Who is the architect of Trump’s ‘Korea bashing’

As U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump continues to urge U.S. allies to shoulder the full expenses of keeping U.S. troops in their countries, attention is drawn to who is instilling such a distorted view into Trump, a foreign affairs layman. In an interview with the Washington Post on March 21, he was asked about the sources of his foreign policy-related information. He said that he read and watched newspapers and television, indicating that he had never read any proper foreign affairs-related book.

At that time, he unveiled the list of his national security advisers, none of whom were top-notch experts. They were led by Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions. The other five were counter-terrorism expert Walid Phares, managing partner of Global Energy Capital Carter Page, energy consultant George Papadopoulos, former Defense Department inspector general Joe Schmitz, and former chief operating officer of Oracle Joseph Keith Kellogg. In addition, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, is also said to be playing an advisory role.

Sessions, a fourth-term Senator, was the first Senator to announce his support of Trump in February. A former Alabama Attorney General, he is called a military expert. He served in the Senate Armed Services Committee for 17 years and is now chairman of the committee’s Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, which deals with key U.S. military forces such as strategic nuclear weapons, intelligence warfare and ballistic missile development. Although South Korea’s Hyundai Motor Co. has a plant in his state, he told a Senate plenary session late last month that the South Koreas-U.S. free trade agreement “sounded pretty good, but their estimates were way off.” Reportedly, he was the architect of Trump’s “America First” doctrine announced on April 27.

Flynn is a counter-terrorism expert. He met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in December last year when he was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. In February, soon after his retirement, he told CNN strongly criticized Hillary Clinton for her e-mail scandal, saying he would have been put in jail if he had done the same. It is said that such remarks got him in Trump’s camp.

Phares is considered a foreign policy expert within Trumps’ camp, as he testified at a Congressional hearing on Middle East issues and advised Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012. Papadopoulos, a former advisor to Ben Carson, who competed with Trump for GOP candidacy, is cited as a White House special advisor if Trump gets elected.

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