On his first trip abroad as President, Donald Trump may be happy to have left Washington, but the cloud he is under will travel with him. And while every preparation has been made to ensure nothing will go awry, there is every reason to fear it will.
Trump’s boasting to Russian officials about the “great intel” he had on a plot by Islamic State underlines just how hazardous this excursion is. His shocking indiscretion seems to have sprung largely from a desire to impress his visitors.
There has been comforting talk of a foreign policy “firewall”, thanks to the influence of the so-called “axis of adults”: Defence Secretary Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser HR McMaster. The result has been a supposedly traditional Republican foreign policy emerging, distant from Trump’s campaign rhetoric.
Read the article in The Australian (from The Economist).