By his own admission, former White House strategist Steve Bannon doesn’t know much about foreign policy. But he knows one thing for sure: Every foreign headache for President Donald Trump’s administration is somebody else’s fault.
“The geniuses in the foreign policy elite, what they left on President Trump, is essentially the Bay of Pigs in Venezuela, the Cuban missile crisis in Korea, and the Vietnam War in Afghanistan, all at one time,” Bannon said Monday in a talk sponsored by the Hudson Institute. “President Trump didn’t do this. The deplorables that voted for President Trump didn’t do this. This is the geniuses of both political parties.”
Bannon made his comments at a Hudson conference titled “Countering Violent Extremism: Qatar, Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood”—an event at which Bannon was somehow a keynote speaker, alongside actual heavyweights like former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Gen. David Petraeus. The privately funded event was staged to discuss the problem of state-funded terror in Qatar.
Bannon’s presence at the event raised eyebrows when it was announced, as the Trump administration has largely taken a neutral stance in the quarrels between Qatar and its regional neighbors. McClatchy reported Monday morning that a company with close ties to Bannon was recently hired by the United Arab Emirates to launch a social media campaign against Qatar—a report Bannon characterized as “the Qataris throwing that up to try to chop-block me before I come.”
But although Bannon’s speech touched on Qatar, his focus was a vague and meandering defense of Trump’s foreign policy and a harangue against the Washington and global establishment he accused of leaving the world in a such a sorry state.
“I’m a huge believer in the common sense and decency and judgment of what we call the common man,” Bannon said. “We were in Fairhope, Alabama, a few weeks ago for Judge Moore in an old barn with a sawdust floor. And I said at the time, I would take the first 100 people that came to that rally than the top 100 partners at Goldman Sachs. I want to reiterate that I would take the top 100 to form our foreign policy than the first 100 at [the World Economic Forum in] Davos.”
Bannon’s interlocutor, Hudson senior fellow and former ambassador to Pakistan Husain Haqqani, frequently attempted to steer Bannon back to concrete answers about the Trump administration’s strategy in Qatar and the Middle East at large, and at one point objected to Bannon’s calling the New York Times “the opposition party.”
“I’d have to stand up for the New York Times; they’re not the opposition party,” Haqqani said. “They’re people who disagree with you, just as you disagree with them, right?”
“I couldn’t disagree more, but that’s a debate for another time,” Bannon replied.
Bannon repeatedly emphasized Trump’s June trip to the Middle East as a highlight of his foreign policy, arguing that it showed the president was neither an isolationist nor an Islamophobe and had spurred the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council to crack down on the misbehavior of Qatar.
“I’m not a foreign policy expert by far, but I took a very hard line in that,” Bannon said. “I thought the UAE and the Egyptians and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia had a well-thought-through plan, that we’re going to stop the financing of radical Islamic terrorism, that it has to be cut off 100 percent. And if we cut off funding, cut off support, we can really have a chance to eradicate it from the face of the earth, which is what President Trump laid out to the American people he was going to do.”
Bannon’s most specific arguments weren’t about foreign policy at all, but about recent speeches by George W. Bush and John McCain that criticized Trump before Haqqani brought the event to a close.
“Well, the foreign policy elite of Washington, D.C., that asked me to interview you today told me that when you start talking about issues other than those that relate to this conference I should bring this to an end, so I’m going to bring this to an end right now,” Haqqani said. “Steve Bannon, thank you for doing this.”
