Newt Gingrich: “The President just made a titanic foreign policy shift. The media missed it.”
Newt Gingrich, speaker of the House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999, and vice chair of the Trump transition team, has issued a statement on President Trump's foreign trip, and the important shift in foreign policy that it demonstrates.
You can read an edited version below:
"This week President Trump gave a historic speech in Saudi Arabia before the leaders of more than 50 Muslim-majority nations.
While the media focused on the ephemeral questions - whether the president would use campaign rhetoric in a diplomatic setting, or how the trip would affect the Obama legacy - they largely missed the real drama of the moment: a titanic shift in U.S. foreign policy occurring right before their eyes.
Trump stood before an unprecedented gathering of leaders to do something far more significant than utter a single phrase or undermine his predecessor’s record. He was there to rally the Muslim world, in his words, “to meet history’s great test” - defeating the forces of terrorism and extremism. He did so in a way that no American president ever had before. While extending a hand of friendship to Muslim nations, he also issued them a clear challenge: to take the lead in solving the crisis that has engulfed their region and spread across the planet. “Drive out the terrorists and extremists,” he urged them, or consign your peoples to futures of misery and squalor.
It was, he said, “a choice between two futures” - the path of civilization, or the path of evil and death.
“America is prepared to stand with you” in the fight against terrorism, Trump pledged. “But the nations of the Middle East cannot wait for American power to crush this enemy for them. The nations of the Middle East will have to decide what kind of future they want for themselves, for their countries, and for their children.”
Never before has an American president tried so clearly to unite the civilized world, including the nations of the Middle East and Africa, against the forces of terrorism. Never before has an American president issued so direct a challenge to those nations to do more in the fight. And never before has an American president so plainly put the ultimate responsibility for eradicating terrorism on the nations of the region.
That this decisive shift in U.S. foreign policy occurred on a foreign trip within the first four months of the administration is all the more impressive. Reagan didn’t take his first international trip until well into his second year. And unlike President Barack Obama’s early speech to the Muslim world in 2009, Trump backed up his words with action.
Journalists and Washington bureaucrats, who are so deeply embedded in the establishment that they can’t see out of it, may see Trump’s call to action as a distracting sideshow from a status quo they can’t imagine changing. And yet this week, it already has. Foreign leaders and the American people alike can see in this trip the core of a new, reality-based foreign policy."
You can read Newt's full statement here.
You can read an edited version below:
"This week President Trump gave a historic speech in Saudi Arabia before the leaders of more than 50 Muslim-majority nations.
While the media focused on the ephemeral questions - whether the president would use campaign rhetoric in a diplomatic setting, or how the trip would affect the Obama legacy - they largely missed the real drama of the moment: a titanic shift in U.S. foreign policy occurring right before their eyes.
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| "A choice between two futures." |
It was, he said, “a choice between two futures” - the path of civilization, or the path of evil and death.
“America is prepared to stand with you” in the fight against terrorism, Trump pledged. “But the nations of the Middle East cannot wait for American power to crush this enemy for them. The nations of the Middle East will have to decide what kind of future they want for themselves, for their countries, and for their children.”
Never before has an American president tried so clearly to unite the civilized world, including the nations of the Middle East and Africa, against the forces of terrorism. Never before has an American president issued so direct a challenge to those nations to do more in the fight. And never before has an American president so plainly put the ultimate responsibility for eradicating terrorism on the nations of the region.
That this decisive shift in U.S. foreign policy occurred on a foreign trip within the first four months of the administration is all the more impressive. Reagan didn’t take his first international trip until well into his second year. And unlike President Barack Obama’s early speech to the Muslim world in 2009, Trump backed up his words with action.
Journalists and Washington bureaucrats, who are so deeply embedded in the establishment that they can’t see out of it, may see Trump’s call to action as a distracting sideshow from a status quo they can’t imagine changing. And yet this week, it already has. Foreign leaders and the American people alike can see in this trip the core of a new, reality-based foreign policy."
You can read Newt's full statement here.
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