A President Trump could end the era of American global leadership - Washington Post Editorial Board
By Editorial Board October 3 at 4:29 PM
IN NO realm is the U.S. president more powerful than in matters of national security. A president may launch wars, conduct intelligence operations and strike deals with foreign governments with minimal checks from the courts and Congress. If he wished, a President Donald Trump could carry out — or at least order — many of the most extreme proposals he has tossed off during the election campaign.
If Mr. Trump chose to “take the oil” of Iraq or Syria, as he has frequently proposed, he could direct the armed forces to plan and launch such an operation, whatever its prospects for success. If he wanted to assassinate foreigners who opposed him, he could unilaterally and secretly change the executive order prohibiting such action. If he wanted to reinstate waterboarding and other torture methods for use on detainees, he could cancel President Obama’s orders governing torture and appoint lawyers to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel willing to issue a secret opinion invalidating a congressional ban.
Mr. Trump could launch surveillance programs targeting foreigners without informing Congress. He could scrap — again, without public notice — the rules Mr. Obama instituted for limiting U.S. drone strikes. He could shut U.S. bases abroad, withdrawing troops from Japan, South Korea and Europe.
Because the GOP candidate has evidently done no serious thinking about national security, which of these actions he might take is necessarily a matter of guesswork. Yet two aspects of Mr. Trump’s worldview appear deeply rooted and consistent over a number of years. One is his disregard for traditional U.S. alliances, from Mexico to NATO to Saudi Arabia and Japan. The other is a strong and somewhat mysterious attachment to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. If Mr. Trump were to act on those instincts, he could transform the world, very much for the worse.
It would not be necessary for Mr. Trump to take any formal action to wreck NATO, which has been the foundation of Western security since 1949. If he merely repeats, as president, the suggestion that the United States might not defend states in Central and Eastern Europe that are threatened by Russia, it will send them scrambling to make other arrangements — including their own deals with Moscow.
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