September 29, 2016 | No Comments
How will the next president deal differently with the ongoing and increasingly-complicated conflict in Syria, former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden was asked Thursday morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
For Hillary Clinton, Hayden had an answer. For Donald Trump, all the retired general could muster as a response to “Morning Joe” panelist Mike Barnicle was “I don’t know.”
“If it’s a Trump administration, Mike, I just don’t know,” Hayden told Barnicle, a regular on MSNBC and a former columnist. “And there’s no real coherence other than we’re going to be really tough, and frankly he doesn’t seem to be very sensitive to the emotional needs of any of our allies.”
Hayden is one of many former GOP national security officials who been loudly critical of Trump’s policy proposals on national security and foreign policy. He has called Trump’s proposals “incoherent” and said Trump would “create a crisis in civil-military relationships,” adding that the Manhattan billionaire would “strain and test the fabric of our civilian military control.” He was among the 50 Republican signatories to a letter warning that Trump “would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”
As he has been in the past, Hayden took a much more positive view of Clinton’s proposals. He suggested that the former secretary of state might be able to undo some of the damage Hayden alleges has been done by President Barack Obama’s weakness in dealing with Russia, the Syrian regime’s chief supporter, and his unwillingness to be more aggressive early in the conflict.
“I think with Secretary Clinton, she begins to buy back trust. She will be more forward-leaning in this. She was more forward-leaning in the administration. She’s mentioned safe zones. She’s mentioned no-fly zones. Both of which are much harder to do now,” Hayden said. “Just a strip along the Turkish border and another strip along the Jordanian border where you can actually provide some sort of safe haven and then you simply say to the other players, don’t go there. We are going to defend these people in these Zones.”