James Melville on U.S. Foreign Policy

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: What impact on foreign policy do you think it will have, given your immediate concerns about the denigration as you put it of allies and alliances, the praise and sort of — yes, the praise of authoritarian regimes?

JAMES MELVILLE: Well, it’s kind of a strange thing that most of the institutions, our Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, the intelligence community, the law enforcement community still speaks for our institutions and our interests. And I think for the most part, the message is consistent with what have been our policies for many, many decades. What I came to really have a hard time with was the ahistorical rhetoric of the President himself and the disconnect between his words and what other leaders were saying became more and more difficult for me to explain and understand.

AMANPOUR: OK. Just quickly, fill in those blanks there. What do you mean the disconnect between his words and what other leaders were saying? Just fill in those blanks for me.

MELVILLE: Well, it started for me — remember, I was the U.S. Ambassador in Estonia. Estonia — in the last 300 years, Estonia has spent 250 of them occupied by Russia. So, there is a great sensitivity to their neighbor to the east. And the solution to that geographic challenge that they faced throughout their history was to embed themselves in the institutions of the west. These are the institutions that the United States built and led for many decades and primarily that means NATO. During the campaign when candidate Trump was saying that NATO was obsolete and in fact, one of his advisers, the former speaker of the House of Representatives was on television saying that perhaps Estonia wasn’t worth defending because it’s a suburb of Saint Petersburg. It put me in a very difficult position when they took office. So, I was looking right from the start for the administration to reassure our allies and return to the traditional rhetoric and language of American leadership regarding our fealty to NATO and the institutions that we belong to and lead.