One week after the missile strike, we still don’t know what it was meant to accomplish.
Effective signaling in foreign policy and warfare is both vital and no simple matter, as every president discovers.
.. In the annals of pinprick strikes, Trump’s Tomahawk attack now stands as the pinprickiest.
.. That strike was undertaken in response to the discovery of an Iraqi plot to assassinate former President George H. W. Bush during a visit to Kuwait.
.. Iraq never again attempted to kill a U.S. president, and, indeed, never supported another terrorist attack against Americans
.. the Russians notified the Syrians, who reportedly moved their most important aircraft elsewhere before the strike. The very next day, Syrian airplanes were once again flying from the base to hit rebel targets.
.. from the perspective of international politics, the fact that the airstrip was in the use the next day was not negligible.
.. This attack possibly even eroded the chemical weapons taboo by convincing any would-be transgressors that the worst they could expect would be the loss of a small number of inessential aircraft after an advance warning—in other words, a slap on the wrist.
The clearest signal of all would have required a serious punitive attack on the regime itself, a step whose legality would be open to question and that would risk a dangerous escalation with Russia.
.. The fact that Trump chose the least aggressive option available suggests that the principal audience for the strikes was not in Damascus or Moscow, but in the United States.
.. So was the strike political kabuki
.. Sean Spicer suggested in a news briefing Monday that there was now open-ended U.S. commitment to intervene to stop the killing of civilians.
.. Rex Tillerson added to the confusion by issuing his own series of conflicting signals.
.. the era of Assad family rule was coming to an end—an assessment at odds with most military analysts’ views
.. H.R. McMaster .. suggested that the administration had embraced the goal of regime change in Syria
.. Nikki Haley won the sweepstakes by enunciating war aims more far-reaching than McMaster’s: It is a U.S. priority, she said, “to get the Iranian influence out” of Syria
.. historic conduit to the Shiite community in Lebanon.
.. Trump’s own rhetoric has both echoed and contradicted Haley, as he said on April 11 that “we’re not going into Syria” after asserting just days before that “we have a vital strategic interest in Syria.”
.. boasts of his unpredictability while showing no ability to think one step ahead.
Bannon’s Out. But Did H.R. McMaster Win?
in mid-March, General McMaster tried to fire Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council. Mr. Cohen-Watnick, a holdover from Michael Flynn’s aborted stint as national security adviser, complained to Mr. Bannon and Jared Kushner, who prevailed on Mr. Trump to have him reinstated.
The idea that the 30-year-old Mr. Cohen-Watnick should be senior director for intelligence programs — a position held by senior career C.I.A. officers in the Obama administration and others — is dubious. Furthermore, General McMaster’s decision to get rid of Mr. Cohen-Watnick was well within his pay grade.
.. A few days after his reinstatement, Mr. Cohen-Watnick was one of three White House staffers who facilitated a briefing to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes on the “incidental surveillance” of Trump campaign staff members, which Mr. Nunes used to distract news media and public attention from the committee’s investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to influence the outcome of the presidential election.
A little unpacking revealed how artlessly pretextual this distraction was: Mr. Nunes professed the need to learn new information about surveillance to warn the president, yet that very information was in the possession of the White House and accessible to Mr. Trump without Mr. Nunes’s intervention.
.. One defensible inference is that Mr. Trump wanted to keep a pliable ally as the White House’s principal liaison with the intelligence community.
To arrange Mr. Trump’s reversal of General McMaster’s dismissal of Mr. Cohen-Watnick, Mr. Bannon required no formal position on the National Security Council. Indeed, Mr. Cohen-Watnick’s other inside patron — Mr. Kushner — had no such position.
.. Rex W. Tillerson blithely channeled buzz phrases like “win-win solutions” and “mutual respect” in describing United States-China relations. The phraseology seemed to signal United States capitulation to China’s sphere-of-influence geopolitical stance
.. Matt Pottinger, the senior director for Asia at the National Security Council, had warned in a memo against using such language. The fact that no one seems to have paid him any heed suggests how little the council matters in the Trump White House.
.. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, implied it would be “silly” to advocate regime change due to the absence of practical alternatives. The next day, Nikki Haley, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, in an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council, struck a very different chord by condemning the regime and saying that the United States could take unilateral action should the Security Council fail to respond effectively. (Mr. Trump then dialed up his own language, saying his attitude toward Syria had “changed very much.”)
In each case, the stated position of one national security player did not mesh with that of another.
Among the National Security Council’s key tasks is to help the president arrive at a consensus on a given foreign policy issue by soliciting the views of different agencies and orchestrating compromises in formulating a clear and integrated approach.
.. And perhaps a lack of policy coordination is just the way it is in the Trump administration. But if that is the case, the situation calls into question the National Security Council’s very utility.
..
But for the institution to have real value, regardless of who the players are, Mr. Trump himself needs to respect it more than he apparently does.
Can a Free Mind Survive in Trump’s White House
Colonel McMaster had spent the first two years of the war at Central Command under General John Abizaid, trying to get their boss, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, to acknowledge that America was fighting an insurgency in Iraq. Rumsfeld refused to admit it, because it went against his high-tech approach to the global war on terror. He would fax McMaster pages from Che Guevara’s memoirs to prove that Iraq didn’t fit the classical definition.
.. McMaster believed that a counterinsurgency strategy—putting the focus on securing the population and bringing economic development, not just killing the enemy—could turn things around.
.. He sent his troops into the city and kept them there, establishing connections with local leaders and Iraqi Army units, gathering intelligence on the jihadis, providing security in the streets, and showing that the Americans—appearances throughout the country notwithstanding—were not abandoning Iraq to its warring factions.
.. it failed strategically because it could not resolve the basic struggle for political power between sectarian groups. As McMaster told me again and again, counterinsurgency is eighty per cent political.
.. He could also be tough on his men, who did not universally love him.
.. McMaster was too intellectually rambunctious for his own good.
.. Lieutenant General McMaster has a lot of faith in American power, especially military power.
.. I imagine that he would shake his head over the conspiracy theories about Muslims that held Flynn spellbound.
.. I wasn’t surprised to learn from a mutual friend that McMaster considered his new boss’s ban on refugees and immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries to be heinous and self-defeating.
The national-security adviser has to master three fundamental things.
- He has to stay on top of fast-moving events around the world while helping to develop long-term American strategy across regions and issues.
- He has to allow the views of the key national-security officials in Washington to reach the President in an honest and independent way.
- And he has to win the trust of the President himself
.. Will he have the bureaucratic skill to outmaneuver the long knives of Steve Bannon and his shadow National Security Council?
General H.R. McMaster Fans Say They Would Follow Him Anywhere
Those who have served with and worked alongside Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, President Trump’s new national security adviser, describe a brilliant leader and military strategist they would follow anywhere.
.. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who recommended McMaster for the position, also served under him in Iraq. Cotton submitted his resignation from the army in 2007, partly because he was passed over for a promotion to a one-star general. He later rescinded that resignation to deploy to Afghanistan.
“H.R. McMaster is one of the finest combat leaders of our generation and a great strategic mind. He is a true warrior scholar, and I’m confident he will serve both the president and the country well,” he said.
.. Friends also say he is honorable.
“He is brilliant and principled. He speaks truth to power and that has occasionally rubbed some of his peers and superiors the wrong way,” said Collins.
.. McMaster wrote the book on military commanders speaking truth to power, which some say could cause him to collide with others at the White House.
.. “He has a forceful personality. He doesn’t suffer fools well. If he thinks somebody’s wrong, he won’t hesitate to say so,” Fitzpatrick added.
.. Fitzpatrick predicts McMaster will get along with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who reportedly had battled over political appointments with former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, a retired army lieutenant general.
“They’re kind of birds of a feather. … I think he’ll play well with [Secretary Rex] Tillerson at the State Department. But others in the White House — that’s the big question. How well they play with him is maybe the question.”
.. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-AZ) said in a statement, “I could not imagine a better, more capable national security team than the one we have right now.”