What’s Donald Trump planning? 1987 advertisement offers clues
Foreign policy experts say US president-elect reprised old themes in election campaign
With a confused world speculating about Donald Trump’s foreign policy intentions, past statements by the US president-elect are being scrutinised for clues as to which of his radical pledges might come true.
Despite having no track record in diplomacy, Trump has repeatedly made his world view clear, starting long before he entered the presidential race as a political outsider last year.
As long as you are paying attention to the issues you raise, you don’t have to necessarily honour every word
In the past 30 years, some things about Trump have never changed, according to Nicholas Burns, a former undersecretary of state for political affairs under George W. Bush: his denigration of Japan, Saudi Arabia and Nato allies and his praise for strongman leaders.
“You do have to pay attention to what he says. It is indication of how he’s going to go,” said Burns, now professor of the practice of international relations at Harvard Kennedy School. “I take him seriously.”
In the 1980s, the New York real estate developer began to appear on television shows and in print interviews complaining about Japan dumping cheap cars and electronic devices in the United States and defeating America economically. At the time, Japan was America’s major rival for economic pre-eminence and its companies were purchasing trophy assets in the US like the Rockefeller Centre in Manhattan.
On September 2, 1987, Trump published full-page advertisements in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe that were billed as an “open letter from Donald J. Trump”.