GOP foreign policy elites flock to Clinton

Two weeks before he hopes to consolidate his party at the Republican convention in Cleveland, Donald Trump is driving Republican foreign policy elites into the arms of Hillary Clinton, as several more Reagan and Bush administration veterans say they not only oppose Trump but will likely vote for Clinton this fall.

Two former senior officials from the George W. Bush administration tell POLITICO that they will cast a ballot for Clinton over Trump. They are Stephen Krasner, a Stanford University professor who served as the State Department's director of policy planning from 2005 to 2007, and David Gordon, a senior advieor at the Eurasia Group who was Krasner’s successor in that post, which provides strategic thinking.

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Also saying he would choose Clinton over Trump is Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA case officer and influential neoconservative writer for The Weekly Standard. Gerecht, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has been a harsh critic of Obama’s foreign policy, opposing last summer’s nuclear deal with Iran and arguing for “war” in Syria.

But given a choice between her and Trump, Gerecht said in an email, “I will vote for Clinton.”

Gerecht lauded Clinton in a recent Weekly Standard essay, writing, “As unpleasant as it may be to accept, there is now only one presidential candidate who could abandon Obama's defining foreign accomplishment,” by which he meant the Iran nuclear deal, “challenge the Islamic Republic's regional ambitions, and destroy the caliphate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi: former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.”

“She's not a neoconservative,” Gerecht added, “but Hillary Clinton isn't uncomfortable with American power.”

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