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WASHINGTON – Making long run army help to Ukraine contingent at the nation taking part in peace talks with Russia. Banning Chinese nationals from purchasing assets inside a 50-mile radius of U.S. executive constructions. Filling the national security sector with acolytes of Donald Trump.
One of a number of teams seeking to lay the groundwork for a 2d Trump management if the previous Republican president wins in November is out with a new coverage book that goals to articulate an “America First” national security time table.
The book, shared with The Associated Press earlier than its unencumber Thursday, is the newest effort from the America First Policy Institute. Like the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” the group is seeking to help Trump avoid the mistakes of 2016, when he entered the White House largely unprepared.
Beyond its policy efforts, the institute’s transition project has been working to draft dozens of executive orders and developing a training program for future political appointees. Heritage has been building an extensive personnel database and offering its own policy manuals.
Both groups stress they are independent from Trump’s campaign, which has repeatedly tried to distance itself from such efforts, insisting that the only Trump-backed policies are those the candidate articulates himself.
Still Fred Fleitz, the book’s editor, noted that he and retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who served for a time as Trump’s acting national security adviser and wrote several of the chapters, have been in frequent touch with the former president, soliciting feedback and discussing topics such as Ukraine at length.
“We hope this is where he is. We’re not speaking for him, but I think he will approve,” said Fleitz, who formerly served as the National Security Council’s chief of staff.
He said he hopes the book will serve as “a guidebook that will be an intellectual foundation for the America First approach” to national security “that’s easy to use.”
“It’s a grand strategy,” added Kellogg. “You don’t start with the policies first. You start with the strategies first. And that’s what we’ve done.”
The group casts the current trajectory of U.S. national security as a failure, thanks to a foreign policy establishment it accuses of having embraced an interventionist and “globalist” approach on the expense of America’s national pursuits.
While short on specifics, the book offers some guideposts to how a future Trump administration could approach foreign policy issues such as Russia’s war against Ukraine. Trump has said, that if elected, he would solve the conflict before Inauguration Day in January, but has declined to say how.
The book’s chapter on the war spends more time discussing how the conflict unfolded than how to end it. But it says the U.S. should make future military aid contingent on Ukraine participating in peace talks with Russia.
It predicts the Ukrainian army will likely lose ground over time and advises against the U.S. continuing “to send arms to a stalemate that Ukraine will eventually find difficult to win.” But once there is a peace agreement, it says the U.S. would continue to arm Ukraine as a deterrent to Russia.
The authors appear to endorse a framework wherein Ukraine “would not be asked to relinquish the goal of regaining all its territory” but would agree to diplomacy “with the understanding that this would require a future diplomatic breakthrough which probably will not occur before (Russian President Vladimir) Putin leaves office.”
It recognizes that Ukrainians “will have trouble accepting a negotiated peace that does not give back all of their territory or, at least for now, hold Russia responsible for the carnage it inflicted on Ukraine. Their supporters will also. But as Donald Trump said at the CNN town hall in 2023, ‘I want everyone to stop dying.’ That’s our view, too. It is a good first step.”
The book blames Democratic President Joe Biden for the battle and repeats Trump’s declare that Putin by no means would have invaded if Trump had been in office. Its major argument in protection of that declare is that Putin noticed Trump as robust and decisive. In truth, Trump cozied up to the Russian leader and used to be reluctant to problem him.
The bulk of the bankruptcy is spent laying out an every now and then misguided timeline of Biden’s dealing with of the battle.
Going ahead, it suggests Putin might be persuaded to sign up for peace talks if Biden and different NATO leaders be offering to eliminate NATO club for Ukraine for a longer duration. It means that the U.S. as an alternative identify a “long-term security architecture for Ukraine’s defense that focuses on bilateral security defense.” It supplies no rationalization of what this could entail. It additionally calls for putting levies on Russian power gross sales to pay for reconstruction in Ukraine.
The book is significant of Trump’s transition efforts in 2016, bemoaning a wide loss of preparation earlier than Trump took place of job.
“The tumultuous transition of 2016/2017 did not serve President Trump and the nation well and slowed the advancement and implementation of his agenda,” the authors wrote. For instance, they note that before the election, Democrat Hillary Clinton’s transition team had submitted more than 1,000 names for future security clearance. Trump’s team submitted just 25.
The group says it has identified roughly 1,200 national security-related positions that the next administration will need to fill and urges it to be ready on Day 1 with Trump loyalists who adhere to the “America First” approach.
“It’s not about retaliating against people or trying to politicize government positions. It’s about making sure government workers do their job and keep politics out of their work,” Fleitz said.
The book describes China because the country’s maximum urgent national security risk, desperate to displace the U.S. as the sector’s premier energy. It proposes a hawkish coverage that builds on approaches from each the Trump years and the Biden management with the purpose of constructing Beijing’s insurance policies “largely irrelevant to American life.”
It elevates economic concerns with China to those of national security and proposes a reciprocal approach that would deny Beijing access to U.S. markets in the same way American companies have been denied in China.
The book also recommends more rigorous screening of cyber and tech companies owned by U.S. adversaries, especially China, to make sure they are not collecting sensitive information. It also recommends that Chinese nationals be banned from buying property within a 50-mile radius of any U.S. government property.
It calls for visa restrictions on Chinese students wishing to study in the United States and for the banning of TikTok and other Chinese apps out of concerns for data privacy. Trump, however, has spoken out against a law that would force TikTok’s sale or block U.S. access.
The analysts’ views of what an “America First” coverage seems like steadily replicate the writers’ non-public focuses.
For Ellie Cohanim, a former Trump deputy State Department envoy charged with tracking and fighting antisemitism, “America First” seems so much like a buying groceries listing for the Israeli army.
The U.S. must rush Israel a squadron of “25 Lockheed Martin F-35s, one squadron of Boeing’s F-15 EX, and a squadron of Apache E attack helicopters,” Cohanim wrote.
The U.S. must give a few of its billions of greenbacks in army investment to Israel in Israeli forex so Israel can spend it at house, and Washington must push Arab states to foot the invoice for the rebuilding of Gaza and settle for Israel’s shelving any political talks with the Palestinians pending an indefinite duration of obligatory deradicalization for the Palestinian folks, she wrote.
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Colvin reported from New York. Associated Press creator Rebecca Santana contributed to this record.
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