Hillary gives strong foreign policy speech

NY Times wrote:Hillary Clinton plans to deliver a scorching assessment of Donald J. Trump’s foreign policy prescriptions on Thursday, casting her likely Republican rival as a threat to decades of bipartisan tenets of American diplomacy and declaring him unfit for the presidency.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign aides said the speech, which she will deliver in San Diego, would be the start of a persistent assault to portray a potential Trump presidency as a dangerous proposition that would weaken American alliances and embolden enemies.

The argument will include specific criticism of comments Mr. Trump has made about rethinking the United States’s support of NATO; his proposal to allow Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia to acquire nuclear weapons; his vow to temporarily bar Muslims from entering the United States; and his pledge to advance the use of torture and kill the families of suspected terrorists.

But Mrs. Clinton will also invoke her experiences as secretary of state, including in 2011 when she supported President Obama’s decision to send Navy SEALs on a raid in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden, to make the case that Mr. Trump does not have the temperament to make such decisions.

“Donald Trump is unlike any presidential candidate we’ve seen, maybe ever, certainly in decades, in that he does not cross the threshold of fitness for the job,” said Jake Sullivan, Mrs. Clinton’s top policy adviser, who helped draft the speech.

Mrs. Clinton will deliver the address on her final campaign swing before California holds its Democratic primary on Tuesday, when she is widely expected to reach the threshold of delegates needed to secure her party’s nomination. But in choosing to raise concerns about Mr. Trump’s foreign policy stances, she will be speaking to swing voters in general election battleground states who have doubts about a Trump presidency.

While Mrs. Clinton must be cautious not to alienate liberal Democrats who oppose some of her hawkish foreign policy stances, her campaign says national security could be the catalyst that drives independents and wavering Republicans to support her this fall.

Little Is Off Limits as Donald Trump Plans Attacks on Hillary Clinton’s Character MAY 16, 2016
Roughly 21 percent of independent voters and 32 percent of Republican voters said the most important issue this election was terrorism and national security, compared with 16 percent of Democrats, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll conducted last month. At the same time, 61 percent of registered voters said a Trump presidency would make America’s image in the world worse, according to the latest New York Times-CBS News poll.

“There are many Republicans concerned about this,” R. Nicholas Burns, an American ambassador to NATO during the George W. Bush administration who also served on Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, said of Mr. Trump. “They find his policy positions beyond the pale, and they’re also turned off by his vulgarity.”

To that end, the Clinton campaign and its outside advisers have embarked on an effort to reach out to prominent moderate Republicans who could endorse Mrs. Clinton, largely making the case for foreign policy sure-footedness.

Those calls have included to an aide of the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, and to Nicholas F. Brady, who served as secretary of the Treasury under Mr. Reagan and the elder Mr. Bush, with plans to reach out to James A. Baker III, a White House chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan and secretary of state under President George Bush.

In her debates with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Mrs. Clinton has defended her foreign policy decisions, including urging the Obama administration to join a NATO-led coalition to oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya and her 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq, which she later said was a mistake.