Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump will undergo what’s become a near-rite of passage for aspiring GOP candidates and meet with the party’s influential elder statesman on foreign policy matters, Henry Kissinger. The meeting is scheduled for this Wednesday, the Washington Post reports, and marks an effort by Trump to bolster his foreign policy credentials, according to people close to the candidate. The two have reportedly had “weeks of phone conversations” preceding the meeting.
Here’s more from the Post:
Trump’s conferring with Kissinger underscores not only how he is building relationships with Republican elders but how he leans toward a more realist view of international affairs, which has long been the bailiwick of Kissinger’s work. While Trump rarely describes himself as a realist, which is a worldview grounded in national interest, his impulses and comments have often had a hardheaded and non-hawkish tilt, and he has been a critic of extensive U.S. intervention abroad.
The 92-year-old former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford had a large influence on American foreign policy during the Cold War, but remains a deeply polarizing figure in American life because of American support for unsavory regimes that resulted from his realist approach to foreign policymaking.
