Michael Hirsh was national editor for Politico Magazine from 2014–2016.

Barack Obama, whom Donald Trump earlier in the day called “the most ignorant president in our history” on foreign policy, returned the favor Wednesday night, suggesting that the Republican nominee had no clue what he was talking about—especially in comparison to Hillary Clinton. “Until you’ve sat at that desk, you don’t know what it’s like to manage a global crisis or send young people to war,” Obama said. “But Hillary’s been in the room; she’s been part of those decisions. ... And that's why I can say with confidence there has never been a man or a woman — not me, not Bill, nobody — more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America.” By contrast, “the Donald is not really a plans guy. Not really a facts guy, either,” the president said.

Vice President Joe Biden, who earned a reputation as a foreign policy expert over nearly four decades in the Senate, was far more blunt, saying flatly earlier in the night: “No major party nominee in the history of this nation has ever known less or has been less prepared to deal with our national security” than Trump.


Set aside the truthfulness of these claims for a moment. Wednesday night confirmed a dramatic shift, perhaps even a reversal, of the roles the two major parties have been identified with for several decades. For the first time, perhaps, since Vietnam, the Democratic Party is now the party of national security expertise—not just in its own rhetoric, but in the eyes of national-security specialists on both sides. One of the most striking facts about the election of 2016 is that a sizable majority of Republican foreign-policy professionals appear to agree with Obama and Biden. They believe that Trump is a far greater danger to U.S. national security than Clinton is—and many of them say they will even vote for her. And it’s the Democrats who are selling themselves as stronger, tougher and smarter than the Republicans when it comes to securing America’s place in the world.

So pronounced is this shift that some national-security experts say Trump, if elected, may have a lot of trouble filling top posts in his administration with qualified Republican officials. “I don’t know any prominent national security person who’s signed up with Trump since he started,” says Eliot Cohen, who served as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the George W. Bush administration. “It’s the same cast of oddballs and has-beens and kooks he’s had before.” Earlier this year Cohen co-authored a letter signed by 121 GOP national-security elites, saying Trump’s foreign policy “is wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle. He swings from isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence.” Cohen says the number of defectors has only grown since then. “A week doesn’t go by without more people wanting to sign on.”

Former Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who has served in both Republican and Democratic administrations for decades, seconds that viewpoint. “I served in every administration from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush, including all the Republican ones. I know tons of people at senior levels. I don’t know a single person who is working for him and is supporting him. There is deep, deep anguish among a lot of senior Republicans. Many are silently rooting for Hillary and will quietly vote for her,” says Burns, who is now advising the Democratic candidate. “This is not a reversal by the party,” he says, “but by one person, Trump.”

Burns says that the controversial news conference Trump gave earlier Wednesday—when he said he might simply let Russia keep annexed Crimea, and even appeared to call on Moscow to launch another cyber-invasion of the U.S. to find Hillary Clinton’s “30,000 emails that are missing”—only confirmed the experts’ worst expectations. “He is contradicting major American strategy since Truman, the view held by every president of both parties, in particular the Republicans, that we are going to protect our power, we’re going to be the guardian at the gate. The Crimea quote today! He’s turning Ronald Reagan on his head. This guy comes along with no experience, no historical memory, no understanding of the stakes involved, and he carelessly just gives it all up. Shameful. Shameful.”

Dan Senor, a key foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney in 2012, says he also doesn’t “know anyone who’s been in a serious position in a Republican administration in a national security role who’s comfortable saying, at least now, that they could work in his administration. … It’s never been like this before—people saying, ‘Oh my gosh, this guy is inflammatory, he’s volatile, I have real questions about his temperament to the point that he shouldn’t ever be allowed to set foot in the Situation Room.’ I’ve never heard that.”

Trump’s views on foreign policy are eclectic, to say the least: He has called into question the post-World War II consensus on American global power; he has forthrightly advocated torture; and he has sometimes made statements that are provably false. “NATO changed their whole program because of me,” he said at his news conference on Wednesday, suggesting that NATO was coming around to his view that the alliance needs to focus on counterterrorism. But the shift he was referring to, the creation of a new post of assistant secretary general for intelligence, was in place before he came along, a NATO official told POLITICO in June. Trump has also called for upgrading “NATO’s outdated mission and structure—grown out of the Cold War—to confront our shared challenges, including migration and Islamic terrorism,” without acknowledging that NATO has been engaged in that very enterprise for at least a decade, especially in Afghanistan.

Among Trump’s odd-duck collection of foreign policy advisers is Joseph Schmitz, a former Pentagon inspector general who was once accused by Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, then chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, of blocking investigations of Bush administration officials tied to Iraq and Afghanistan war contracts; George Papadopoulos, a 2009 college graduate and an international energy lawyer; and Carter Page, a former investment banker and global energy consultant with ties to Russian business. Asked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in March who he talks with regularly about foreign policy, Trump responded, “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.”

Since June the GOP defectors have included former George H.W. Bush National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Richard Armitage, who has served in senior positions since the Reagan administration. They also include retired Navy Rear Admiral, John Hutson, who spoke at the Democratic convention on Wednesday and declared that Trump “is not fit to polish John McCain’s boots,” in a pointed riposte to Trump’s earlier insult to McCain for being a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Some Republican opponents of Trump see him, oddly enough, as a follow-on to the president the GOP candidate says he despises for his weakness, Barack Obama, whom they also consider weak. "America's allies have already been shaken and stirred by the Obama administration’s lack of constancy and confidence,” says one prominent former GOP national security expert. “A President Trump would shake these alliances to their foundation and Trump would likely be the worst foreign-policy president since Carter.”

It’s somewhat ironic that if Hillary Clinton does indeed become America’s first female president, then “the best mother in the whole world”—as Bill Clinton, in his paean to his wife Tuesday night, called her— will no longer be representing what political wags have long called the “mommy party,” at least when it comes to national security. The Democratic Party has long been perceived—and effectively portrayed by Republicans—as soft, compliant and weak, while the Republicans have been seen as the “daddy party”—the party of stringent, tough love for Americans at home and hawkishness abroad.

Since Vietnam, the Democratic Party has been viewed as more squeamish when it comes to the use of force. After Vietnam, President Jimmy Carter suffered from a fatal perception of weakness that culminated in the Iran hostage crisis and the disastrous Desert One rescue mission. President Bill Clinton fares better in posterity, and he grew more comfortable with using power toward the end of his second term, especially after his early misfire in Somalia, where 18 Army Rangers were killed in another failed rescue attempt. But Republicans—especially George W. Bush—sharply criticized Bill Clinton’s cautious air attacks on Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the late 1990s. Since the 2012 election, Republicans have also portrayed Obama, despite his takedown of Osama bin Laden in 2011, as weak in the face of the threat from the Islamic State and Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, is perceived as something of a hawk dating back to her vote to authorize George W. Bush’s intervention in Iraq in 2002. According to New York Times reporter Mark Landler’s recent book, Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle over American Power, Clinton believes heart and soul in America’s hard power and has the instincts of an interventionist.

Though the switch in party roles brings an unexpected new cohort of supporters to Clinton, it could be a problem for a President Hillary Clinton, whose own party is somewhat to the left of her on national security, Cohen says. There were strident anti-war chants at the convention in Philadelphia Wednesday night as former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta spoke. “The Democrats are very divided. Hillary is, thank goodness, well to the right of her party. Her views are where most of us are,” he says. “I think that’s one of the challenges a Clinton administration will face.”

Even so, adds Cohen, he can’t actually vote for her. “I wanted to vote for her. After [FBI] Director [James] Comey’s comments [criticizing her “careless” use of her email server], I can’t. If I had done those things, Condi would have fired me that day, I would have been handed over for prosecution. … Although I do wish her the best. I want her to win.”