One of Donald Trump’s top foreign policy advisers, retired Rear Adm. Charles R. Kubic, said Thursday that the Republican front-runner’s approach to Iran and other foreign threats would be “not predictable,” but successful.
Kubic said that Trump would never allow Iran to attain nuclear weapons, and told CNN’s Kyra Phillips he was confident a Trump administration could break down the Iranian regime by using the “threat of force” and putting “the economic power of the U.S. to work.”
But he declined to lay out a specific plan, citing Trump’s own insistence that he remain “not predictable.”
“The Iranians are also practical people, not all of the Iranians support their tyrannical regime, and I think in time we could be able to bring about an implosion of their regime and bring them back into the nations of the world,” he said. “I think the tactics that would be used to do this, to implement it, a lot of those will become, as Mr. Trump says, ‘not predictable.’ They will remain flexible. And they won’t necessarily broadcast them.”
Kubic spoke one day after Trump promised in a speech in Washington, D.C., that his foreign policy approach would “always put the interests of the American people and American security first.”
Kubic also defended Trump’s comments last year that U.S. forces should kill not just terrorists, but their families as well.
Asked if he would ever direct his troops to kill the families of terrorists, Kubic said, “Not in those words. I think he is prone to drawing very stark contrasts when he’s trying to make a point. I think his point was that we are playing by different rules of engagement than the enemy.”
“And he was saying that if they’re going to play tough, we have to play tough. And if that means taking another look at our rules of engagement, we do,” Kubic added.
Trump’s comments aren’t just for show, Kubic said, but acknowledged the “drama” of running for office.
“If you look at the politics of getting elected, there’s an awful lot of drama in that act, going back through our history,” he said.