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.
Just What Is Trump Trying to Do in Syria?
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.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are on their way to the White House
Trump’s personnel choices seem designed to either reward personal loyalty or embody a certain perception of competence — the competence of generals who know how to give orders and of billionaires who know how to make money.
.. Failed politicians, in this view, need to be schooled. Never mind that the habits of command are not immediately transferrable to some of the main tasks in a democracy — persuasion, compromise and public policy innovation.
.. Failed politicians, in this view, need to be schooled. Never mind that the habits of command are not immediately transferrable to some of the main tasks in a democracy — persuasion, compromise and public policy innovation.
.. Apart from a few vivid campaign promises on immigration and infrastructure — which have also been renegotiated since the election — Trump has radical freedom of action. He owes no one, holds no definite ideology and will be forgiven even the worst heresies by his supporters
.. His large tax cuts and commitment to a balanced budget may force nondefense discretionary spending — only about 16 percent of the budget — to be a repeated blood donor, until it is pasty white and weak.
.. But who can possibly predict what will be in President Trump’s budget address to Congress in February? Who can know what Trump does not yet know himself? In the period between now and then, the identity of a presidential administration will be determined, in many areas from scratch.
.. He seems caught in a cycle: a few days on message, then a conspiratorial or bullying statement or tweet, then a scramble by Republicans to solicit intervention from “the family,” who give the president-elect the political equivalent of lithium and get him back on message before the next manic stage.
Trump’s one consistent policy: Chaos
it would seem the incoming Trump administration plans to handle its affairs — domestic and foreign — in a manner that meets the dictionary definition of a “rogue state” as one “that conducts its policy in a dangerously unpredictable way.”
.. According to foreign government accounts, Trump praised Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s campaign against drug users and dealers, which has killed at least 4,500 people in five months. And he hailed Kazakhstan dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev for his “fantastic success” that can be called a “miracle.”
.. Trump is now open to keeping the Paris climate pact, after calling climate change a hoax. He campaigned against Goldman Sachs as a symbol of corruption and is now stocking his administration with Goldman bankers. He pledged to reinstate waterboarding and to repeal Obamacare but is rethinking both. He riled supporters with a pledge to prosecute and imprison Hillary Clinton but has reconsidered. He dropped his pledge to ban Muslims or those from terrorism-prone countries from entering America in favor of better vetting of all immigrants. He now says his border wall may be a fence in parts, and he dropped his talk of mass deportation of illegal immigrants.
.. His nominee to be commerce secretary assures Americans that “tariffs are the last thing” to which the Trump administration would resort — only to be contradicted by Trump himself, who tweeted Sunday that here will “soon” be a 35 percent tariff on imports from companies that offshore jobs.
.. Some suggest that there is a method to Trump’s madness, that he is trying to make would-be adversaries think he is irrational and capricious, thereby making foes and rivals wary of pushing him too far. This is why North Korea’s Kim Jong Un gets a wide berth. On a lesser scale, this also underpinned Richard Nixon’s “Madman Theory” during the Vietnam War