Twelve years after George W. Bush dedicated much of his 2004 Republican nomination acceptance speech to the cause of “advanc[ing] liberty in the broader Middle East,” Donald Trump ripped into Hillary Clinton for advocating a “failed policy of nation building and regime change … in Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria.”

Trump’s words underscored a sudden and dramatic shift in direction for a Republican Party once proudly associated with military intervention and democracy promotion in the Arab world. The biting speech, during which Trump was often shouting, also directly blamed Clinton for multiple world crises, calling the former Secretary of State responsible for “death, destruction, terrorism and weakness” around the world.


Trump contrasted the relative stability of 2009, when President Barack Obama “made the decision to put Hillary Clinton in charge of American foreign policy,” and the violence and chaos now plaguing the Middle East and North Africa.

Clinton's defenders denounced the speech as riddled with false, unfair and even hypocritical charges. In some cases Trump blamed Clinton for Obama policies that the Democratic candidate herself opposed, or for events that Clinton had little or nothing to do with.

In two cases, Trump criticized Clinton for positions he himself advocated—including the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the ouster of Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi.

Trump also neglected to mention the historic Arab Spring that swept across the Arab world in 2011, bringing chaos and violence to Libya, Egypt, Syria and Iraq.

Clinton, who served as Obama’s Secretary of State from January 2009 until December 2012, is perhaps most vulnerable on Libya. She does not deny arguing firmly for Obama's 2011 U.S. military intervention in support of a rebel uprising that helped to topple Qadhafi. The country is now in chaos and ISIL has developed a strong foothold there. Like many other Republican speakers this week, Trump also blamed Clinton for the Islamist assault on a U.S. compound in Benghazi that left four Americans dead.

But many leading Republicans applauded Obama's intervention in Libya. And Trump himself called for killing Qadhafi, saying in a 2011 video blog post: "We should go in, we should stop this guy, which would be very easy and very quick.” Trump has since reversed that position and said that the world would be better off with Qadhafi in power.

Trump's case against Clinton is even murkier when it comes to Egypt, Syria and Iraq.

"Egypt was peaceful," before Clinton took over the State Department, Trump said, adding that the country was "turned over to the radical Muslim Brotherhood, forcing the military to retake control."

It is unclear why Trump blames Clinton for this sequence of events. When Obama sided with protesters who called for the ouster of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak in March 2011, Clinton took the other side, arguing that Mubarak was an ally who maintained stability. The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood later took power, but only after winning a democratic election.

Trump also seemed to blame Clinton for the rise of ISIL in Iraq and Syria. "In 2009, pre-Hillary, [ISIL] was not even on the map," Trump said. "Iraq is in chaos."

Again, Trump did not explain why he faults Clinton. Many Republicans say Obama's withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq allowed ISIL to rampage there. But Clinton sided with military officials who urged Obama to leave behind several thousand troops.

Republicans react to Trump's RNC speech Gov. Scott Walker and Representatives John Mica and Mark Sanford react to Donald Trump's speech in Cleveland. Produced by Beatrice Peterson.

The nonpartisan fact-checking site PoliticFact has previously concluded that Trump is wrong to blame Clinton for the rise of ISIL. "There were several factors that contributed to the growing power of [ISIL], but it’s misleading to pin the responsibility solely on Clinton" PolitiFact wrote on Wednesday.

Trump says he opposed the 2003 Iraq war, which changed that country's regime by toppling the dictator Saddam Hussein. But when asked in a September 2002 radio interview with Howard Stern whether he would support invading Iraq, Trump replied: "Yeah, I guess so." Trump did not publicly criticize the war until 2004.

Trump's precise critique of Clinton on Syria is likewise unclear. Many Republicans fault Obama for not acting sooner to arm Syria's rebels, an action they say could prevented better-armed Islamic radicals from hijacking the Syrian revolution. (Clinton joined other senior officials in urging Obama in 2012 to do so, but Obama overruled them.) But in his Tuesday night remarks, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie faulted Clinton for underestimating the brutality of the Syrian ruler, implying she had not opposed him forcefully enough.

Trump also targeted Obama's 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which he said "gave back to Iran $150 billion and gave us nothing." Under the deal, Iran accepted stringent limits on its nuclear program over the next decade and dismantled key parts of its nuclear infrastructure. By most estimates, the deal unfroze more like $100 billion in Iranian assets, of which Iran has access to only a few tens of billions. In recent months, Iranian officials have complained bitterly that they are not receiving a greater economic windfall under the deal.

Clinton left government more than two years before the July 2015 nuclear pact was sealed. Although she did help lay the groundwork for Obama's nuclear talks with Iran, she also conducted much of the diplomatic legwork that imposed harsh sanctions on Iran's economy which many experts credit with bringing Tehran to the bargaining table.

Perhaps most remarkable was the way Trump glossed over recent GOP policies in the Middle East, which many analysts say bear some blame for the regional mayhem Trump described, including the rise of ISIL.

"Because we acted to defend our country, the murderous regimes of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban are history, more than 50 million people have been liberated, and democracy is coming to the broader Middle East," Bush said in his September 2004 convention address in New York City.

Trump struck a radically different note on Thursday night.

“After fifteen years of wars in the Middle East, after trillions of dollars spent and thousands of lives lost, the situation is worse than it has ever been before,” he said.

“This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction, terrorism and weakness,” he added.

But that legacy arguably belongs more to the Republican Party itself. Although Clinton voted for the 2003 Iraq War, so did virtually every Republican in Congress at that time, and it was championed by Bush in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks. The vast majority of American combat deaths in the Middle East and Afghanistan since 2001 occurred during the Bush's presidency.