Indiana Senator Joe Donnelly says he’s concerned the Trump Administration is turning toward an isolationist foreign policy.
Donnelly says he’s troubled by President Trump’s confrontational meetings with German and French leaders at last week’s NATO and G-7 summits. He says both countries have been staunch American allies for decades, and says it’s “almost unexplainable” that Trump has made a point of publicly slamming Germany in particular over trade policies and its contributions to NATO.
But Donnelly says more troubling than the interpersonal relationships are shifts in U-S policy. The Democratic senator notes he advocated a more muscular approach in Ukraine and Syria than President Obama, urging that the U-S arm the Ukrainians and create “safe zones” within Syria for refugees. He says Trump has dialed back U-S involvement in those regions further. Doing so, he says, has left a power vacuum to be filled by Russia, which he warns doesn’t have American interests at heart, and in some cases has actively worked to complicate matters for the U-S.
