Michael T. Flynn, a retired lieutenant general and Trump adviser, disdains many George W. Bush security officials, saying they helped push the United States into “too many conflicts that just seem too perpetual.”CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Like no other part of the Republican establishment, the party’s foreign policy luminaries joined in opposition to the idea of aDonald J. Trump presidency.
Loyal Republicans who served in the two Bush administrations, they appeared on television and wrote op-eds blasting him. They aligned under a “Never Trump” banner and signed a letter saying they were “convinced that he would be a dangerous president and would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”
For his part, President-elect Trump has maligned them as bumbling and myopic, architects of “a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war.”
The coming weeks will determine whether both sides decide they need each other.
On the establishment side, the opposition is now softening for some — driven either by a stated sense of patriotic duty to advise a new president with no foreign policy expertise, or a somewhat less noble motive to avoid years of being excluded from Washington power circles.
“Never Trump” has become “Maybe Trump.” But whether he would have them is another matter.
Mr. Trump, a man known to nurse grudges long after doing so is beneficial, has boasted for months that he has a better understanding of how to best serve the nation’s security interests than nearly anyone who has made policy in the area for the past decade. At the same time, his transition team faces the daunting task of filling hundreds of jobs in a constellation of national security agencies.
At stake is more than a parlor game about who gets what job. Personnel decisions by Mr. Trump and his team will help determine both the course of the administration’s foreign policy and whether the president-elect will hew to the themes of his campaign — a suspicion of alliances, skepticism of foreign intervention and admiration for authoritarian figures like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Some of these views have been embraced by some of Mr. Trump’s current advisers, including Michael T. Flynn, a retired lieutenant general and the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Such positions are generally anathema in Republican foreign policy circles largely dominated by hawkish former George W. Bush administration officials — from Eliot A. Cohen, a former State Department official, to Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser.
There is some common ground, particularly on counterterrorism policy. For instance, Mr. Trump has repeatedly praised the brutal interrogation methods the Bush administration used against Qaeda suspects, including waterboarding. “Torture works,” Mr. Trump said during a campaign stop in February. Most former Bush administration officials insist that the methods, used by the C.I.A., did not constitute torture.
Since the election was resolved early Wednesday, there have been at least informal contacts between the two factions, according to several people in both camps who refused to be identified. One person who is helping Mr. Trump’s transition team said the group was already receiving résumés from former Republican officials, including some of the signers of two open letters this year excoriating Mr. Trump’s foreign policy views. At the same time, the transition team has also made unofficial overtures to some of the people who signed the two letters — one in March and the second in August.
For now, Mr. Trump is relying on a small circle of advisers to begin considering candidates for national security positions. General Flynn openly disdains the views of many in the Republican national security establishment, especially those who served in senior positions during the George W. Bush administration. It was these people, he said during an interview shortly before the election, who helped push the United States into “too many conflicts that just seem too perpetual.”
“Mr. Trump, that’s what he wants to change,” he said.
People close to Mr. Trump’s team said that view did not seem to have changed significantly since Election Day. Representative Devin Nunes, the California Republican who is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has spoken to General Flynn, and he said the transition team seemed to be focused on filling the administration with many retired military officers and intelligence analysts who had operational roles in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“There’s no shortage of folks who have fought in war zones and were in the I.C. and are now out who are capable,” Mr. Nunes said, using an abbreviation for the intelligence community.
He also suggested that the transition team would not look kindly on those who once opposed Mr. Trump — people he referred to as the “elites” of the “Acela corridor” between Washington and New York.
“A lot of people never thought he would win the nomination, and a lot of people thought he would not win the presidency,” Mr. Nunes said. “And a lot of these people are not in a position to be in the next administration, and that’s refreshing.”
William Inboden, who worked at the National Security Council for President George W. Bush and was one of 50 people to sign the August letter, said he would not completely rule out working in a Trump administration.
“Any patriotic American who is asked to serve our country should be willing to do so and should give serious consideration to whatever position is offered,” said Mr. Inboden, who is now a professor at the University of Texas.
At the same time, he said, “the Trump team will have to decide how magnanimous they want to be toward the dissenters.”
Mary Beth Long, a former C.I.A. officer and assistant secretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration and another signer of the August letter, said she reversed her position on Mr. Trump at a campaign rally in Charlotte, N.C., about a month ago.
She said in an interview that she changed her views because she thought Mr. Trump and his campaign had “matured” over the past several months. She said that she was not seeking a job in the new administration nor expecting to be asked.
Ms. Long said that if experienced, respected Republican national security figures like Mr. Hadley, George W. Bush’s former national security adviser, were offered top jobs, and accepted them, it would provide cover and comfort to other Republicans who might otherwise balk at joining the Trump team.
Mr. Hadley, in a brief interview on Thursday, declined to comment on the speculation about his being a candidate for defense secretary or another top job in the Trump administration.
The March letter, coordinated by Mr. Cohen, the former State Department official, called Mr. Trump’s vision of American influence and power in the world “wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle,” swinging “from isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence.”
It was signed by 122 people.
Mr. Cohen said he did not expect to work for Mr. Trump. “People like me will not be asked to serve,” he said. While he stopped short of ruling it out, on the grounds of “you never rule out something that a president asks you to do,” he added: “It won’t happen to me, and I don’t want it to.”
Peter Feaver, a former George W. Bush administration official who teaches at Duke University, said he believed that the Trump administration would probably blacklist the signers. “That was the price people believed they were paying when they signed those letters,” he said.
Mr. Feaver said that even if the administration excluded everyone on both letters, there would still be an adequate pool of Republican foreign policy experts from which to choose. He also said the administration could quietly consult people who are blacklisted but who have particular expertise on a specific subject.
But Omarosa Manigault, the Trump campaign’s director of African-American outreach and a contestant on one of the early seasons of Mr. Trump’s reality show, “The Apprentice,” said at his election night party that the campaign is keeping an “enemies” list.
“It’s so great our enemies are making themselves clear so that when we get into the White House, we know where we stand,” she told the Independent Journal Review. Ms. Manigault was referring to Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican and a vocal critic of Mr. Trump, but several of the “Never Trump” former officials made reference to her comments in interviews over the past two days.
A big question for some is how much Mr. Trump intends to conduct a foreign policy that mirrors his campaign talk. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump reportedly reassured President Park Geun-hye of South Korea in a telephone call that he would maintain America’s security commitment to Seoul. During an interview with The New York Times in March, he had said that both South Korea and Japan needed to pay far more of the cost of stationing troops in those countries, or he would consider withdrawing them.
“We will be steadfast and strong with respect to working with you to protect against the instability in North Korea,” Mr. Trump said, according to a statement from Ms. Park’s office.
Eric Edelman, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and a former Pentagon official, has repeatedly criticized Mr. Trump’s fitness to be president. He said he could not imagine the Trump team calling him, and he said he would not serve if asked.
But Mr. Edelman, 65, said he had counseled many younger Republican former security officials to keep an open mind — especially if they fear that it could be years before they have another chance to get a job in a Republican administration.
“People in my position can’t pass moral judgment on younger colleagues,” he said.
Reporting was contributed by Michael S. Schmidt, Mark Landler, Maggie Haberman and Matthew Rosenberg.
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