Paul Wolfowitz: "I might have to vote for Hillary Clinton"
Paul Wolfowitz, the former World Bank president and deputy defense secretary under President George W. Bush, joins a long line of Republicans abandoning the party’s nominee to consider voting for Hillary Clinton in November.
“I wish there were somebody I could be comfortable voting for,” Wolfowitz told international news outlet Spiegel Online in an interview published Friday. “I might have to vote for Hillary Clinton, even though I have big reservations about her.”
Wolfowitz, known as one of the architects of the Iraq War, cited his concerns with Trump’s foreign policy as a reason he won’t cast his ballot for the billionaire in the general election.
Asked if he believed Trump was a “security risk” to the U.S., Wolfowitz responded: “Yes, he is.”
“He says he admires Putin, that Saddam Hussein was killing terrorists, that the Chinese were impressive because they were tough on Tiananmen Square,” he added. “That is pretty disturbing.”
“I certainly think it’s important to speak up and say how unacceptable he is,” Wolfowitz went on. “I’m always more than willing to do that.”
The only way anyone could be “comfortable” with Trump’s foreign policy tenets, Wolfowitz noted, “is to think he doesn’t really mean anything he says.”
“Our security depends on having good relationships with our allies. Trump mainly shows contempt for them,” he said. “And he seems to be unconcerned about the Russian aggression in Ukraine. By doing this he tells them that they can go ahead and do what they are doing. That is dangerous.”
Wolfowitz called Trump’s proposals to abandon any U.S.-led efforts for regime-change or nation-building a “huge mistake.”
“Peaceful political change has been enormously successful in the past years in Eastern European countries as well as in countries like South Korea, South Africa, Chile and Indonesia,” he said. “However, if possible, the use of force is something to avoid except in cases where genocide is threatened, like Bosnia or Libya or with regimes that threaten our security, like the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.”
But, he cautioned, “after a regime is removed, however, it is dangerous to leave a security vacuum. This is where we failed in Libya and in Iraq.”
Wolfowitz also discussed in the wide-ranging interview what he believed were mistakes of the Bush administration in the Iraq war.
“[Head of the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq] Bremer and the State Department decided that what was needed was an occupation authority,” he said. “I thought that was a mistake. We came to liberate the country. Then we occupied it. To many Iraqis, it was a complete contradiction. It made them suspect our intentions and it gave us the same image as the Israelis.”
He also criticized President Obama for his failure to intervene in Syria’s civil war.
“Doing nothing in the face of the slaughter in Syria is not only shameful, it is unrealistic,” he said. “This approach leaves Syria as a broken country and a breeding ground for extremists for decades.”