Albright: I'm 'very concerned' about Trump's tweets

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright criticized Donald Trump’s use of Twitter on Tuesday and pushed back on the “America First” foreign policy message on which he campaigned.

“I’m going to try to be polite,” Albright said, asked about the president-elect’s propensity to tweet policy pronouncements on a U.S. Institute of Peace conference panel. “Let me just say that I am very concerned about the tweets and generally about the messages that are going out.”


Trump’s Twitter feed has alarmed some foreign policy experts, who say that it is irresponsible and even dangerous to make haphazard statements about other nations in under 140 characters. Experts were especially frightened last month when Trump tweeted about nuclear weapons, with some warning that foreign leaders likely read it as a policy change and could respond.

Outgoing Secretary of State John Kerry is such a critic. Shortly before Albright’s panel on Tuesday, Kerry addressed Twitter policy-making at the conference and candidly declared it a “problem.”

“If policy is going to be made in 140 characters on Twitter and every reasonable measurement of accountability is being bypassed and people don’t care about it, we have a problem,” he said.

Albright, wading into the issue at the next panel, also argued against the U.S. pursuing a foreign policy of “America First,” a phrase Trump used repeatedly on the campaign trail to describe his vision of focusing on jobs and other priorities at home. Albright referenced President Bill Clinton’s label of the U.S. as an “indispensable nation” and argued that the U.S. “needs to be engaged” as a partner with nations abroad.

“I think that that is a message I think we need to get out there, not as ‘America First,’ but as America as a partner,” Albright said.

Relating that point back to the Twitter question, Albright made clear her skepticism that tweets are the right tool for facilitating effective, intentional foreign policy.

“I do think there has been a system in place in the world for a very long time of how governments communicate with each other, how presidents communicate with each other, how those documents are developed,” she said. “Are they part of some kind of a decision making process that does in fact reflect what the government thinks and what the Congress thinks and what the American people think?”

“And the tweets don’t deal with that,” she concluded.

Asked if Trump’s tweets might create a needed shake-up on the world stage, Albright allowed that “disruption is a very interesting theory” that “doesn’t hurt." But “destroying is not a good thing,” she warned.