Trump warns on Arab oil imports unless allies fight or fund Isis war

Donald Trump, the Republican presidential frontrunner, has said that if elected, he might halt purchases of oil from Saudi Arabia and other Arab allies unless they commit ground troops to the fight against the Islamic State or "substantially reimburse" the United States for combating the militant group, which threatens their stability.

“If Saudi Arabia was without the cloak of American protection,” Trump said, during a 100-minute interview on foreign policy, spread over two phone calls, “I don’t think it would be around.”

He also said he would be open to allowing Japan and South Korea to build their own nuclear arsenals rather than depend on the US nuclear umbrella for their protection against North Korea and China. If the US "keeps on its path, its current path of weakness, they're going to want to have that anyway, with or without me discussing it", Trump said.

And he added he would be willing to withdraw US forces from both Japan and South Korea if they did not substantially increase their contributions to the costs of housing and feeding those troops.

Trump also said he would seek to renegotiate many fundamental treaties with US allies, possibly including a 56-year-old security pact with Japan, which he described as one-sided. In Trump’s world view, the US has become a diluted power, and the main mechanism by which he would re-establish its central role is via economic bargaining.

He approached almost every current international conflict through the prism of a negotiation, even when he was imprecise about the strategic goals he sought. He again faulted the Obama administration's handling of the negotiations with Iran last year – "It would have been so much better if they had walked away a few times," he said – but offered only one new idea about how he would change its content: ban Iran's trade with North Korea.

Trump struck similar themes on the future of Nato, which he called "unfair, economically, to us", and said he was open to an alternative organisation focused on counter-terrorism. He argued that the best way to halt China's placement of military airfields and anti-aircraft batteries on reclaimed islands in the South China Sea was to threaten its access to US markets.

"We have tremendous economic power over China," he argued. "And that's the power of trade." He made no mention of Beijing's capability for economic retaliation. Trump's views, as he explained them, fit nowhere into the recent history of the Republican Party: he is not in the internationalist camp of George H W Bush, nor does he favour George W Bush's call to make it the mission of the United States to spread democracy around the world. He agreed with a suggestion that his ideas might best be summed up as "America First".

“Not isolationist, but I am America First,” he said. “I like the expression.”

He said he was willing to reconsider traditional US alliances if partners were not willing to pay, in cash or troop commitments, for the presence of US forces around the world. “We will not be ripped off anymore,” he said.

In the past week, the bombings in Brussels and an accelerated war against Islamic State have shifted the focus of the campaign trail conversation back to questions of how the candidates would defend the United States and what kind of diplomacy they would pursue around the world.

Trump explained his thoughts in concrete and easily digestible terms, but they appeared to reflect little consideration for potential consequences. Much as he treats political rivals and interviewers, he personalised how he would engage nations, suggesting his approach would depend partly on “how friendly they’ve been toward us”, not just on national interests or alliances.

At no point did he express any belief that US forces deployed on military bases around the world were by themselves valuable to the United States, though Republican and Democratic administrations have for decades argued that they are essential to deterring military adventurism, protecting commerce and gathering intelligence.

Unpredictability

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Richard Nixon

, Trump emphasised the importance of “unpredictability” for a US president, arguing that the country’s traditions of democracy and openness had made its actions too easy for adversaries and allies alike to foresee. “I wouldn’t want them to know what my real thinking is,” he said about how far he was willing to take the confrontation over the islands in the South China Sea, which are remote and uninhabited but extend China’s control over a major maritime thoroughfare. But, he added, “I would use trade, absolutely, as a bargaining chip.”

Asked when he thought US power had been at its peak, Trump reached back 116 years to the turn of the 20th century, the era of another unconventional Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, who ended up leaving the party. His favourite figures in US history, he said, include two generals, Douglas MacArthur and George S Patton – though he insisted that, unlike MacArthur, he would not advocate the use of nuclear weapons except as a last resort.

New advisers

Trump denied that he had had trouble recruiting senior members of the foreign policy establishment to advise his campaign. “Many of them are tied up with contracts working for various networks,” he said, like Fox or CNN. He disclosed the names of three advisers in addition to five he announced earlier in the week: retired Maj Gen Gary L Harrell, Maj Gen Bert K Mizusawa and retired Rear Admiral Charles R Kubic. Asked about the briefings he receives and books he has read about foreign policy, he said his main source of information was newspapers, “including yours”.

Until recently, Trump’s foreign policy pronouncements have largely come through slogans: “Take the oil”, “Build a wall” and ban Muslim immigrants, at least temporarily. But as he has pulled closer to capturing the nomination, he has been called on to elaborate.

Pressed about his call to "take the oil" controlled by Islamic State in the Middle East, Trump acknowledged this would require deploying ground troops, something he does not favour. "We should've taken it, and we would've had it," he said, referring to the years in which the United States occupied Iraq. "Now we have to destroy the oil."

Trump did not rule out spying on allies, including foreign leaders like Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, whose mobile phone was apparently a target of the National Security Agency. President Barack Obama said the US would no longer target her phone but made no such commitments about the rest of Germany, or Europe.

"I'm not sure that I would want to be talking about that," Trump said. "You understand what I mean by that." Trump was not impressed with Merkel's handling of the migrant crisis: "Germany is being destroyed by Merkel's naivete, or worse," he said. He suggested Germany and the Gulf nations should pay for the "safe zones" he wants to set up in Syria for refugees, and for protecting them once built.

Trump painted a bleak picture of the US as a diminished world force, an opinion he has held since the late 1980s, when he placed ads in the New York Times and other papers calling for Japan and Saudi Arabia to spend more money on their own defence.

Threat to Saudis

Trump’s new threat to cut off oil purchases from the Saudis was part of a broader complaint about the US’s Arab allies, which many in the Obama administration share: that they frequently look to the US to police the Middle East, without putting their own troops at risk. “We defend everybody,” Trump said. “When in doubt, come to the US. We’ll defend you. In some cases free of charge.”

But his rationale for abandoning the region was that “the reason we’re in the Middle East is for oil, and all of a sudden we’re finding out that there’s less reason to be there now”. He made no mention of the risks of withdrawal – that it would encourage Iran to dominate the Gulf, that the presence of US troops is part of Israel’s defence, and that US air and naval bases in the region are key collection points for intelligence and bases for drones and special operations forces.

Trump seemed less comfortable on some topics. He called the US “obsolete” in terms of cyberweaponry, although the nation’s capabilities are generally considered on the cutting edge. In the morning interview, asked if he would seek a two-state or a one-state solution between the Israelis and the Palestinians, he said: “I’m not saying anything. What I’m going to do is, you know, I specifically don’t want to address the issue because I would love to see if a deal could be made.”

But in the evening, saying he had been rushed earlier, Trump reverted to a position he outlined last Monday before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby. "Basically, I support a two-state solution on Israel," he said. "But the Palestinian Authority has to recognise Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state."

In his discussion of nuclear weapons – which he said he had learned about from an uncle, John G Trump, who served on the faculty of MIT and died in 1985 – Trump seemed fixated on the large nuclear stockpiles amassed in the cold war. While he referred briefly to North Korean and Pakistani arsenals, he said nothing about a danger that is a cause of great consternation among international leaders: small nuclear weapons that could be fashioned by terrorists.

In criticising the Iran nuclear deal, Trump expressed particular outrage at how the roughly $150 billion released to Iran was being spent. "Did you notice they're buying from everybody but the United States?" he said. Told that sanctions under US law still prevent most US companies from doing business with Iran, Trump said: "So, how stupid is that? We give them the money and we now say, 'Go buy Airbus instead of Boeing', right?"

But Trump, who has been pushed to demonstrate a basic command of international affairs, insisted voters should not doubt his foreign policy fluency. "I do know my subject," he said. – (New York Times service)