Trump to unveil plan to fight IS

JERSEY CITY: Donald Trump was set to declare an end to nation building if elected president, replacing it with what aides described as “foreign policy realism” focused

JERSEY CITY: Donald Trump was set to declare an end to nation building if elected president, replacing it with what aides described as “foreign policy realism” focused on destroying the Islamic State and other extremist organisations.

HT Image

In a speech the Republican presidential nominee was to deliver on Monday in Ohio, Trump was expected to argue that the US needs to work with anyone that shares that mission, regardless of other ideological and strategic disagreements.

Any country that wants to work with the country to defeat “radical Islamic terrorism” will be a US ally, he was expected to say. “Mr Trump’s speech will explain that while we can’t choose our friends, we must always recognise our enemies,” Trump senior policy adviser Stephen Miller said on Sunday.

Trump on Monday is also expected to outline a new immigration policy proposal under which the US would stop issuing visas in any case where it cannot perform adequate screenings.

It will be the latest version of a policy that began with Trump’s unprecedented call to temporarily bar foreign Muslims from entering the country — a religious test that was criticised across party lines as un-American. Following a massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June, Trump introduced a new standard.

Trump is also expected to propose creating a new, ideological test for admission to the country that would assess a candidate’s stances on issues like religious freedom, gender equality and gay rights. Through questionnaires, searching social media, interviewing friends and family or other means, applicants would be vetted to see whether they support American values like tolerance and pluralism.

The candidate is also expected to call in the speech for declaring in explicit terms that, like during the Cold War, the nation is in an ideological conflict with radical Islam. On the eve of the speech, clearly angered by news reports that he has grown depressed and sullen over his fading presidential prospects, Trump issued some of his sharpest attacks on the media.

“I am not running against Crooked Hillary Clinton,” the Republican presidential candidate said in a speech late Saturday in Fairfield, Connecticut. “I’ m running against the crooked media.”

Trump seemed particularly upset with a New York Times article that quotes unnamed associates of his as saying that in private “his mood is often sullen and erratic.”