump opposed the Iraq War — though not in public until 2004, after it began — he has called the U.S. removal of Saddam Hussein “a priceless gift” to Iraqis and argued that Iraq should repay America with oil revenues. “The ingratitude of Iraq’s leadership is breathtaking,” Trump wrote in his 2011 book, Time to Get Tough.

He rails at the U.S. intervention in Libya, complaining that President Barack Obama did not insist on 50 percent of the oil-producing country’s crude revenues over the next 25 years as repayment for helping to topple Muammar Gaddafi.

And he thinks Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Arab countries should cough up cheaper oil or see it seized by America. “We get virtually nothing from Saudi Arabia. Every time somebody raises a rifle in the air and points it in the direction of Saudi Arabia,” he told Hewitt, “we start loading up and… sending ships and sending all sorts of things. We get nothing.”

Trump also sees free riders in Asia. South Korea should be paying more for the U.S. troops that defend its border with North Korea, Trump says. He argues that Japan is also getting the best of its decades-old security pact with America.

“You know, we have an agreement with Japan where if somebody attacks Japan we have to come to their rescue. But if we get attacked Japan doesn’t have to help us,” Trump said recently. “Do you think that’s a good deal?”

Meanwhile, Trump largely defines America’s complex relationship with China as a matter of cutting better trade agreements. “I beat China all the time,” Trump likes to say, vowing to return “millions and millions” of American jobs in the process.

One of the few foreign countries Trump talks about with undiluted admiration is Israel. Trump insists he is the most pro-Israel candidate in the GOP field, although he recently told Hewitt he had only visited the country once.

Trump has met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the U.S. In 2013 he filmed a 2013 endorsement video for the Israeli leader. “I’m a big fan of Israel,” Trump declared, calling Netanyahu “a winner,” “highly thought of by all” and a “terrific guy.”

And he has noted before Jewish audiences that his daughter converted to Judaism before marrying her husband, Jared Kushner. “I have a Jewish daughter,” he declared at a February dinner hosted by a conservative Jewish news outlet.

Trump’s rivals can only watch it all in frustration. Florida Senator Marco Rubio has diligently honed his expertise in recent years, serving on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, traveling to places like Afghanistan and China, and consulting with the likes of Henry Kissinger. During a May appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations in mid-May, Rubio impressed the assembled wonks when he expounded on everything from shipping lanes in the South China Sea to Iran’s ballistic missile program to Ukraine’s potential admission into the NATO alliance.

Trump, by contrast, continues to stumble. Last week he repeatedly referred to “the Ukraine” in remarks by phone to a gathering of foreign policy elites in Kiev — outdated phrasing that treats Ukraine as a vassal state of Russia. And in recent weeks, Trump has claimed that the Iran nuclear deal obligates the U.S. to defend Iran from attack by Israel or any other country.

“[A]ccording to the deal, and this is hard to believe, but we’re supposed to be protecting Iran against any invader,” Trump told Hugh Hewitt, a line he has also repeated at least once on Fox News.

The nuclear deal does include a provision suggesting the possibility of “training and workshops” to assist Iran with on-site security for its nuclear facilities and defense against sabotage. But the language is not binding, has no military connotation and, officials say, in no way obligates America to defend Iran from a foreign attack.

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