50 G.O.P. Officials Warn Donald Trump Would Put Nation’s Security ‘at Risk’
By DAVID E. SANGER
AUG. 8, 2016
Fifty of the nation’s most senior Republican national security officials, many of them former top aides or cabinet members for President George W. Bush, have signed a letter declaring that Donald J. Trump “lacks the character, values and experience” to be president and “would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”
Mr. Trump, the officials warn, “would be the most reckless president in American history.”
The letter says Mr. Trump would weaken the United States’ moral authority and questions his knowledge of and belief in the Constitution. It says he has “demonstrated repeatedly that he has little understanding” of the nation’s “vital national interests, its complex diplomatic challenges, its indispensable alliances and the democratic values” on which American policy should be based. And it laments that “Mr. Trump has shown no interest in educating himself.”
“None of us will vote for Donald Trump,” the letter states, though it notes later that many Americans “have doubts about Hillary Clinton, as do many of us.”
Among the most prominent signatories are Michael V. Hayden, a former director of both the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency; John D. Negroponte, who served as the first director of national intelligence and then deputy secretary of state; and Robert B. Zoellick, another former deputy secretary of state, United States trade representive and, until 2012, president of the World Bank. Two former secretaries of homeland security, Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff, also signed, as did Eric S. Edelman, who served as Vice President Dick Cheney’s national security adviser and as a top aide to Robert M. Gates when he was secretary of defense.
Document: A Letter From G.O.P. National Security Officials Opposing Donald Trump Robert Blackwill and James Jeffrey, two key strategists in Mr. Bush’s National Security Council, and William H. Taft IV, a former deputy secretary of defense and ambassador to NATO, also signed.
The letter underscores the continuing rupture in the Republican Party, but particularly within its national security establishment. Many of those signing it had declined to add their names to a similar open letter released in March. But a number said in recent interviews that they changed their minds once they heard Mr. Trump invite Russia to hack into Mrs. Clinton’s email server — a sarcastic remark, he said later — and say that he would check to see how much NATO members contributed to the alliance before sending forces to help stave off a Russian attack.
Yet the signatories are unlikely to impress Mr. Trump or the largely lesser-known foreign policy team he has assembled around him: He has said throughout his campaign that he intends to upend Republican foreign policy orthodoxy on everything from trade to Russia. And many of the aides who signed the letter were active in developing the plan to invade Iraq or managing its aftermath, which Mr. Trump has described as a “disaster.”
A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Missing from the signatories are any of the living Republican former secretaries of state: Henry Kissinger, George P. Shultz, James A. Baker III, Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
Mr. Trump met with Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Baker several months ago, and “I came away with a lot of knowledge,” he told The New York Times in a July 20 interview. But neither of the two — who represent different foreign policy approaches within the party — has said if he will endorse Mr. Trump.
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