GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump said that if Middle Eastern allies want the U.S. to police the region, they should pay it.
“We are not being reimbursed for our protection of many of the countries … including Saudi Arabia,” Trump told the New York Times in a foreign policy interview published Saturday.
The United States takes “tremendous monetary hits on protecting [other] countries,” Trump said referring to Saudi Arabia specifically and the world generally.
“We lose, everywhere. We lose monetarily, everywhere,” Trump said.
Gulf allies who refuse to send their own ground troops to fight the self-proclaimed Islamic State should pay for U.S. military protection and intervention, Trump said. If they don’t, the U.S. should cut them off.
Without U.S. help, “Saudi Arabia wouldn’t exist for very long. It would be, you know, a catastrophic failure without our protection,” Trump said. “And I’m trying to figure out, why is it that we aren’t going in and saying, at a minimum … ‘I’m sorry folks … under no circumstances can we continue to do this.'”
Trump blamed much of the country’s budget deficit on America’s role as world policemen.
“One of the reasons we’re a debtor nation: We spend so much on the military, but the military isn’t for us,” he said. “The military is to be policeman for other countries.”
Trump said with new oil producers emerging, the pursuit of alternative energy sources and new technology allowing the U.S. to produce even more domestically, America doesn’t need the Middle East anymore.
“The beautiful thing about oil is that, you know, we’re really getting close, because of fracking, and because of new technology, we’re really in a position that we weren’t in, you know, years ago, and the reason we’re in the Middle East is for oil,” he said. “And all of a sudden we’re finding out that there’s less reason to be.”
Still, Trump says that Presidents George W. Bush and Obama erred in not seizing Iraqi oil after invading that country in 2003. He said now it is too late to do so.
“When we left I said, ‘Take the oil,'” Trump said.
The real estate mogul conceded that with the rise of the Islamic State the U.S. can’t disengage from the Middle East. He spread the blame for that problem.
If “our presidents would have just gone to the beach and enjoyed the [region’s] ocean and the sun, we would’ve been much better off in the Middle East,” he said. “We’re far worse off today than we were 15 years ago or 10 years ago in the Middle East.”
