They certainly don’t all agree with everything Hillary Clinton believes or has done in her political life. But, in an unprecedented move, 75 retired ambassadors and other senior diplomats have signed a letter endorsing her for the presidency and ripping on Donald Trump, saying he should never be elected. Among the signatories is Thomas Pickering, who served at his first diplomatic post during the presidency of Harry Truman.
There are a number of neoconservatives like Ryan Crocker on the list who those of us with leftist foreign policy views will never be comfortable with. Nonetheless, their endorsement is another punch to the gut for The Donnie, whose own foreign policy pronouncements seem to consist of little more than outtakes from Rambo movie scripts.
The letter states, in part:
Very simply, this election is different from any election we can recall. One of the candidates—Donald J. Trump—is entirely unqualified to serve as President and Commander-in-chief. [...]
In his frequent statements about foreign countries and their citizens, from our closest friends to our most problematic competitors, Mr. Trump has expressed the most ignorant stereotypes of those countries; has inflamed their people; and has insulted our allies and comforted our enemies. [...]
We fear the damage that such ineptitude could cause in our closest relationships as well as the succor it might offer our enemies. By contrast, Hillary Clinton’s handling of foreign affairs has consistently sought to advance fundamental US interests with a deep grounding in the work of the many tens of thousands of career officers on whom our national security depends.
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Veteran Washington Post foreign policy reporter Karen de Young wrote that the letter was initiated by two members of the international consulting firm of McLarty Associates—Nelson Cunningham, a former Democratic adviser, and James Keith, a former ambassador to Malaysia. The letter, however, reached many signers by being passed along by friends in the retired foreign policy community. They expressed a wide variety of views about their reasons for signing. Crocker, for instance, called Trump “scary”:
Edward Marks, the Ronald Reagan administration’s ambassador to Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, said, “I am very upset by the fact that Trump as a candidate has formally said he will use torture [and] . . . collective punishment as elements of U.S. policy. Those two pull him outside the normal U.S. political boundaries.”
Others have already publicly indicated a preference for Clinton, including Laura Kennedy, Bush’s ambassador to Turkmenistan, who has volunteered for the Clinton campaign. Nic[h]olas Burns, undersecretary of state for Bush and a former ambassador to Greece, is rumored to be on a short list for Clinton’s secretary of state.
Burns has a lengthy résumé that includes time served in the Bill Clinton administration and as a director of the Center for a New American Security, whose co-founder in 2007 was Michèle Flournoy. She still sits on the group’s board of directors, served as undersecretary of defense for policy under Obama, was appointed to the president’s 12-member Intelligence Advisory Board in 2014, and is on Hillary Clinton’s short list for secretary of defense.
CNAS has a reputation as a centrist operation. But it’s also been called “a haven for hawkish Democrats.” And superhawks like Eliot Cohen as well, who was hired in October 2014. Cohen was an avid backer of the Iraq invasion in 2003 and was once described as “the most influential neoconservative in academe.” Flournoy gave him fulsome praise when he was hired by CNAS, at a time when she was still CEO of the organization.