FOREIGN POLICY/POLAND/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Trump cast himself as a defender of Western values in a clash of civilizations during a dark and confrontational speech in Warsaw on Thursday [7-6-17], rebuking the news media, American intelligence agencies and Barack Obama during his visit to the European capital most hospitable to his right-wing nationalist message.
Once again breaking with tradition by attacking American leaders and institutions while abroad, Mr. Trump told a friendly Polish crowd, including loyalists the governing party had bused in from the more-conservative countryside, that ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ threatened ‘our civilization and our way of life.’
In Warsaw, a city rebuilt after it was razed by the Germans in World War II, the president declared rhetorical war on a broad array of foreign and domestic forces that he said were aligned against him, even criticizing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in his strongest terms to date, before their first face-to face meeting, in Hamburg, Germany, on Friday.
But the blunt force of his words was not matched by new specifics. Pressed about Russian interference in the American election, he said that ‘nobody really knows’ if other countries might have been involved. He also vowed a ‘very severe’ response if North Korea escalated its military threat, but he did not go into detail.”
-Glenn Thrush and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Donald Trump, in Poland, Urges West to ‘Defend Our Civilization’,” The New York Times online, July 6, 2017