Susan Rice panned President Trump’s foreign policy, saying he puts his best interests ahead of what is best for the country.
Rice, who served as President Barack Obama’s national security adviser from 2013 to 2017, called Trump’s foreign policy contradictory and self-serving in an op-ed for the New York Times on Monday.
“The unifying theme of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy is simply to service his domestic politics,” she said.
“Mr. Trump welcomes and encourages Russia, a hostile adversary, to interfere in our elections so long as the manipulations benefit him. He discards decades of bipartisan policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to curry favor with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and thus right-wing political support. The president follows a basic, if unorthodox, playbook: He and his party over our country,” Rice wrote.
Rice also cited the administration’s actions toward Cuba and Venezuela as more evidence, which she said are aimed only at “dishing up red meat to energize the Republican base.”
The Trump administration has walked back a deal allowing Cuban baseball players to play in the U.S. and imposed sanctions against the country that Rice said will drive the nation’s leaders closer to Russia and China. Though Rice credited Trump for backing Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, she questioned the president’s motives. She said if Trump truly wanted to help Venezuelans he would grant those already in the U.S. temporary protected status, but that would anger anti-immigrant voters.
“Plenty of presidents before Mr. Trump have made serious, sometimes catastrophic foreign policy mistakes; but, few, if any, decided almost every aspect of foreign policy on the basis of what would help him get re-elected,” she wrote.
