What would Donald Trump do to fix the Middle East? Listening to his prescriptions, it’s not an easy question to answer. 
 
 Trump sought to clarify his worldview with a prepared speech in Youngstown, Ohio, on Monday after a week of battles over his claim that President Obama “founded ISIS” and was the “MVP” of the Islamist terror group. 
 
 But setting aside the debate over that rhetoric, which he did not repeat in his speech, the national security framework he described was so contradictory and filled with so many obvious falsehoods that it’s virtually impossible to tell what he would do as president. 
 
 Trump’s “Obama founded ISIS” catchphrase is inflammatory, but it’s not a literal argument (even though Trump initially insisted it was). Instead he's used the term to stitch together a patchwork of more mainstream criticisms that blame Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former President George W. Bush for creating the current Middle East crisis. “Our current strategy of nation building and regime change is a proven, absolute failure,” Trump said on Monday. 
 
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 Under Trump’s telling, Bush committed the initial sin by destabilizing the Middle East with his 2003 invasion of Iraq. This is a version of events more common on the left, but one that exists on the right as well. 
 
 Obama then made things worse with a "reckless" withdrawal of troops that created a "vacuum" for groups like ISIS to assert control. This is a frequent complaint from more neoconservative Republicans. 
 
 In addition, Trump said, Clinton exacerbated the problem by supporting airstrikes against Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi's "stable" regime, which provided Islamic radicals another weak state to serve as a base. He also argued Clinton and Obama should have supported Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, rather than encouraged him to step down in the face of street protests. These too are relatively ordinary criticisms. 
 
 But these arguments, while unremarkable enough on their own, say nothing about Trump's instincts or how he would govern. 
 
 That’s because Trump previously supported every single foreign policy decision he now decries. 
 
 Despite claiming daily that he opposed the Iraq War from the start, Trump endorsed deposing Saddam Hussein in a 2002 interview and there’s no record of him opposing the war until after it had began. As for exiting the Iraq War, he said repeatedly in 2007 and 2008 that America should withdraw immediately and later recommended the same course for Afghanistan. 
 
 Turning to Libya, Trump recorded a video in 2011 demanding the Obama administration remove Gadhafi from power on humanitarian grounds. He went on to lie about his support for the Libya intervention in a Republican debate only to admit to it when confronted with footage of his old statements in a CBS interview. Finally, Trump called Mubarak’s departure “a good thing” at the time before turning against the idea years later. 
 
 The result is that the only thing we know about Trump is that he’s good at criticizing decisions by other presidents in hindsight. Unfortunately, this is not a very useful skill for the person tasked with making the decisions in the first place. 
 
 “He’s best when he’s making forceful retrospective critiques,” Colin Dueck, a professor at George Mason University who’s researched the history of Republican foreign policy, said when asked to describe Trump’s worldview. “But when you ask him what specifically are you proposing going forward, he doesn’t have a coherent proposal.” 
 
 As Colin Powell famously cautioned George W. Bush ahead of the Iraq War, “you break it, you own it.” The consequences of military action — or inaction, in some of these cases — are irreversible. 
 
 A 'Blathering Jumble of Nonsense' 
 
 Trump’s chameleon-like prescription for Middle East is not consistent with any one school of thought – or with itself. Sometimes he resembles a non-interventionist in the vein of Ron Paul, like when he decried nation building and regime change in his speech on Monday. At other times, he sounds like Genghis Khan, like when he demanded in the very same speech that American troops conquer oil fields in Iraq by force and claim the profits for America. He previously suggested in 2011 that the US claim Libya's oil as well. 
 
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 “In the old days when we won a war, to the victor go the spoils,” Trump said on Monday, describing a doctrine that runs directly counter to the international regime America led the world in establishing and currently enforces. 
 
 The result of this confusing mix is that Trump has alienated Republican national security minds across a range of policy schools. 
 
 John Noonan, who advised Jeb Bush’s campaign on national security, said Obama’s “premature withdrawal from Iraq" was an avoidable mistake that contributed to the rise of ISIS and that Trump was accurate to point it out. But that doesn’t mean Noonan is on board with the GOP nominee — far from it. 
 
 “The rest of his foreign policy is an absolutely blathering jumble of nonsense,” he told NBC News. “I can’t in good conscience sign my name to it." 
 
 In March, Noonan signed onto a letter with dozens of Republican foreign policy hands disavowing Trump in part because his policies are “wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle." 
 
 Daniel Larison, a writer at the American Conservative, has spent years criticizing the Republican Party’s foreign policy for leaning too hard on military operations to advance American interests. But despite Trump’s stated opposition to “nation building” and toppling dictators by force, Larison opposes the nominee as well. 
 
 “Trump has relatively few antiwar conservative friends because he is not really reliably antiwar in any meaningful sense,” Larison said. “He favors a much larger military budget, he usually has no strong objections to foreign wars when they begin, and he has little or no interest in diplomatic engagement that might avert conflict.” 
 
 Trump’s views on intervention weren’t the only place where things ran off the rails. Adopting a standard GOP talking point, he decried Obama for a mythic “apology tour” on Monday and chided him for not championing feminism and gay rights abroad. 
 
 But this is at odds with his stated views as well, which have long been characterized by a deep contempt for any notion of human rights that might impede raw material gains. In addition to celebrating torture and regaling audiences with apocryphal tales of Americans committing war crimes, Trump has regularly argued America’s own leaders should refrain from criticizing dictatorial regimes because America lacks the moral authority to do so. 
 
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 “When the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don’t think we’re a very good messenger,” Trump said last month when asked about concerns over a crackdown on opposition by Turkish leader Reccep Erdogan. 
 
 Pressed on MSNBC’s Morning Joe last year over his praise for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin despite allegations he’s murdered journalists and rivals, Trump responded: “I think our country does plenty of killing also.” 
 
 In 2013, Trump also lavished praise on Putin in multiple interviews for writing an op-ed that criticized the very concept of American exceptionalism. 
 
 “You use a term like ‘American exceptionalism,’ and frankly, the way our country is being treated right now by Russia and Syria and lots of other places and with all the mistakes we've made over the years, like Iraq and so many others, it's sort of a hard term to use,” Trump said on Fox News, adding that Putin was “extremely diplomatic” for pointing this out. 
 
 'America First' a Departure From GOP Philosophy 
 
 Outside of the Middle East, Trump’s “America First” foreign policy views are at least somewhat more consistent. He’s long described international relations as a zero-sum gain between strong winners and weak losers in ways that apply to both national security and trade. Trump has consistently called for new tariffs to protect workers from foreign competition and he’s cast a skeptical eye towards alliances like NATO, which he’s threatened to abandon in recent months if member states don’t pay enough for protection. 
 
 Dueck compared Trump’s perspective to the original “America First” movement, which resisted foreign entanglements and sought American neutrality in World War II. 
 
 “Trump’s actually been saying for decades that he thinks U.S. alliances are more of a burden than an asset, he’s been saying for decades he against free trade deals like NAFTA,” Dueck said. “He’s very volatile and contradictory day to day but he has been actually saying this for years.” 
 
 All of this would be a major break from the last seven-plus decades of Republican and Democratic presidents. But at least American voters could fairly say they were warned if he implemented this approach. No one, probably not even Trump himself, knows how what he’d do about the Middle East. 
 
 Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to reflect that Donald Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. claim Libya’s oil fields was made in 2011, not during his speech Monday as first reported. ||||| Donald Trump’s speech on Monday about the war on “radical Islamic terrorism” was indifferently delivered and in many ways familiar. But there were some new elements — including an alarming suggestion that the Cold War offers a useful lesson in how to combat Islamic State. 
 
 Again Trump said that he had opposed the war in Iraq; again he attacked President Obama for opening the way for (if not “founding”) Islamic State by precipitously withdrawing U.S. forces from that country; again he disdained “nation-building and regime change”; and again he disparaged Hillary Clinton’s work as the country’s chief diplomat, this time adding the grace note that she lacked the “mental and physical stamina” necessary to deal with Islamic State. 
 
 Trump also promised to “temporarily suspend immigration from some of the most dangerous and volatile regions of the world that have a history of exporting terrorism” — the latest variation on his notorious proposal last year for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” There are too many immigrants coming in from the Middle East to perform adequate screening, he argued. But even if that’s true, many of the terrorist attacks he cited in Europe and the United States were conducted by people who wouldn’t have been subject to such scrutiny because they held European or American passports. 
 
 Requiring assent to a checklist of values would punish thoughts rather than deeds and might encourage newcomers to dissemble about their beliefs. 
 
 Trump said he would call for an international conference on halting the spread of radical Islam and described an alliance comprising NATO (which he claimed had decided to focus on terrorism at his suggestion), Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Russia. Never mind that something similar already exists under the imprimatur of the United Nations Security Council, although Russia seems more interested in propping up Syrian President Bashar Assad than in defeating Islamic State. 
 
 More interesting — and alarming — was Trump’s description of how he would combat “radical Islamic extremism” at home. Essentially, he would seek to promote liberal values, such as autonomy for women and tolerance for gays and lesbians, by adopting the conservative tactics of the 1950s. 
 
 “In the Cold War, we had an ideological screening test,” Trump said. “The time is overdue to develop a new screening test for the threats we face today.” Instead of excluding immigrants with communist views, he suggested, a Trump administration would bar immigrants “who have hostile attitudes toward our country or its principles — or who believe that Sharia law should supplant American law.” (How he would test for such attitudes — and why those who harbored them wouldn’t conceal them — went unexplained.) 
 
 And where the House Un-American Activities Committee delved into the alleged disloyalty of Americans during the Cold War, Trump would establish a Commission on Radical Islam that would “expose the networks in our society that support radicalization.” Trump said that “reformist voices in the Muslim community” would be invited to take part — an invitation unlikely to be accepted. 
 
 The goal of these initiatives, Trump suggested, would be to promote assimilation of Muslims and spare the United States the sort of alienation that has produced violence in Europe. What he apparently doesn’t recognize is that Muslims are far better assimilated in America than they are in the European countries that have been victimized by Islamist terrorists. 
 
 Obviously Americans aren’t immune to the siren call of Islamist extremism; witness the attacks in Boston, San Bernardino and Orlando, all of which Trump mentioned. Screening of potential immigrants and asylum-seekers for possible connections to terrorism is a matter of common sense as well as national security. 
 
 But ideological litmus tests for immigrants and a national commission to study “radical Islam” could be catastrophically counterproductive. Requiring assent to a checklist of values would punish thoughts rather than deeds and might encourage newcomers to dissemble about their beliefs. A commission designed to expose radicals could bring back the days of blacklists and guilt by association. These are frightening ideas. It’s no surprise that they have been proposed by Donald Trump. 
 
 Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook ||||| People familiar with the immigration system say that many of Donald Trump's ideas will be nearly impossible to implement. | AP Photo Why Trump's immigration ideas won't work The Republican nominee's proposals appear nearly impossible to implement — and critics say they could actually fuel the terrorist threat. 
 
 Donald Trump on Monday laid out some big plans to change the U.S. immigration system, calling for the suspension of immigration from regions that have "a history of exporting terrorism" and the roll-out of an ideological test to weed out foreigners who may support "radical Islamic terrorism." 
 
 The problem, people familiar with the immigration system say, is that many of Trump's ideas will be nearly impossible to implement. And some may wind up actually increasing the terrorist threat. 
 
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 The Republican presidential nominee unveiled the proposals during a speech in Ohio on national security. "We should only admit into this country those who share our values and respect our people. I call it extreme vetting," the real estate mogul said, ad-libbing the "extreme vetting" line. "Those who do not believe in our Constitution, or who support bigotry and hatred, will not be admitted for immigration into the country." 
 
 Critics argue that Trump's plans are just a way to bar Muslims from the U.S., an idea he suggested months ago but which even some Republicans called an "un-American" religious test. (Trump also wants a ban on Syrian refugees.) Regardless of his true intentions, the basics that Trump proposed Monday left observers struggling to envision how they could ever become a reality. 
 
 For instance, some asked, what does Trump mean by "terrorism" and "regions" with "a history of exporting terrorism?" Who counts as an immigrant — people who want to move to the U.S. permanently or the many millions who come as tourists, often without a visa? What counts as "bigotry and hatred?" And how will the ideological test be administered? 
 
 Trump's proposals now are "no more specific than saying you’re going to screen out Muslims — it’s less specific than that. In a way he’s made his proposal less narrow and even vaguer than it was before," said David Bier, an immigration analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute. "Vague proposals rarely get implemented in any sort of specific, targeted way." 
 
 Trump's team has promised more details in the coming weeks. As they figure them out, they'll face some tough realities. 
 
 For one thing, there are few regions in the world not affected at some point by some form of terrorism. In Europe alone, Spain has suffered from attacks by Basque separatists the U.S. labels as terrorists, while Northern Ireland is still troubled by offshoots of the Irish Republican Army. Even if Trump were to focus purely on Islamist-inspired terror, that would still presumably include much of Europe, including France and Britain, most of whose citizens currently enjoy visa-free tourist travel to America. 
 
 "Are we calling for restrictions on visas to countries that have some of the best criminal justice and international policing programs?" asked Greg Chen, a top official with the American Immigration Lawyers Association, in reference to Western European states. 
 
 Then there's the Middle East, which is deeply scarred by terrorism but includes countries such as Jordan, Egypt and Israel, whose governments are important partners in the fight against Islamist extremists. Trump actually singled out those three countries in his speech, calling them friends "who recognize this ideology of death that must be extinguished." But those countries — not to mention others — may resent seeing their citizens barred by the U.S. That could affect their cooperation on fighting extremists just as the U.S. is making headway in the fight against the Islamic State terrorist group in Syria and Iraq. 
 
 "Freedom of travel, whether regulated by visa or not, to the United States is a critical element of our relationship with these countries. It’s a matter of dignity," said Jeremy Shapiro, director of research at the European Council on Foreign Relations. 
 
 Trump also kept using the word "region," but the U.S. immigration and visa policies are largely built around country-to-country relationships, and some countries don't clearly fall into one region or another: Turkey, for example, is a country that straddles Europe and the Middle East. 
 
 U.S. immigration policy is incredibly complex and it is often affected by political decisions that seem questionable. For instance, earlier this year, the Obama administration imposed special visa restrictions on foreigners who have traveled in recent years to Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. But the administration chose not to include on that list Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, two countries notorious for producing terrorists, because the governments in Riyadh and Islamabad are, technically, allies in the fight against extremism. 
 
 The U.S. government has very broad authority when it comes to deciding which foreigners it allows on its soil, and it does occasionally bar people, such as foreign government officials believed to be human rights violators. Historically, the U.S. also has barred people based on their beliefs, including in communism, a Cold War approach Trump alluded to in his speech. Legislative changes have made such ideological bans less likely today, but the rules are not black and white. Some experts assert that even if a Trump administration were to try to bar people based on their religion it may not technically be unconstitutional, even if it would seem to violate the spirit of the First Amendment. 
 
 Constitutionality aside, the ideological test proposed by Trump poses challenges on a sheer logistical level, and could cost huge amounts of money to implement. Would the test come in the form of a questionnaire? Interviews with consular officers? The deployment of people to scour immigration applicants' social media accounts? 
 
 And what counts as an un-American value? 
 
 In his speech, Trump castigated radical Islamists for their hatred of gays, but would he argue that evangelical Christians from South Korea who also denounce homosexuality should be barred from visiting the United States? 
 
 "Immigration to the United States would grind to a near halt if millions of people are subject to background checks based on subjective criteria," said Cornell University law professor Stephen Yale-Loehr, who added: "This proposal would also cost billions of dollars to implement. Business people and visitors could not be able to plan quick trips to the United States because they would not know how long an ideological background check would take." 
 
 Trump on Monday also slammed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for saying in the past that she wanted to see more Syrian refugees be allowed in the United States, warning that terrorists and criminals are hiding among the refugees (though Clinton has said refugees must be carefully vetted). But refugee advocates warn that Trump's comments only worsen America's reputation in the Middle East, spurring more young people to turn to Islamist extremism. 
 
 Hina Shamsi, director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said that, despite the change in language, Trump's overall goal appears to still be keeping out Muslims. She believes that would be unconstitutional. “It’s hard to see how these proposals do not pose significant legal, policy and practical hurdles, and rightly so,” she said. ||||| A HEAVILY trailed speech by Donald Trump on counter-terrorism, delivered in Ohio on August 15th, included little that made sense as a plan for keeping America safe, but offered some fresh insights into the self-obsessed, fact-scorning temperament of the businessman who wants to hold the world’s most powerful job. 
 
 As his poll numbers slide and the murmuring from his allies grows in volume, Mr Trump increasingly sounds like someone with a political version of Tourette’s Syndrome. Much of the speech could have been given by any of the 16 Republicans that the businessman defeated for the party’s presidential nomination, amounting to a committee-drafted recital of conventional conservative talking points. A subdued Mr Trump, reading from a teleprompter, dutifully accused Barack Obama of staging a blame-America “global apology tour” after taking office in 2009, and—together with his first secretary of state, Hillary Clinton—of destabilising the world by coddling tryants and snubbing allies, while refusing to take seriously the threat from Islamic terrorism. 
 
 But every now and then Mr Trump sensed an opportunity to boast about how prescient he had been in his assessment of foreign affairs, even as a private businessman with no seat in the councils of state, and began shouting about some of his favourite ideas, and how clever they were. Rather often this required brutalising the historical record. In his Ohio speech Mr Trump claimed, falsely, to have opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq from the very start, then called Mr Obama “incompetent” for withdrawing troops too fast from Iraq. He scolded the “Obama-Clinton group” for toppling the Qaddafi regime in Libya (though he actually praised that overthrow at the time). Mr Trump simultaneously grumbled that the Obama administration had both betrayed Reaganite ideas about freedom, and naively thought that democracy could ever be brought to such countries as Iraq. 
 
 The foreign policy speech had been billed as a chance for Mr Trump to show that he has sober, workable ideas for fighting the Islamic State (IS) terror network. The property developer ploughed through some proposals that ranged from policies already in place, such as drone strikes on terrorist leaders, to ideas that seemed to bore him as he read them out, such as a presidential commission on radical Islam, including moderate Muslims, which would craft new protocols on tackling extremism for use by local police departments. Bowing to off-stage pressure from Republican bigwigs, he backed away from his earlier, unconstitutional talk of banning Muslims from entry to America. Instead, he offered a plan for what he called “extreme, extreme vetting” of immigrants, reviving ideological screening tests last seen during the Cold War, under which consular officials and immigration officers would somehow identify those with “hostile attitudes” towards America and its values; anyone who believes that Sharia law should “supplant American law”; or any arrivals who do not “believe in the constitution or who support bigotry and hatred”; and ensure that visas only go to those “who we expect to flourish in our country.” To that end, once elected president he would ask the State Department and Department of Homeland Security to draw up a list of regions where “adequate screening” is not possible, and he would suspend immigration from dangerous regions with a “history of exporting terrorism.” 
 
 He sounded much more excited when his text gave him the chance to engage in personal abuse, accusing Mrs Clinton of wanting to be “America’s Angela Merkel”, claiming that the German chancellor has allowed “massive immigration” bringing “catastrophe” to her country. Mr Trump sounded even happier when peddling conspiracy theories, as when he flatly declared that Mrs Clinton “lacks the mental and physical stamina” to take on IS “and every other challenge we face.” He sounded happiest of all when he congratulated himself for his idea that America should have seized Iraqi oilfields (while shunning all other forms of nation-building in Iraq), leaving behind American troops to guard this war booty. “I said: ‘keep the oil, keep the oil, keep the oil, don’t let somebody else get it’,” Mr Trump said, adding: “In the old days, when we won a war, to the victor belonged the spoils.” 
 
 The audience in Ohio liked some bits of Mr Trump’s speech, as when he promised to dismantle terror networks in America “viciously if necessary”. His supporters were quiet through one of the few passages that amounted to a foreign-policy strategy that Mr Trump could realistically deliver as president, possibly because it was a fresh statement of his desire to forge closer links with the authoritarian government of Russia led by President Vladimir Putin, and “find common ground” in the fight against IS and in Syria policy. 
 
 A short while before Mr Trump’s speech, Hillary Clinton, campaigning in the scrappy, blue-collar city of Scranton, Pennsylvania, preemptively mocked her rival for taking so long to reveal his counter-terror plans, saying that his secret is that “he has no plan”. Mrs Clinton was joined in Scranton by the vice-president, Joe Biden, who condemned Mr Trump’s praise for authoritarian leaders, saying that the businessman “would have loved Stalin”, and joked that Mrs Clinton had forgotten more than Mr Trump and his entire foreign policy staff ever knew about geopolitics. 
 
 Real Cold War veterans may be forgiven for finding the 2016 election a little odd. The party of Eisenhower and Reagan has nominated a man who calls looting of foreign assets the highest priority for America in war, and who sucks up to Russia. The Democrats are running on their candidate’s national-security credentials. Meanwhile Mr Trump—judged simply as a man standing on a stage—sounds angrier and unhappier every day. This election is not about to grow more inspiring. ||||| WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump says that as president he would end "our current strategy of nation-building and regime change" because they don't work. His dislike for nation-building is shared by many, including none other than the target of his criticism, President Barack Obama. 
 
 In fact it was Obama's predecessor, Republican George W. Bush, who committed the U.S. to large-scale nation-building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama discarded that strategy while trying to keep enough U.S. influence there to prevent those two countries from crumbling. Obama's approach may not have worked, but it's not Bush-like "nation-building." 
 
 And while the Republican presidential nominee argued against nation-building in a foreign policy speech Monday, he advocated for something even more grandiose: seizing Iraq's oil wealth in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion in 2003 that toppled Saddam Hussein. 
 
 "I have long said that we should have kept the oil in Iraq," he said in Youngstown, Ohio. "I said, 'Keep the oil. Keep the oil. Keep the oil. Don't let somebody else get it.'" It would have required U.S. troops to protect the oil, he said, but the benefit would have been clear today. 
 
 "If we had controlled the oil like I said we should, we could have prevented the rise of ISIS in Iraq, both by cutting off a major source of funding and through the presence of U.S. forces necessary to safeguard the oil and vital infrastructure products necessary for us to have the oil." 
 
 Rather than nation-building, this would have been nation-grabbing, making Iraq a de-facto American colony. 
 
 In the final months of his administration, Bush negotiated an agreement with the Iraqi government that called for all U.S. troops to leave the country by December 2011. Obama stuck to that schedule, believing that the Iraqis needed to stand on their own while the U.S. turned its attention to other pressing needs at home and abroad, what he called "nation building at home." Obama, supported by his first secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, saw Bush's nation-building effort as a proven failure. 
 
 Iraqi politics, however, never overcame sectarian divisions, undermining the Iraqi army and leaving an easy target for IS. 
 
 Trump is right that the Islamic State capitalized on the political and security vacuum in Iraq in 2014, but it's not clear that a long-term U.S. military occupation to hold and exploit Iraqi's oil resources would have led to a more stable outcome. 
 
 Trump says he would have used money from the sale of Iraqi oil to pay for the care of wounded soldiers and the families of those Americans killed in the war. 
 
 "This proposal by its very nature would have left soldiers in place of our assets," he said. "We would have had soldiers there guarding this valuable supply of oil. In the old days, when we won a war, to the victor belonged the spoils." 
 
 After major military victories, the 240-year-old United States has tended to pour money and aid back into countries it has fought to help re-establish governments and services. It was, in fact, a kind of nation-building approach. The U.S. still has troops in Germany and Japan, with the permission of those nations, but it never confiscated their natural resources. 
 
 In his speech, Trump said that as president he would discard "nation-building." In its place would be what he called a new approach, which he described simply as halting the spread of "radical Islam." He said that if elected he would convene an international conference on the topic and work closely with Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Russia, the NATO alliance and "all others who recognize this ideology of death that must be extinguished." 
 
 Trump also called Monday for "extreme" ideological vetting of immigrants seeking admission to the United States, vowing to significantly overhaul the country's screening process and block those who sympathize with extremist groups or don't embrace American values. 
 
 "Those who do not believe in our Constitution, or who support bigotry and hatred, will not be admitted for immigration into our country," Trump said. "Only those who we expect to flourish in our country — and to embrace a tolerant American society — should be issued visas." 
 
 Trump's proposals were the latest version of a policy that began with his unprecedented call to temporarily bar foreign Muslims from entering the country — a religious test that was criticized across party lines as un-American. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.
– Donald Trump delivered what one analyst calls a "surprisingly serious" speech on foreign policy and counterterrorism Monday—but serious may not equal coherent. Many analysts were taken aback by the mix of proposals in the speech, which included policies favored by the Obama and George W. Bush administrations, along with ideas dating back to the Cold War and some touches that were pure Trump. A roundup of reactions: Some elements of Trump's speech on the war on "radical Islamic terrorism" were familiar, but what was new was "alarming," according to the Los Angeles Times editorial board. His calls for a Cold War-style "ideological screening test" and a Commission on Radical Islam could be "catastrophically counterproductive," they write—and "would punish thoughts rather than deeds," as well as encourage newcomers to the US to conceal their beliefs. Former Bush administration official Peter Feaver tells the New York Times that he gives Trump credit for the "surprisingly serious" speech, but a striking amount of it "depends on counterterrorism ideas developed by the Bush administration." The "good parts are not new," and "the new parts are not good," he says. Robert Burns at the AP believes there was a lot more Obama than Bush in Trump's disdain for nation-building. Obama ditched Bush's large-scale projects in Iraq and Afghanistan while "trying to keep enough US influence there to prevent those two countries from crumbling," he writes, noting that Trump's argument that the US should have seized Iraq's oil isn't nation-building, it's "nation-grabbing." John Noonan, Jeb Bush's former national security adviser, tells NBC News that Trump is completely correct about Obama's contribution to the rise of ISIS, and not much else. "The rest of his foreign policy is an absolutely blathering jumble of nonsense," he says. "I can't in good conscience sign my name to it." At Politico, Nahal Toosi looks at the "extreme vetting" proposal that has replaced Trump's ban on Muslim immigration and finds numerous problems. She notes that focusing on regions with a "history of exporting terrorism" would include much of Europe, even if only Islamist-inspired terrorism is included. Trump seemed bored by much of his own speech and only seemed excited when congratulating himself on his prescience or accusing Hillary Clinton of "wanting to be 'America's Angela Merkel,'" per the Lexington column at the Economist. The article notes that real Cold War veterans will find this election very strange. "The party of Eisenhower and Reagan has nominated a man who calls looting of foreign assets the highest priority for America in war, and who sucks up to Russia," it says. Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post is equally scathing in his fact-checking of the speech. Kessler debunks claims, including the notion of an Obama "apology tour" in 2009, and notes that Trump was not an outspoken opponent of the Iraq War until well after it began—and that he has apparently forgotten that he "was a fervent advocate of intervening in Libya."