While many pundits panned Donald Trump's
foreign policy speech on Wednesday as contradictory and evoking the "America First" isolationist stance of many during World War II, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan writes that Trump is right on the money.
"This may be rankest heresy to America's elites, but Trump outlines a foreign policy past generations would have recognized as common sense: Look out for your own country and your own people first," Buchanan writes in his latest column published at
WND.com.
Buchanan called Trump "gutsy and brazen" to use the "America First" phrase, "considering the demonization of the great anti-war movement of 1940-41, which was backed by the young patriots John F. Kennedy and his brother Joe, Gerald Ford and Sargent Shriver, and President Hoover and Alice Roosevelt."
Not only does it make sense for the United States to stop overextending itself abroad, Buchanan said, it is also smart to try to talk to Russian President Vladimir Putin rather than call him names.
Lindsey Graham tweeted after the speech that "Ronald Reagan must be rolling over in his grave," but Buchanan, who served as Reagan's communications director, said "the Gipper was always seeking a way to get the Russians to negotiate. He leaped at the chance for a summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva and Reykjavik."
Buchanan also countered critics of Trump's speech who said he called for a military buildup on one hand while seeking to avoid war on the other.
Reagan did exactly the same thing, Buchanan said, and it allowed him to negotiate nuclear arms reduction with the Soviets from a position of strength.
"Military intervention for reasons of ideology or nation building is not an Eisenhower or Nixon or Reagan tradition. It is not a Republican tradition," Buchanan said. "It is a Bush II-neocon deformity, an aberration that proved disastrous for the United States and the Middle East."
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