Elliott Abrams sounds off on Steve Bannon, Trump’s about-face on Syria and the boss he almost had.
No one really knew what Trump’s foreign policy was before the Syrian strike, and it’s even less clear now—“unpredictable” is the most anyone’s come up with. “It matters,” Abrams warns when I ask him whether people should care that they don’t know what the president stands for on any given day.
.. there was always a conflict inherent in that line about not getting involved in all of these things on the one hand and ‘Make America Great Again’ on the other, because making America great, to me, is going to require some involvement around the world,” Abrams says.
.. Tillerson, a former oil-company CEO who has failed to impress many in the Washington foreign policy establishment during his first few months on the job
.. Abrams chided Tillerson for insisting that last week’s strikes didn’t represent a change in posture or policy: “It certainly changes our posture in the sense that we’ve now said, ‘We will attack you if you use chemical weapons,’”
.. “It’s not true that having lots of great press coverage makes you an effective secretary of state,” Abrams says. “The mistake is thinking that the converse is not true. That is, that having zero press coverage or good press coverage makes you an effective secretary.”
.. “There’s this sort of view out there he never listens, but he listened to Tillerson,”
.. “You just hope to get everybody through before the August recess.
.. Abrams, a man who’s got both the Iran-Contra affair and the Iraq War on his résumé.