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Top Experts Confounded by Advisers to Donald Trump


By ALAN RAPPEPORTMARCH 22, 2016


WASHINGTON — When Donald J. Trump finally began to reveal the names of his foreign policy advisers during a swing through Washington this week, the Republican foreign policy establishment looked at them and had a pretty universal reaction: Who?



Many foreign policy experts have been wondering for months about who might be counseling the leading Republican presidential candidate, who has unfurled such provocative proposals as reinstating waterboarding and barring foreign Muslims from entering the country.

Mr. Trump has promised to hire the world’s brightest minds to make up for his lack of political experience, but his new foreign policy team left some of the country’s leading experts in the field scratching their heads as they tried to identify his choices. And on a day when the Islamic State struck a blow to a major European capital, Mr. Trump’s new team faced additional scrutiny.

“Many of us who have held senior positions in previous Republican administrations have been asking each other if we have ever heard of them, and pretty much everybody is turning to Google to see what they can find,” said Mike Green, a foreign policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who served on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council.

While most presidential campaigns have been offering lists of their high-profile advisers, Mr. Trump had repeatedly declined to reveal his, offering only that he developed his views about world affairs from listening to experts on television, and that he liked to come up with his own ideas.


That changed on Monday when, in an interview with The Washington Post editorial board, he shared the names of five advisers who signed up to be on his team: Joseph E. Schmitz, Gen. Keith Kellogg, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos and Walid Phares.

But in many cases, even Google offered little but outdated biographies of Mr. Trump’s new cast of experts, and on Tuesday, most of them proved elusive when sought for interviews.

Perhaps the most prominent of the group is Mr. Phares, who is regularly accused by Muslim civil rights groups of being Islamophobic and of fear-mongering about the spread of Sharia law. He took to Fox News on Tuesday to discuss the terrorist attacks in Brussels and warned, “Basically, we don’t know who’s jihadist and who’s not,” but would not say what advice he had been giving the campaign.

The rest are remaining low profile. There was no record of employment for Mr. Kellogg, a retired Army lieutenant general who helped run the coalition provisional authority in Iraq from 2003 to 2004. He most recently worked for a defense contractor that had no information on his whereabouts.

Mr. Papadopoulos, a London-based energy analyst who lists his participation in the 2012 Model United Nations on his résumé, was traveling, and his employer said he was unreachable.

And others could say little about how they were helping Mr. Trump. None have spoken to their new boss.

Mr. Page, a managing partner at Global Energy Capital, who will be advising Mr. Trump on energy policy and Russia, said that he had just been sending policy memos to the Trump campaign and that the details of his role remained unclear. Mr. Page did not comment when asked if he supported Mr. Trump’s views on torture or the moratorium on Muslim immigration.

Some foreign policy experts have been wary about joining Mr. Trump out of concern that they will have to answer for controversial policies that he sometimes seems to develop on the fly. Although there is potential upside to signing up with a candidate who is on the rise, there are also risks to reputation.


“It’s always surprising when a member of our relatively tightly knit community is willing to sacrifice their reputation to stand with someone like Donald Trump,” said Danielle Pletka, senior vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Peter D. Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University, signed a letter from top Republican national security leaders objecting to Mr. Trump earlier this month and said he was confounded by the advisers that the candidate ultimately came up with.

“I think that normally, the front-runner for a Republican presidential campaign, by March of the campaign year, has assembled a team that is more distinguished than this,” said Dr. Feaver, who was a national security adviser in the George W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. “I think this suggests that he might be straining to assemble a list.”

Dr. Feaver said that while he had heard of Mr. Phares and Mr. Schmitz, who was an inspector general of the Defense Department during Mr. Bush’s administration, the assortment of backgrounds did not have a coherent theme.

Also curious was the fact that Mr. Trump would choose two people who played active roles in the Iraq war. Mr. Trump regularly tells voters that he was against the war, and he has accused Mr. Bush of lying about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Top foreign policy experts have been increasingly worried about Mr. Trump’s vision for the United States’ role in the world, and many of the prominent figures in the administrations of George Bush and George W. Bush have denounced Mr. Trump. The prominence of those who signed the open letter, which included Robert B. Zoellick, a former World Bank president, and Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of homeland security, dwarfs the little-known experts that Mr. Trump has turned to.

Despite questions about the team, the Trump campaign contends that this is just the beginning of a hiring spree. Sam Clovis, a senior policy adviser to Mr. Trump, said new hires were being briefed on Mr. Trump’s foreign policy positions and were asked to be sure that they felt comfortable with where he stood.

Mr. Clovis also pushed back against the idea that it had been hard for Mr. Trump to find good help and said the campaign had been looking for people with “real world” and military experience as opposed to retreads that other candidates relied on.

“These are people who work for a living,” Mr. Clovis said. “If you’re looking for show ponies, you’re coming to the wrong stable.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/23/us/politics/donald-trump-foreign-policy-advisers.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur