We begin today’s roundup with The New York Times and its take on Donald Trump’s latest foreign policy speech:
Far from coherent analysis of the threat of Islamic extremism and a plausible blueprint for action, the speech was a collection of confused and random thoughts that showed little understanding of the rise of the Islamic State and often conflicted with the historical record.
Meanwhile, with terrorism as his central focus, Mr. Trump doubled down on the anti-refugee themes that have dominated his campaign, dressing them up as a national security issue. He proposed a new “extreme vetting” approach to immigration that would impose an ideological test on newcomers and undermine the very American values of tolerance and equal treatment that he said he wanted to encourage. He also called for the creation of a commission that would “expose the networks in our society that support radicalization,” which struck many listeners as an uncomfortable echo of McCarthyism.
In his Ohio speech Mr Trump claimed, falsely, to have opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq from the very start, then called Mr Obama “incompetent” for withdrawing troops too fast from Iraq. He scolded the “Obama-Clinton group” for toppling the Qaddafi regime in Libya (though he actually praised that overthrow at the time). Mr Trump simultaneously grumbled that the Obama administration had both betrayed Reaganite ideas about freedom, and naively thought that democracy could ever be brought to such countries as Iraq.