Paul Wolfowitz Boards The Trump Train

So, Paul Wolfowitz is on the Trump Train and Lindsey Graham is now saying “we have got a president and a national security team that I’ve been dreaming of for eight years.”

“To liberals and other critics, Wolfowitz would be the last person they want Trump to listen to. Long a lightning rod because of the havoc unleashed by the Iraq invasion, Wolfowitz has never apologized for advocating the war, although he has said—and repeated in our conversation—that it was not carried out as he would have wanted it to be. In recent days he‘s jumped right back into the public debate, nudging President Trump from the pages of the Wall Street Journal to follow up his bombing strike in neighboring Syria with more aggressive action—and, he tells me, privately emailing with Trump Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and national security advisor H.R. McMaster, both longtime contacts since his Bush days, in hopes they will pursue a U.S. strategy of stepped-up engagement in the Middle East.

“I think there is a fantastic opportunity here. It’s only a first step, it’s only an opportunity,” he says of Trump’s surprise decision to unloose an American Tomahawk missile strike in Syria after President Bashar Assad’s regime again unleashed chemical weapons on civilians, a strike that turned Wolfowitz and many of his fellow neoconservatives into unlikely cheerleaders for the actions of an administration they had previously viewed as a threat. …”

But he’s now wondering whether the Trump presidency may offer more than he initially thought possible as Trump talks tough on North Korea, proclaims willingness to take further military action in the Middle East and seems to have marginalized anti-free trade, neo-isolationist advisers in favor of his more conventionally Republican national security team, led by CEO-turned-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Generals McMaster and Mattis, whose worldviews are very much shaped by their own participation in the Iraq war. …

Graham and his close ally Senator John McCain were issuing near-daily warnings about Trump’s foreign policy. Now, he says, “we have got a president and a national security team that I’ve been dreaming of for eight years.”

Could Trump’s first 100 days have gone any worse?

I expected the federal courts to create roadblocks on issues like the travel ban. I didn’t anticipate Trump throwing his foreign policy out the window to the delight of neocons.