Cheney told Pence he worries Trump’s foreign policy looks ‘more like Barack Obama than Ronald Reagan’: report

During a weekend retreat, former Vice President Dick Cheney expressed concerns to Vice President Pence over the Trump administration’s foreign policy, The Washington Post reported Monday.

The news outlet obtained a transcript of the March 9 conversation between the two leaders at the American Enterprise Summit in Georgia. Cheney took issue with President Trump’s views toward traditional allies such as NATO as well as his decisions to pull U.S. forces out of Syria and cancel large-scale military drills with South Korea.

{mosads}The former vice president reportedly told Pence that he worried U.S. allies were losing confidence in America.

“I worry that the bottom line of that kind of an approach is we have an administration that looks a lot more like Barack Obama than Ronald Reagan,” Cheney said, according to the Post.

Pence fiercely defended the president’s decisionmaking, the Post reported, arguing that he was fulfilling campaign pledges and maintaining America’s interests.

President Trump has roiled U.S. officials and traditional allies with his approach to foreign policy.

While he has earned praise for his efforts to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula and for his hard-line approach toward Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, he has caught allies off guard with some of his decisions.

U.S. and international leaders expressed concern when Trump abruptly announced in December that U.S. troops would leave Syria. The administration has since placed conditions on the withdrawal and said a small force would remain in the region.

Trump stoked controversy with a number of other decisions, including the relocation of the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, his criticism of NATO and the United Nations, and his warm rhetoric toward leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

In June, Trump became the first American president to meet face to face with the sitting leader of North Korea, and he has held two in-person summits in a push to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. That move has been met with cautious optimism, though Democrats in particular have criticized Trump for offering Kim an international platform.