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 Governments alarmed at the prospect of a Trump presidency will be
paying close attention. Critics have accused the Republican
front-runner of bigotry and posing a danger to U.S. national
security.
Many foreign policy and defense advisers say his views are worrying,
mingling isolationism and protectionism, with calls to force U.S.
allies to pay more for their defense and proposals to impose
punitive tariffs on some imported goods.
"Part of what I'm saying is we love our country and we love our
allies, but our allies can no longer be taking advantage of this
country," Trump told reporters on Tuesday night in a speech preview.
He said he would focus on nuclear weapons as the single biggest
threat in the world today.
The billionaire businessman, 69, promises to temporarily ban Muslims
from entering the United States and to build a wall to block off
Mexico.
His policies are popular with many voters who want a change of
viewpoint in Washington, but foreign policy elites are concerned.
 “It’s a perfect storm of isolationism, muscular nationalism, with a
dash of pragmatism and realism," said Aaron David Miller, a foreign
policy scholar who has served in Republican and Democratic
administrations.
The speech, at noon (1600 GMT) at a Washington hotel, will address
several critical foreign policy issues including global trade and
economic and national security policies and building up the U.S.
military, his campaign said.
It is expected to be the first in a series of policy speeches meant
to show that Trump, fresh off a sweep of five Northeastern state
nominating contests on Tuesday, is worthy of the White House despite
having never held public office.
"He needs to show that he has the substance, the depth of knowledge
and the vision to be the American commander in chief," said Steve
Schmidt, who was 2008 Republican nominee John McCain's campaign
manager.
Trump's biggest backer in Washington, Republican U.S. Senator Jeff
Sessions, said Trump would offer "a more restrained foreign policy,
a more realistic foreign policy that counts the cost not only now
but in the months and years to come."
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Driving much of Trump's rhetoric is what he feels is the need to
ease the U.S. financial burden overseas, focus more on
nation-building at home and make sure American companies pay a price
for outsourcing jobs to countries where labor is cheaper.
"His views are reckless and dangerous but that doesn't necessarily
mean that they’re unpopular. That's part of the challenge," said
Lanhee Chen, who advised former 2016 Republican candidate Marco
Rubio and 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney.
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Trump has declared NATO obsolete and said European countries should
be pulling more of their weight in the post-World War Two alliance.
Democratic President Barack Obama has for years urged Europeans to
bolster their defense spending to help NATO, but unlike Trump has
never said the alliance needs to be reconfigured.
In a joint paper published this month, national security and
regional experts at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies rejected Trump’s position on overseas bases.
“The United States gets the better end of the deal from its forward
deterrent posture than any other nation, and its value outweighs its
current costs,” Kathleen Hicks, Michael Green and Heather Conley
wrote in Foreign Policy magazine.
Trump says South Korea and Japan are too reliant on the U.S.
military presence there and should be paying for it, and that they
might need to develop nuclear programs to counter North Korea's
atomic belligerence - a statement that prompted Obama to say Trump
was ill-informed on international relations.
Former U.S. Navy chief Admiral Jonathan Greenert, a former commander
of the Japan-based U.S. Seventh Fleet, said it was not accurate to
suggest Japan and South Korea get a free ride from the United
States, since both countries are subsidizing their U.S. base
presence by billions of dollars a year each.
In the Middle East, Trump has said he would use U.S. forces to
"knock the hell out of ISIS," an acronym for Islamic State, and get
the forces out quickly, and create safe havens for Syrian refugees
so they do not come to the United States.
Dennis Ross, who served as a Middle East adviser to both Democratic
and Republican administrations, said Trump’s rhetoric suggested his
worldview was something of a throwback to political thinking that
drew a significant following among Americans before the U.S. entry
into World War Two.
"I don’t think that anyone would feel they could count on the United
States,” Ross said.
(Additional reporting by David Brunnstrom, Matt Spetalnick, Warren
Strobel and Richard Cowan; Editing by Richard Valdmanis, Howard
Goller and Peter Cooney)
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