Despite saying that he would bring the best advisers into his administration if elected, Donald Trump haltingly named three national security experts he trusts during Thursday night’s presidential debate.
“I think Richard Haass is excellent. I have a lot of respect for him. I think General Keane is excellent. I think that there are — I like Colonel Jacobs very much. I see him. I know him. I have many people that I think are really excellent but in the end it’s going to be my decision,” Trump said during the Fox News debate.
But at least one of those experts has said that Trump’s strategy to defeat the Islamic State by taking out their access to oil is an oversimplification of a very complex problem.
“When you take the oil, that’s the beginning of the end of ISIS,” Trump said last year, reiterating what he’s commonly said is his strategy to take out the terrorist group.
“If you took ISIS’ oil, that would not stop them. It’s not their only source of revenue,” retired Gen. Jack Keane, a former vice chief of staff of the Army, said during a Fox Business interview in August. “It would be a setback, but it would not stop them.”
In fact, Keane went on to say that Ben Carson, who did not attend Thursday’s debate and is dropping out of the race, actually gets closer to solving the problem by saying he would take away the Islamic State’s territory, which would hurt its recruiting.
Keane told the Washington Examiner that he has never spoken to Trump, but assumed he got advice from Keane’s congressional testimony and TV appearances.
“I’ve never had a discussion with him on any subject whatsoever, but I would,” Keane said.
The retired four-star general said he had met with seven presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle and that he felt it was a “duty” to provide advice when asked, but that the Trump campaign had never reached out to him.
“I would be more than happy to speak to Mr. Trump if that’s what he desired. They have the means to get ahold of me,” he said.
Trump also named Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, as someone he trusts.
Haass did brief Trump once, but has also briefed several other presidential contenders and can not make an endorsement or exclusively advise any one candidate, said Iva Zoric, a spokeswoman for CFR.
“What he has done this year as in previous campaigns is offer briefings to all the candidates (both Democratic and Republican) on foreign policy issues,” Zoric said in a statement. “He has also invited all the candidates to speak at CFR and several of them — Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Jim Webb, and Jeb Bush — have done so.”
Trump’s third national security expert is retired Col. Jack Jacobs, a Medal of Honor recipient during the Vietnam War and analyst for MSNBC. When Trump named him as one of advisers during an appearance on “Meet the Press” last year, Jacobs responded that he had met Trump at a handful of fundraisers, but had never talked about foreign policy with him at these events or otherwise.
Instead, Jacobs told Mother Jones that he assumed the businessman was going off of his appearances on TV.
“I talk about a wide variety of things on television,” Jacobs said. “Who knows what anybody absorbs? But I’m delighted to hear that he’s a fan of MSNBC.”
