In 1987 Trump was featured in this article and I'm not sure why we aren't talking about it.
So what is the deal Trump thinks can be done? What is the Trump Plan?
It’s a deal with the Soviets. We approach them on this basis: We both recognize the nonproliferation treaty’s not working, that half a dozen countries are on the brink of getting a bomb. Which can only cause trouble for the two of us. The deterrence of mutual assured destruction that prevents the United States and the USSR from nuking each other won’t work on the level of an India-Pakistan nuclear exchange. Or a madman dictator with a briefcase-bomb team. The only answer is for the Big Two to make a deal now to step in and prevent the next generation of nations about to go nuclear from doing so. By whatever means necessary.
“Most of those [pre-nuclear] countries are in one form or another dominated by the U.S. and the Soviet Union,” Trump says. “Between those two nations you have the power to dominate any of those countries. So we should use our power of economic retaliation and they use their powers of retaliation and between the two of us we will prevent the problem from happening. It would have been better having done something five years ago,” he says. “But I believe even a country such as Pakistan would have to do something now. Five years from now they’ll laugh.”
“You think Pakistan would just fold? We wouldn’t have to offer them anything in return?”
“Maybe we should offer them something. I’m saying you start off as nicely as possible. You apply as much pressure as necessary until you achieve the goal. You start off telling them, ‘Let’s get rid of it.’ If that doesn’t work you then start cutting off aid. And more aid and then more. You do whatever is necessary so these people will have riots in the street, so they can’t get water. So they can’t get Band-Aids, so they can’t get food. Because that’s the only thing that’s going to do it—the people, the riots.”
“But what about the French?” I ask Trump. “They—”
“I’d come down on them so hard,” he says. “Because I think they’ve been the worst example of—”
“But they already have the bomb. Do you think they’ll give it up?”
“Well, I tell you if they didn’t give it up—”
“Look, they blew up the Greenpeace ship—”
“They’ve got the bomb, but they don’t have it now with the delivery capability they will have in five years. I f they didn’t give it up—and I don’t mean reduce it, and I don’t mean stop, because stopping doesn’t mean anything. I mean get it out. If they didn’t, I would bring sanctions against that country that would be so strong, so unbelievable... ”
OK, I didn’t say the Trump Plan was a sophisticated diplomatic document. It’s a little crude at this point. It’s a vision of a deal. It doesn’t have the imprimatur of the military geniuses who came up with Dense Pack. Think of it as a kind of Modest Proposal.