“Bridging geopolitical gaps”
Walid Phares/Face Book
April 03/16
Phares to BBC: “Trump’s views on NATO and Saudi are bridging the gap with geopolitics”
In an interview on BBC TV Arabic, Dr Walid Phares the Foreign Policy advisor to Presidential candidate Donald Trump said “the views expressed by Mr Trump on the necessity to reorganize relations with NATO and with Saudi Arabia do not necessarily mean that the relations will be less, just the opposite, they will be more comprehensive and in the interest of the international campaign against terror and extremism. In short it is an attempt to bridge the gap with the current state of geopolitics”
Phares, who is the author of ‘The Lost Spring: US Foreign Policy in the Middle East and Catastrophes to Avoid,” said “regarding NATO, many of Mr Trump’s critics assume on their own that if elected President he will simply withdraw from NATO. This is an immature understanding of the new approach he is proposing. NATO was launched as a transatlantic alliance to contain the Soviet Union. Then after 1991, it remained as a Western security bloc. What is needed now is a strategic rethinking of the organization to maintain its role as defender of Europe, with an increasing participation of Europeans and a repositioning so that it can put more resources to confront the various emerging Jihadi threats to its south and south east.”
On Saudi Arabia’s relations with the US, Phares said “Riyadh and Washington need to reexamine the partnership in the goal of confronting the increasing regional and terror threats. In fact it is the Saudis who have been frustrated with the past few years of the Obama Foreign policies in the region. They are asking for this rethinking. Once the two parties will sit to reexamine the situation jointly, a stronger but more transparent realignment will reemerge.”
