At the hundred-day mark of the administration I was invited by a news outlet to write an op-ed and give the administration a grade for its foreign and security policy. I began the piece by observing that we were all still here, which belied the worst fears that had been suggested during the campaign and transition. And I grudgingly admitted that the administration had clawed its way up to accepting much that I thought should have been obvious: that China was not currently a currency manipulator; that NATO was not obsolete; that maybe Vladimir Putin sometimes did bad things.
I attributed a lot of that to the strong national security team that the president had set in place, a team that was not just strong for a Manhattan real estate developer, but would have been considered so for any president. And the president had wisely cleared the security policy decks with the removal of his war-of-civilizations prophet Steve Bannon from the National Security Council.
Mike Flynn, of course, was also gone. There was little mourning in the intelligence community when Flynn was asked to resign after only weeks on the job, and there was probably intelligence community leaking that poured oil on this fire. But Flynn was fired for lying to the vice president, and many of the leaks about his Russia connection could easily have been the by-product of internal White House maneuvering.
The president, typically, though, put the blame squarely on a version of the deep state when he tweeted two days after the dismissal, “Information is being illegally given to the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost by the intelligence community (NSA and FBI?). Just like Russia.”1
Flynn’s firing made the new national security adviser, Army lieutenant general H. R. McMaster, the last-arriving senior on the security team. Flynn in his Army career may have been an American hero, but I knew few who thought him a good fit for the national security adviser role, and almost everyone I knew thought that the president had traded up with McMaster.
As an Army major, H.R. had literally written the book on “truth to power,” turning his Ph.D. thesis at the University of North Carolina into 1997’s bestselling Dereliction of Duty, an indictment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and national leadership for the lies that led to Vietnam—a historical account studied in the late 1990s by a generation of American officers, including me.
By then McMaster had already earned a solid combat reputation by leading an armor troop during the Gulf War in the Battle of 73 Easting (named for a map reference), where his small unit (nine Abrams tanks and twelve Bradley Fighting Vehicles) destroyed some seventy-five Iraqi armored vehicles in just over twenty minutes.2 He later added to that reputation with a successful counterinsurgency effort in and around Tal Afar in western Iraq after the Iraq War.
McMaster was a powerful intellect in the Army and so true to his beliefs that he irritated some and, as the story goes, occasionally needed the intervention of appreciative seniors to advance in rank. I had not met him often; in late 2008 he visited me in my CIA office for an extended discussion on a fact-finding effort for Dave Petraeus, who was then taking over Central Command (Iraq and Afghanistan and a lot more). Years later, H.R. and I were actually onstage together for a security conference in New York City the day before President Trump’s inauguration. I thought he was an impressive intellect, knowledgeable and thoughtful.
He would have to be . . . and strong, too. The president still had a great deal of affection for the now departed Flynn, with whom he had obviously bonded during the campaign. Flynn at the podium during the Republican convention in July joining in the chant to “lock her up” sent a massive shock wave through the active and retired officer corps, but only endeared him to Trump. The president ultimately fired Flynn for misleading Vice President Pence, but he did so reluctantly. He sat on that information for two weeks and moved on it only after the Washington Post made it public.3
So McMaster would have to build his own relationship with a president for whom he was not the first choice. Indeed, he wasn’t even the second choice, as former Navy SEAL Admiral Bob Harward (who was close to Defense Secretary Mattis) had turned down the position. Still, it would be up to McMaster to build the bridge between the (broadly international) national security departments and agencies and the (America First) circle of family and friends around the president.
He would also have to deal with an NSC staff that he had not selected, that had some residual loyalties to his predecessor, and that he soon discovered he did not have a totally free hand to change. It wasn’t until August that he was able to move his too junior/too inexperienced/too disruptive senior director for intelligence programs, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, who had successfully blunted earlier attempts by McMaster by appealing to Bannon, Jared Kushner, and, through them, to the president himself.4
At the same time, McMaster had to clean up after one of the weirdest memos in the history of the NSC, a thirty-five-hundred-word screed titled “POTUS and Political Warfare,” written by Flynn holdover and Trump campaign loyalist Rich Higgins in the NSC’s strategic planning office. The informal memo condemned the warfare against the president’s agenda by an unholy alliance of “deep state actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans” and then described “hate speech narratives [as] non-random, coordinated, and fully interoperable escalations of cultural Marxist memes” that were being spread by players that “include the European Union, the UN, and the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe], the OIC [Organisation of Islamic Cooperation] and the International Muslim Brotherhood.” Higgins also reminded his readers that for the United States, “As a Judaeo-Christian Culture, forced inclusion of post-modern notions of tolerance is designed to induce nihilistic contradictions that reduce all thought, all faith, all loyalties to meaninglessness.”
The memo seemed crazy and is hard to follow for anyone not steeped in the patois of alt-right nationalist conspiracy theories. Indeed, there were reports that Higgins’s manifesto seemed to echo right-wing blogger Mike Cernovich, a bitter critic of McMaster and his alleged globalism. There were even suggestions in the press that McMaster may have discovered Higgins’s memo in a search for whoever was leaking inside NSC information to Cernovich.5 Higgins was finally shoved out, but his presence on the NSC for half a year (and Foreign Policy suggested that the president and Donald Jr. supported his being there) indicated how big a challenge McMaster faced.
The NSC historically has had its share of eccentrics, but Bannon, Cohen-Watnick, Higgins, and this memo suggested a level of weirdness rarely seen before, with predictable results on the smooth flow of information, including intelligence. Until Cohen-Watnick was finally axed, the NSC’s senior director for intelligence programs had a fully reciprocated hate-hate relationship with the nation’s premier intelligence service. And some powerful people in the White House didn’t seem to mind!
And while he was getting his staff up to functioning normally, McMaster would have to impose a disciplined process on a president who was notoriously spontaneous and more trusting of personal relationships than finished staff work. Of all the members of what the press came to call the “axis of adults,” McMaster was the most junior, and not sitting atop a powerful bureaucracy like Jim Mattis across the river at the Pentagon. Lacking the personal gravitas of previous occupants of his West Wing corner office like Kissinger, Brzezinski, Powell, Scowcroft, and Jones, McMaster was dependent on the goodwill of a mercurial president. Hence a tendency to describe his task as one of complete service to his boss: “There’s nobody there to control the President” or “keep him on the reservation. We’re there to . . . help him advance his agenda.”6
That turned the normal policymaking process a bit on its head. Clearly the personality and preferences of any president matter, but in this administration the NSC process seemed more harnessed to simply implementing the axioms and even mythologies of the president rather than teeing up truly strategic choices.
Beyond his relationship with the president, McMaster would also have to synchronize, harmonize, deconflict, and occasionally direct the powerful personalities heading the national security departments and agencies. The most powerful personality was retired Marine general Jim Mattis, “Mad Dog” Mattis to the president, but better described by those who knew him as “the warrior monk.” Mattis was unmarried, thoughtful, well read, steeped in history, and more akin to General George C. Marshall than to the president’s frequently invoked George S. Patton, the cartoon image of an aggressive combat commander.
Like Marshall, Mattis was all about the prudent use of American military power only when necessary and then only in concert with the other tools of American power and influence. Mattis had displayed his internationalist instincts during his confirmation hearings. While on active duty as commander of Central Command, he famously complained to a congressional committee that if the State Department budget were to be cut, he would “need to buy more ammunition.”7
Respectful of diplomacy (as well as talent and experience), Mattis wanted former ambassador Anne Patterson to be his under secretary for policy. Anne had been ambassador in some of the world’s toughest spots: El Salvador, Colombia, Pakistan, Egypt. I knew her best from her time in Pakistan, where we routinely huddled on the secure phone on how to deal with al-Qaeda in the region. She was knowledgeable and tough and seemed to be doing well in the vetting process until the “religious warriors” in the White House and some conservatives in the Senate nixed the choice for her work while in Cairo with the Muslim Brotherhood—which headed up the duly elected government of Egypt at the time.8
Mattis used and appreciated intelligence. Shortly after his retirement in 2013 our paths crossed at the Marine Corps Exchange just outside of Washington. He walked across the near-empty store to reintroduce himself and to thank me for the work the Agency had done supporting him even though by then I had been out of government for over four years.
At the Department of State, Rex Tillerson, chief executive officer of energy giant ExxonMobil, seemed an equally substantive choice. Few in Washington policy circles knew him personally, but he came with the public endorsement of former secretaries of state James Baker and Condoleezza Rice and former secretary of defense Bob Gates (the consulting firm of Gates, Rice, and former national security adviser Steve Hadley had also been an adviser to Exxon).9
I said at the time that those endorsements were good enough for me because I feared (perhaps like Gates, Rice, Hadley, and Baker) that the summer’s “never Trump” letter-writing campaign had severely depleted the available Republican foreign policy bench.
I may have been too hasty in accepting the endorsements of even such a prestigious quartet. Within the year Tillerson seems to have alienated both the White House and his own department. It appears that he actually did call the president a “fucking moron” following a meeting on Afghanistan and then had to endure a public challenge about his and the president’s IQs.10 In the State Department, important posts are unfilled, veteran foreign service officers are departing in record numbers, applications are down nearly 40 percent, and the secretary seems willing to accept losing a quarter of his budget.
It was always a given that Tillerson would need help navigating his sprawling C Street empire, and he selected Elliott Abrams to be his deputy. I knew, liked, and respected Elliott from the George W. Bush administration, where he handled the NSC portfolio for the Middle East and later for global democratization. He was a tough neocon, a staunch supporter of Israel, and a solid Washington hand.
Abrams managed his way through the process to what was described as a positive interview with the president only to be rejected afterward because of an article he had written on Trump the previous May. Elliott had not signed any of the “never Trump” letters, and his piece in the conservative Weekly Standard, “When You Can’t Stand Your Candidate,” was less harsh on Trump than most of the genre. No matter. The thin-skinned new president crossed him from the list.11 It was yet another sign of how the White House’s obsession with loyalty would complicate already difficult questions.
Marine general John Kelly was widely applauded as an excellent choice to head up the Department of Homeland Security. A towering combat leader, he had completed his active service as head of Southern Command, responsible for the Western Hemisphere south of Mexico. I had known John from attending mass with him on Sundays at the small chapel of the Washington Navy Yard and serving on the board of a D.C.-based investment firm with him. On a train ride to visit one of our subsidiaries in New Jersey after his announcement but before his confirmation, I congratulated John on his appointment and said that his record in SOUTHCOM suggested that he understood that real border security for America was best premised on improving the quality of life in Central America rather than on building a wall along the Rio Grande. He didn’t actually respond to the observation, and as time went on I came to believe that John was more sympathetic to the president, especially on immigration and border security, than I first believed. He also seemed to share the president’s disdain for Congress.
If John was softening any presidential positions, it was hard to detect and was clearly being done in private. When he attempted as much in public—as when he told Democrats that candidate Trump’s views on border security were “uninformed,” and then told Fox News that the president’s views had “evolved”—the president was reported as “fuming” and shot back with, “The Wall is the Wall, it has never changed or evolved from the first day I conceived of it.”12
The president’s choice for homeland security adviser was Tom Bossert, a highly regarded veteran of the George W. Bush administration, and Tom in turn selected Rob Joyce as his right-hand man for cyber security. Joyce had been my pick to run TAO—Tailored Access Operations, NSA’s elite hackers—when I was director there, and it was hard for me now to think of a more qualified individual by background, skill, or personality to be the White House cyber security coordinator. A career NSAer, Joyce would know how to get accurate cyber intelligence as the White House charted a cyber way forward.
All in all, this looked like a very impressive team. And although several of these officers went out of their way to say they were there only to serve the president, most people around town were of the belief that these folks were there not only to correct some of the shortcomings of the previous administration but also to put some clear restraints on the new one. There would be opportunities to demonstrate that.
First was Syria and ISIS, where the choice was pretty clear: accelerate the three-year-old Obama effort to defeat ISIS militarily. This truly was “Obama plus,” so it was more than a little unfair and historically inaccurate for Trump to claim after the fall of Raqqa that ISIS hadn’t been on the run before because “you didn’t have Trump as your president.”13
But as president, Mr. Trump did push operational decision making down to tactical commanders, did make complex rules of engagement more straightforward, and did commit necessary resources. The result was the accelerated destruction of the physical Islamic caliphate. But there seemed to be considerably less effort and intellectual energy on the “what then?,” although that would seem to be one of the core intelligence and policy questions of the conflict.
Secretary of Defense Mattis threw a tantalizing one-liner into one of his press availabilities when he talked about the “stabilization phase” of the counter-ISIS campaign. That’s the part where you stick around to change the facts on the ground so that you don’t have to go back and kill people again later.
A critic might call that nation building. It doesn’t have to be, but by any name it is hardly consistent with candidate Trump’s hit-them-hard-and-fast-and-leave gospel on the campaign trail. Only half-jokingly did I refer to the secretary’s press intervention as the first televised NSC meeting ever. I think he was trying to stimulate a necessary conversation, but nothing came of his remark, at least not publicly. A few months later, Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert was asked about the future of Syria, and he reemphasized that it was not important that Assad go first, that ISIS was still job one, and that broader conversations were not useful now.
One of the broader conversations would eventually have to be what to do about Syrian/Iranian/Hezbollah forces supported by Russian airpower “drafting” on allied military success to move eastward in Syria and down the Euphrates River valley to build what looks suspiciously like an Iranian-Shia land bridge from Tehran to Beirut. It also means that the rump Syria we all expected to come out of this conflict, the future Alawistan (so named for Assad’s sect), is going to be a lot bigger than we previously calculated.
There may be serious NSC discussions about all of this, but there has been nil heard publicly, and, frankly, these are not the kinds of questions that naturally engage the president or about which he does much talking (or thinking).
During the campaign the president had said, “I don’t want to broadcast to the enemy exactly what my plan is,”14 and he repeatedly complained about the effort to retake Mosul as being too public. “Why don’t we just go in quietly, right? They used to call it a sneak attack.”15
Frankly, I always took those kinds of statements as suggesting that the candidate/president didn’t understand strategy (no one who did would actually propose a sneak attack on a heavily garrisoned/heavily mined city in the middle of a desert), or didn’t actually have a strategy, or feared saying much about his strategy for of fear opening it up to comment and criticism. Just like it’s easier to just say you’re rich than to open up your tax returns and answer questions.
It’s also easier for the administration to talk about an operational success in Syria, the retaliatory Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM) strike in response to Assad’s use (again) of chemical weapons. Good marks for doing what should have been done more than three years ago.
And the administration deserves extra credit for its indirect slap at the Russians in doing so. Despite all the rhetoric praising Putin and highlighting the goal of better relations with Russia, ten weeks into his administration President Trump punched Moscow’s closest Arab client in the mouth. And his secretary of state hammered Russia, the supposed guarantor of Syria’s chemical disarmament in 2013, as “complicit or simply incompetent in preventing Syria’s chemical gas attack.”16 At least the United States warned Russian forces at the airfield about the deadly American incoming.
The airfield attack hit a sweet spot in the president’s approach to the world and his own decision making. He took Assad’s affront personally, and his public reaction to the atrocity was genuine. He’s also not inclined to admire problems very long before acting, and an American response (sea-launched cruise missiles) was at the ready and battle proven.
And quick, decisive action would powerfully differentiate him from his predecessor, a goal never far from the president’s mind. One cannot avoid the thought that there was more than a little about the Trump “brand” at work here.
CIA director Mike Pompeo has talked about the intelligence back story to the president’s decision. He recounts that he got an afternoon call from the president17 about the disturbing post-attack images coming out of Syria and a direction to “find out what happened.” Pompeo immediately assembled his own Agency team and experts from across the intelligence community to piece together the evidence, which, given the intelligence emphasis on Syria for the last six years, was likely abundant.
By the time of a scheduled cabinet meeting the next day, Pompeo could tell the president that the attack had indeed taken place and that the Syrian government had done it. And then the president turned to him to ask the question that sends a chill down the spine of any CIA director: “Are you sure?” A tough question always, and especially tough here since Pompeo would have known that a yes would prompt immediate and decisive American action.
Pompeo reports that he responded, “Mr. President, we have high confidence in our assessment.”
That was the same level of confidence that was in the Intelligence Community Assessment that the Russians had interfered in the American electoral process (see chapter 4). Good enough here to bomb, but not good enough there to convince the president of Russian malevolence.
Then again, the Syrian information was welcome, backing up an already preferred course of action. The Russian data was not welcome as it cut across a preferred narrative. All in all, a really bad sign for intelligence.
Director Pompeo outlined the Syrian sequence of events in front of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, an IC-friendly nonpartisan collection of public, business, private, and academic experts, and it was appropriately applauded by the group. It was an unarguable intelligence success. But there is nothing in the public record or later discussions about any larger questions being raised by the president or answered by the IC. Questions like: “Why do you think Assad did this? Is he cocky or desperate?” or “Where are the Russians on all this? What does it say about how far they’ll go with Assad?” or “How will the Iranians read this? Will they dismiss our strike as a one-off or see it as something more important?”
That may have been discussed. I certainly hope so. And although it wasn’t exactly an intelligence question, there was a broader issue. How did this fit into the president’s overall foreign policy?
Candidate Trump had run on a platform of “America First,” an explicit and forceful rejection of the internationalism that had governed American policy for much of the past seventy-five years, a world where America often acted “for the good of the order” rather than narrowly defined national interests, and the candidate had been contemptuous of those he said allowed us to be played by an ungrateful global community. But the president himself did exactly that with the Syria strike (to the chagrin of some of his supporters), responding to Syria’s violation of an important international norm on chemical weapons.
It wasn’t a change in policy toward Assad or even the civilian deaths. There have been far more deaths inflicted by more conventional means, and the administration had already made it clear that Assad’s leaving was not job one. No, it wasn’t any of that. It was America, alone and uncompensated, without any formal international sanction or authorization or help, acting on behalf of broader principles.
Go figure.
I’ve talked to a lot of folks about decision making and the role of intelligence in the Trump administration. And although I don’t have access to NSC minutes or intelligence notes, the broader pattern has become pretty clear.
Discussion of a topic usually starts with a presidential statement or belief, firmly held if not especially well informed. Then follows a large-scale and long-term effort to better inform the president, to impress upon him the complexity of the issue, to review the relevant history, to surface more of the factors bearing on the problem, to raise second- and third-order consequences, and to explore the feasibility of subsequent moves down the board.
It’s not easy. The president is not a patient man. One press account quoted a Trump confidant as saying, “I call the President a two-minute man. The President has patience for a half page.”18
National Security Adviser McMaster (kind of) admitted as much. “The President,” he told an audience at the highly regarded Institute for the Study of War, “is not a policy wonk, at all. He’s a business person and what he demands is results. And what that has done is, it’s changed the way that we do things.” And one of the things changed was creating “succinct” summaries, five-page briefs, rather than sixty-page tomes.19
There is something inherently discomfiting in that. There are some problems that cannot be simplified. They are inherently complex.
Still, sometimes the magic works. The president began his August speech announcing his policy for Afghanistan by confessing, “My original instinct was to pull out—and, historically, I like following my instincts.”
And he really tried to. According to NBC News, in a July SITROOM meeting Trump showed his frustration by complaining about NATO allies, asking how the United States could tap into Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, and repeatedly saying the top U.S. general there should be fired.20 He even allowed his staff to solicit a plan from security company Blackwater’s founder, Erik Prince, and financier Stephen Feinberg to outsource the war to private contractors under overall CIA control.21 I suspect that concept was a tar baby for which the Agency showed little enthusiasm.
In the end Mr. Trump admitted that “all my life I’ve heard that decisions are much different when . . . you’re President of the United States. So I studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle. After many meetings, over many months.”
Which was how he introduced a speech I thought was worth listening to.
First of all, it was the product of “regular order,” the outcome of the traditional deliberative process of the American security establishment. Intelligence got to level-set the picture based on the best available information, and then the departments and agencies weighed in with their views, which were then adjudicated in various meetings within the National Security Council structure. Options were developed, debated, and held up against the intelligence. They were discussed with the president. He gave guidance. The options were sharpened. He made a decision. And then he announced that decision in a twenty-five-minute speech rather than in 140 characters.
That was a first for the Trump administration and a far cry from his more routine outbursts like the presidential bomblet at a press op where he suggested there were U.S. military options in Venezuela. That one had the Pentagon redirecting all follow-up questions back to the White House since they had no idea what the president was talking about.
That episode also had me wondering how this administration vetted what its senior officials were saying. In the Bush administration, CIA certainly vetted all formal speeches very carefully, especially after the president was allowed to misspeak about Iraq’s pursuit in Africa of yellowcake, a precursor for uranium fuel for reactors. The charge was contained in sixteen words in Mr. Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, and forever after we referred to reviewing major speeches in sixteen-word batches. And we took the review very seriously. Fundamentally we were saying that if we objected, we couldn’t back up this or that passage.
From the outside looking in, there doesn’t appear to be a whole lot of that going on with much of what President Trump says. But the Afghanistan speech was different: deliberate, thoughtful, more comprehensive. With regard to substance, the president announced that he was staying the course in Afghanistan and suggested that troop levels would be increased. That’s the path the Obama administration was on and almost certainly would have followed had it not decided to defer this decision (appropriately in my view) to the incoming administration.
Both Trump and Obama had gone to school on the ill-advised decision to leave Iraq in 2011, but President Trump went one better, announcing that future steps would be based on conditions on the ground rather than on an arbitrary timetable, a perennial issue with the Obama administration.
The speech would also have been the path recommended by most of those folks (internationalists, like me) who signed those letters in the summer of 2016 saying that populist, isolationist Donald Trump would be a danger to American security if elected. His decision cut against his campaign rhetoric and the policy preferences of economic nationalists like his just-exiled strategic adviser Steve Bannon. More credit to the president.
Still, to critics, this was less a strategy than it was more of the same, a decision to hang on and hope. The president made multiple references to “winning” in Afghanistan, but never quite described what that would look like. Here we might have to accept the reality that “success” is simply an Afghanistan that has not deteriorated to the point where it constitutes a significant danger to the region and the United States—and that might require a continuous American effort as far forward as the eye could see despite the president’s downplaying efforts to construct democracy or change the way other people choose to live.
The most interesting parts of the president’s speech had to do with the broader region. He quite correctly criticized Pakistan for the duplicitous role it has been playing, supporting some American efforts while also working its own relationships with the Taliban and the notorious Haqqani network. That’s why many in the intelligence community tend to refer to Pakistan as the ally from hell and would happily have confirmed the pattern of Pakistani duplicity to the president.
The president threatened an immediate reduction in U.S. assistance if Pakistan did not move against terrorist safe havens on its territory. He also seemed to leave a big “watch this space” when it comes to his willingness to authorize unilateral American operations across the border if Pakistan did not act.
Equally interesting were the president’s comments about the positive role that India plays in Afghanistan and his invitation to India to do even more for Kabul. Pakistan views any Indian presence in Afghanistan as strategic encirclement by their longtime rival and have used that presence to justify their relationship with the Taliban. So if it sticks to these positions, the administration could be setting in motion a strategic realignment not just in the region but in America’s relationships with countries there.
One thing is certain, though. Whatever complaints the president wanted to make about the mess he inherited, this one was now his war.
Iran policy followed pretty much the same arc, but to a somewhat different conclusion.
As a candidate, Mr. Trump had called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, i.e., the Iran nuclear deal) “the stupidest deal of all time” and “one of the great dumb deals of our time.”22 In March, before AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), he promised, “My number-one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.”23
I hadn’t been a fan of the JCPOA; I thought we could have driven a harder bargain since the deal should have been more important to Tehran than it was to us. They were the ones desperate for sanctions relief. I also thought that the Obama administration had done a bit of a bait-and-switch when it came to selling Americans on how the deal handled Iranian missile testing, suspect weapon site inspections, and uncovering previous nuclear activities.
Still, Iran was considerably further away from a weapon with the deal than they had been without it. The number of centrifuges and the stockpile of enriched materials had been capped and some facilities disabled. Which was why I was more worried about Iran’s nuclear capacity after this deal when its various provisions aged off in about a decade.
And then there was everything else that Iran was doing in the region, like in Iraq (where Iranian-sponsored militias terrorized Sunnis), or in Syria (where Iran and its proxies were the ground force complement to Russian airpower), or in Yemen (where Iran arms and advises Houthi rebels), all contributing to a “Shia arc” running from Tehran through Iraq and Assad-controlled Syria on to Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon. That ascendency—along with ballistic missile tests, unlawful detention of Americans, arms shipments, the creation of a regional “Shia liberation” force, and provocative naval strutting in the Persian Gulf—constituted grounds for great American concern.
The Obama administration had too often stayed its hand on these questions, apparently for fear of jeopardizing the nuclear agreement that was the crowning achievement of Obama administration diplomacy. The Obama team also believed it was playing the long game. They did what they had to do to get the nuclear file off the table since no movement with Iran was possible with that unresolved. Then they planned to reintegrate Iran into the global community and allow American-Iranian relations to “normalize.” And all of that was to enable the ultimate goal, the administration’s much-desired retrenchment from the region.
Of course, that meant accepting growing Iranian influence. Late in the administration, President Obama told Tom Friedman of the New York Times that “the truth of the matter is that Iran will be and should be a regional power.”24 He later told Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, “The Saudis need to find an effective way to share the neighborhood.”25
I had my concerns, but all that did echo American policy pre-1979, before the Iranian revolution, when we relied on the twin pillars of a friendly Iran and a friendly Saudi Arabia to stabilize the Gulf region. It also reflected the reality that at the level of people and culture, Iran was inherently more pro-Western and inclusive than was the kingdom. But betting that Iranian evolution would trump the Iranian revolution, at least in the short term, felt a lot more like the triumph of hope than the product of experience.
Donald Trump would have none of it, of course—too historic, too nuanced, too strategic, too long-term—and made sure that his first overseas travel (in May) was to Saudi Arabia, Iran’s archenemy, where he fully embraced his Saudi hosts and comforted them and the fifty other Islamic states that had gathered with the promise that “America will not seek to impose our way of life on others. . . . We are not here to lecture—we are not here to tell other people how to live. . . . We must seek partners, not perfection.” The president also referred to Islam as on “one of the world’s great faiths,” a far cry from his campaign rhetoric about blocking that faith’s adherents from entering his country.26
And then, after enlisting Muslim-majority countries to take “the lead in combatting radicalization,” the president set out to paint the Iranians as the unmitigated forces of darkness in the region. “For decades, Iran has fueled the fires of sectarian conflict and terror . . . [giving terrorists] safe harbor, financial backing and the social standing needed for recruitment.” He called for “all nations of conscience . . . to isolate Iran, deny it funding for terrorism, and [in a thinly veiled call for regime change] pray for the day when the Iranian people have the just and righteous government they deserve.”
Sunni Arabs, especially in the Gulf states, were delighted to have America realigning itself squarely against Tehran. Some were so emboldened that in early June, two weeks after Trump left, they moved to aggressively isolate—diplomatically and physically—one of their own, Qatar, for being too accommodating to Iran; for condoning funding for Islamic fundamentalists (hardly unique among the Sunnis); for having a sometimes irritating television network (Al Jazeera); and (left unsaid) for being a little too competitive for influence in the region.
The president tweeted his immediate support and claimed that his desert visit was “already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!”27
His secretaries of state and defense were more cautious, perhaps because they were more aware of the complexities of Gulf politics or maybe just more aware that the center of American combat power in the Gulf was Al Udeid Air Base just outside the Qatari capital of Doha. The base had been built by the emir of Qatar twenty years ago and now hosted some ten thousand Americans.
Tillerson broke formation with the president by offering to act as peacemaker: “We certainly would encourage the parties to sit down together and address these differences, and we—if there’s any role that we can play in terms of helping them address those, we think it is important that the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] remain unified.”28
Two weeks later Tillerson’s State Department piled on: “The more that time goes by, the more doubt is raised about the actions taken by Saudi Arabia and the UAE.” And then came this hammer: “At this point, we are left with one simple question: were the actions really about their concerns regarding Qatar’s alleged support for terrorism? Or were they about the long-simmering grievances between and among the GCC countries?”29
Wow. Compare that with the president’s original, spontaneous Qatar tweet. And from the same government, no less.
There were other challenges reconciling presidential rhetoric with complex regional realities. Every three months Mr. Trump had to decide to certify the Iranian nuclear deal, a hook given the president when Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, inserted that provision into law in 2015.
In a stormy meeting in July, Trump reluctantly agreed to his second certification, but angrily demanded that Secretary of State Tillerson and the rest of the national security team build the case for decertification next time it came due, in October.30
He was done signing off on his predecessor’s signature diplomatic achievement. Indeed, that may have been what so energized him about the issue. In that “taking Trump seriously but not literally” meme, the president intended to deal with the Iranian nuclear deal literally. He actually intended to dismantle it.
And that even though few on his national security team thought it was a good idea. Like ripping up the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris Agreement on climate change and pushing what for all the world looked like a Muslim immigration ban, this looked like coming up with a solution to a problem we didn’t have. Everyone wanted to push back on Iran’s hegemonic reach and no one was enthused about aspects of the nuclear deal sunsetting, but the deal in place was capping Iran’s current nuclear ambitions. Why mess with that? Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joe Dunford said as much to the Senate Armed Services Committee, noting that remaining in the nuclear deal was in the national security interests of the United States.31 Secretary Tillerson conceded that he and the president “have differences of views on things like JCPOA and how we should use it.”32
National Security Adviser McMaster was publicly very supportive of the president’s hard line, but CNN reported one meeting with Democratic senators where McMaster hinted that he didn’t think decertifying [was] the right way to go and seemed to be searching for alternative paths.33
Oddly, the cabinet member most vocal in his public condemnation of Iran was Mike Pompeo, the director of CIA, who complained in July (at the time of Trump’s second certification) about Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA. “How many of you have had a bad tenant?” he asked a crowd in Aspen. “You know they don’t pay the rent, you call them and then they send a check, and it doesn’t clear and they send another one. . . . This is Iranian compliance today. Grudging, minimalist, temporary with no intention of really [doing] what the agreement was designed to do.” Pompeo condemned “continued appeasement” and predicted “a fundamental shift” when the administration got its strategy in place.34
It would be Pompeo’s folks at CIA who would make the intelligence judgments about the status and effects of the JCPOA. There was no doubt that they would document and condemn Tehran’s aggressive expansionism, and they would not hesitate to point out the issues that would ultimately emerge when elements of the deal aged off in the next decade.
But on the core issue of Iranian compliance today, bad tenant or not, their view would be that Iran had committed no “material breach” of the agreement; there had been no violation of a provision essential to achieving the purpose of the treaty—the slowing of Iran’s march to a weapon.
CIA analysts were in a curious position. They had really been integral to the Obama administration’s negotiations with Tehran. Senior negotiators turned to them for the status of the Iranian program; an understanding of Iran’s negotiating positions; a description of the critical paths on which Iran would have to depend to achieve weapons status; and what would be essential in the way of inspections and intelligence to ensure compliance. Now these same people were being asked to give a grade not just to the agreement and Iranian compliance, but, in a way, to their own work in terms of the baseline they had set and the standards on which they had insisted. It wasn’t quite circular or incestuous, but it was going to require real evidence and not just anger or attitude to get them to move off their position. And since there wasn’t evidence of any violations that met the standards of material breach, I feared for a while there would be a real crisis between the White House and Langley if the president insisted there had been such a violation.
In the event, he didn’t. The president refused to certify the deal, but not because the Iranians materially breached the JCPOA. He simply declared that the agreement was no longer in the strategic interests of the United States (which Senator Corker’s 2015 bill allowed him to do), dutifully bashed the Iranians, and then, despite the tough rhetoric, declined to do much more, other than effectively putting the Iranians on notice that the nuclear deal would not inhibit him in responding to Tehran’s aggression elsewhere. In effect, he was telling the Iranians, “If you want to break the deal, go ahead and break the deal. The deal’s not that important to me.”
That had the effect of freeing the United States to go after all the other things the Iranians were doing, but for now, little would change. The president did not actually impose additional sanctions on Iran (which he had authority to do), but merely tossed the question to Capitol Hill, where it was already agreed there would be no immediate action.
My sense was that the president had gotten to make his speech, fulfill a campaign promise, and publicly dissociate himself (à la Obamacare, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the Paris Agreement) from another key element of his predecessor’s legacy.
But from the outside looking in, it appears that a lot of folks in government—in Defense, in State, in the intelligence agencies—weren’t fans of blowing up the nuclear agreement. So knowing that the president wanted to make a tough speech that clearly painted him as being different from his predecessor, they spent several months devising a way for him to do that, but also to essentially leave the deal intact. It fit the overall pattern of an a priori presidential position followed by departments and agencies raising questions of complexities, linkages, history, follow-on effects, and the like. And it seems to have worked, at least for the moment.
But decertification set in motion processes beyond the White House’s control in which Congress; the Europeans, Russians, or Chinese, who are also parties to the deal; or the Iranians can make moves that break the near-term nuclear contract (which, again, was working and promised to be effective for at least several more years). It looks as if the Iranian street gets a vote, too, as deadly demonstrations against the regime erupted at the end of December.
For my nickel this was a move and a danger that we didn’t need.
President Trump is fond of saying that he inherited a mess. I usually slough that off to whining and transference. But in the case of North Korea, he has a point.
Within our traditional definition of acceptable risk, by the late Obama years, North Korea was on an arc to have a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching the United States within just a few years, a problem recognized and addressed, but not resolved, by the last three administrations. It wasn’t illogical, then, for the Trump administration to change the definition of acceptable risk. It just had to do so carefully.
I have a personal history with Korea, having served there twice, the last time in 1997–99, when I negotiated with the Korean People’s Army at the truce village of Panmunjom. Our side wasn’t trying to do much then, just some increased transparency and some confidence-building measures to prevent or contain incidents along the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, the most heavily fortified patch of land on the planet. We didn’t make much progress. The best we could do was to arrange the dignified return of the remains of some North Korean commandos who had intentionally blown themselves up in a midget submarine that had become disabled during an infiltration of the South.
At the time I marveled at the cognitive dissonance that my North Korean counterparts had to tolerate in order to say and believe the things they told me. In retrospect, though, I think I had my own hang-ups; I really underestimated how much they genuinely believed that I represented a society of undying enmity and abject perfidy. It wasn’t performance art on their part. They inhabited a system that took meaning, even existence, from that perception of enmity and perfidy.
So credit to team Trump for trying to deal with something everyone agrees is a pathetic, pathological, and truly irritating little gangster state.
The Trump team has certainly been focused, but even with all the energy of the past year—charged rhetoric, bashing the Obama administration’s “strategic patience,” multiple naval deployments, and multiple B-1 fly-bys, alternately leaning on and incentivizing China to do more—Kim Jong-un remains undeterred.
Even with an occasional presidential shout-out—Kim’s a “pretty smart cookie” and “I would be honored” to meet him—or signals of restraint like Pacific commander Harry Harris characterizing this as about changing minds, not regimes; or Secretary Tillerson working to convince the North Koreans that our goals are not maximalist; or Secretary Mattis’s very tough words being focused on actual threats from the North rather than on theoretical capabilities, Kim has been unresponsive.
All of which tends to confirm my belief and that of many intelligence veterans that North Korea is not about to give up its nuclear status. It might be possible to cap, slow, or even roll back some things or perhaps make a residual program more transparent and less prone to proliferation. No doubt Pyongyang would use the occasion to extort more assistance from the global community, and such an arrangement would be as fragile as it would be distasteful. There would always be the danger of the North Koreans cheating. On the other hand, there are no guarantees that the North Korea of Kim Jong-un survives forever, either. And despite charges that this is an irrational regime, this North Korea would truly be irrational to give up its current weapons entirely. They have seen what happened to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya when these weapons were not within reach.
Getting really granular information on Pyongyang has always been hard. During my time at CIA we rated it the toughest intelligence target on earth. Director Pompeo quickly launched a Korea mission center to sharpen focus and improve coordination (much like I had done with Iran and George Tenet had done to fight terrorism), but that didn’t diminish North Korea’s ruthlessly efficient state security services nor increase the limited number of technical targets in the country nor create an American diplomatic presence there.
So the North Koreans continue their inexorable march to strategic reach and the ability to threaten the United States with a nuclear weapon. In fact, the only thing that has changed much in the last year is that the North has more and longer-range missiles and more and more powerful bombs. In July 2017, North Korea successfully launched an intercontinental ballistic missile. It only went about six hundred miles, but its exaggeratedly high arc showed enough inherent energy for it to travel about four thousand miles with a normal trajectory, enough to reach targets in Alaska, but not (yet) the Lower 48. In September the country detonated what it claimed was a hydrogen bomb. It certainly was big. Estimates ranged up to 280 kilotons. And in November, Pyongyang demonstrated a missile with enough energy to range as far as the East Coast of the United States.
Despite Beijing’s embarrassment at Kim Jong-un’s flouting the wishes of the Middle Kingdom, China has continued to abide his behavior rather than inflicting decisive diplomatic and economic pressure on the North. All of which reinforced the Trump administration’s instinct to amp up the pressure, particularly via presidential rhetoric, so we were treated to “Rocket Man,” “fire and fury,” and “totally destroy North Korea”—the last two in front of the UN General Assembly.35
Which alarmed a lot of folks like me who couldn’t remember any earlier period when we were counting on the leader of North Korea to have enough emotional maturity and geopolitical wisdom to ignore the taunts of an American president. And this North Korean leader was an isolated, ruthless thirty-something steeped in the national mythology created by his grandfather that the United States was one day going to come after him and his country.
The president’s secretaries of state and defense were consistently more measured in their words, often making the distinction between Kim’s having a nuclear arsenal and his threatening to use it. Here is Mattis coming out of the White House after the September nuclear test: “[W]e have the ability to defend ourselves and our allies, South Korea and Japan, from any attack, and . . . any threat to the United States or its territories, including Guam or our allies, will be met with a massive military response.”36
And both Mattis and Tillerson wanted to let diplomacy play out as long and as far as possible. Within a week of the president’s promise of “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” Tillerson signaled the North Koreans, “We continue to be interested in finding a way to get to a dialogue.”37
But by October the president was publicly dismissing diplomacy, negotiations, agreements, and financial assistance as foolish, failed experiments with Pyongyang, and announced that “only one thing will work” in dealing with North Korea.38 He didn’t further identify the “one thing,” but he didn’t have to.
Earlier that week, in front of all of the nation’s four-star combatant commanders and their spouses during a White House photo op, the president told reporters that the formal scene was the “calm before the storm.” Pressed for the meaning of his words, Mr. Trump cryptically replied, “You’ll find out.” With all the dueling hyperbole between Washington and Pyongyang, there seemed to be an ever-diminishing space for error between the two capitals. Even more concerning was the president’s not-so-veiled critique of his own military leadership: “Moving forward, I also expect you to provide me with a broad range of military options, when needed, at a much faster pace.”39
This was nowhere near the savage campaign taunting of “Lil’ Marco” or “Lyin’ Ted,” the treatment of Sean Spicer or the harsh commentary on Attorney General Jeff Sessions, but it was more important and more ominous. It was the president signaling that he was losing patience with the normal and healthy caution that people who are actually responsible for military action always have. This was his way of trying to pressure them to give him what he thinks he wants. One NSC veteran described it to me as what happens when workable military options cannot be made to fit fixed policy preferences.
For most of the summer and early fall, I had worried that the president could blunder us into war with his language. Now I was afraid he would order us to start one. And I didn’t take any comfort in late October when National Security Adviser McMaster told a Washington audience that the president “is not going to accept this regime threatening the United States with a nuclear weapon. He won’t accept it. So there are those who have said well what about accept and deter? Well accept and deter is unacceptable. And so this puts us in a situation where we are in a race to resolve this short of military action. . . . The only acceptable objective is denuclearization.”40 McMaster had already told Fox News that when it came to North Korea threatening America with nuclear weapons, the president “is willing to do anything necessary to prevent that from happening” (my italics).41
Senator Lindsey Graham made it even more stark, characterizing his conversation with the president this way: “If thousands die, they’re going to die over there. They’re not going to die here—and he’s told me that to my face.”42
I wasn’t the only one growing more nervous. Around this time, former CIA director John Brennan put the odds of war in Korea at 20 to 25 percent; Joel Wit, Korean expert and founder of the highly regarded website 38 North handicapped it at 40 percent; the head of the Council on Foreign Relations and former State Department and NSC senior Richard Haass came in at a disquieting 50/50.43
Even allowing for administration hyperbole and diplomatic posturing, even conceding that some of this could have been theater to press the Chinese to be more active against the North, I think the general fear, which I shared, was that the guardrails within the White House might not hold this time.
I wondered about the role of intelligence in all of this. Did the traditional assessment about the North’s determination still hold? At Aspen, DNI Coats had repeated the calm, sober assessment of North Korean motivation: “[A]nd there is some rationale backing his actions which are survival, survival for his regime, survival for his country.” He added that “the nuclear card in your pocket results in a lot of deterrence capability” and then listed Libya and Ukraine as examples of countries that had given up weapons programs and suffered for it.44
How was that communicated to the president? And how did he respond? What was said about the prospects for success? The consequences of failure? The dangers of overreach? What questions were being asked of intelligence? Did intelligence weigh in to shape the broad contours of strategy and perhaps bound expectations, or was it merely referred to as an enabler of specific actions already determined, CIA as action arm versus CIA the intelligence service creating the boundaries of logical policy?
CIA takes great pains to construct leadership profiles, personality studies of officials like Kim Jong-un. What did the profile say about the thirty-three-year-old and did that govern the president’s aggressive tweet storm against him (“Rocket Man,” “short and fat”), or was that more about “Trump being Trump,” or perhaps the president’s own intuition about how to make this particular deal?
And if the profile and the president’s approach were incompatible (even dangerously so), does anyone tell him? Perhaps not. The national security adviser and the president’s chief of staff go out of their way to remind us that they are not tweet minders.
The president’s instinct toward action, his impatience with process, his lack of interest in history, his focus on “winning,” his obsession with protecting the Trump brand (in this case toughness)—all that could conspire to create a very bad decision. Even “kinetic action light”—like shooting at a missile in flight or on the launchpad—could prompt North Korean action, endangering the twenty-five million inhabitants of greater Seoul (along with a couple hundred thousand Americans there), and it would certainly harden North Korean resolve to preserve their nuclear arsenal at any cost.
When I was in government, we used to refer to North Korea as a wicked problem. It’s not surprising the issue has been handed off from one administration to another. There simply aren’t any good answers here.
There are some problems in life for which there aren’t any solutions. And that seems to be an unacceptable formulation for this president.
Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Russia, China. There was no want of issues for the new administration, and there certainly was a great deal of visible activity as it worked to deal with them.
A friend of mine, a security veteran like myself, told me that the administration reminded him of an upside-down duck. Rather than a visible calm above the surface while paddling like hell beneath it, the administration is visibly frenetic (often stimulated by the president’s tweets), but there has been less evidence of much going on beneath the surface in terms of developing an overarching, coherent strategy.
He thought that he had identified some themes: an ethnonationalism suspicious of multilateral institutions and agreements; an “America First” attitude that measured success in win-lose short-term deals; economic mercantilism obsessed with balance-of-trade statistics, especially in manufactured goods; and a nearly all-encompassing narcissism that was vulnerable to parades, banquets, and sword dances. To that list I would add a “values-light” approach to the world and human rights, but in all of this we are imputing strategy based on specific actions, words, and tweets rather than the administration laying out a singular vision.
In a notional hundred-day evaluation of administration foreign and security policy, I would give an “incomplete.” The administration failed to turn in a term paper, as it were—a coherent, global strategy.
There had been some efforts at completing the assignment. The president’s speech before the UN General Assembly in September was billed by the White House as “outlining an America First foreign policy,” a policy labeled by the press office with the marketable but hardly explanatory phrase “principled realism.”
But the UN speech raised more questions than it answered. The president used one or another form of the word “sovereignty” more than twenty times in the speech and identified the concept as the linchpin of a functioning international system. Then, after promising not to impose our way of life on anyone, Mr. Trump skewered five theoretically sovereign nations for what they were doing internally and called for international action against a “depraved” North Korea, a “murderous” Iran, a “criminal” Syria, a “destabilizing” Cuba, and a “corrupt” Venezuela.45 It was hard to create parallax to a set of common, unifying principles from the points in the speech other than that sovereignty was a permanent condition for us, but a transient one for anyone we so designated.
I suspect that National Security Adviser McMaster understood that the administration was still coming up short on “the vision thing.” Early on he hired highly regarded defense expert Nadia Schadlow to write the administration’s National Security Strategy. The NSS is an obscure requirement from the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. It is intended precisely for this purpose: to force the executive to articulate his “big picture.” Most years it is more of a bureaucratic burden and is often left undone, but occasionally the document breaks new ground. I wrote two for President George H. W. Bush while serving on his NSC staff in the early 1990s, and the drafting prompted a spirited debate over the reversibility of changes then under way in the Soviet Union. Later, the 2002 edition codified the George W. Bush administration’s doctrine of preemption.
Now Schadlow had to describe what an “America First” National Security Strategy really looked like, not in 140- or 280-character bursts, but in dozens of coherent, consistent pages. Then she would have to shepherd her draft through an administration that had not really demonstrated strategic consistency or even message discipline. And then this road map had to be approved by a president who cherishes unpredictability and does not seem to be comfortable with the long form of anything.
Administratively, all that is challenging. Substantively, as Schadlow aligned the draft strategy with the president’s tweets and statements, it would mark a dramatic break from America’s past, shaped since 1950 by the Truman-era policy document NSC-68, the road map for Cold War opposition to the Soviet Union and then, even after the fall of communism, for American engagement in the world.
I dusted off a copy and reread the nearly seventy-year-old document and was struck by its deep sense of history, the scope of its vision, its reverence for American values, and the toughness of the actions it was willing to countenance (like developing a hydrogen bomb). It even had a section devoted to describing the fundamental purpose of the United States: “to assure the integrity and vitality of our free society, which is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual.”
Elaborating on the underlying conflict in the realm of ideas and values, the document gave a full-throated defense of “the marvelous diversity, the deep tolerance, the lawfulness of the free society,” and added for emphasis that “the free society does not fear, it welcomes, diversity,” Then, describing U.S. intentions, NSC-68 promised to “foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish” while rejecting “the concept of isolation” and affirming “our positive participation in the world community.” For emphasis, once again, it repeated its core course of action: ours would be “a policy of attempting to develop a healthy international community.”
In late May, National Security Adviser McMaster coauthored a piece in the Wall Street Journal with Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council. Mixed in with the usual reverence for American values and the promise that “America First” did not mean America alone, McMaster (a career military officer with years of service abroad) and Cohn (a former president and CEO of Goldman Sachs)—the kind of American internationalists you would order from central casting—penned the following startling line: “The world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, non-governmental actors, and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” NSC-68 this was not.
Nor was the National Security Strategy that was issued in mid-December, the only such document actually accomplished in the first year of an administration and the first rolled out in a speech by the president himself. The NSS continued the theme that the world was a competitive place—politically, economically, militarily, and informationally—and differentiated itself from previous documents by organizing all of its elements around this principle of constant, sustained competition. (One could not help but recall Hobbes’s formulation of “all against all.”)
Unlike NSC-68, which had been a Department of State and Department of Defense response to Truman’s tasking, the NSS self-consciously mirrored President Trump’s language in his previous speeches and executive orders. The speechwriters were actively consulted in the drafting process. Thus there was a lot of talk of sovereignty and reciprocity and competition and economic success while downplaying traditional themes like engagement. Sam Greene, director of the Russia Institute at King’s College in London, toted up 151 mentions of the economy in the NSS, while there were 17 of Russia, 14 of Europe, and 2 of NATO.
The drafters of the NSS could not afford to ignore the president’s tweets, which carried the stamp of policy. That was a tall order. The spontaneity and inconsistency of the tweets—along with the president’s wrath at being contradicted—prompted one keen observer, David Ignatius of the Washington Post, to refer to the “iron whim” of the Oval Office.46
Built into the strategy document was an underlying fear that world events were not moving in our direction and “America First” was designed to get ahead of those trends, to put America on a winning track, and mute the instinct to turn first to international organizations for solutions. Historian Walter Russell Mead wrote that “strategists in the Trump national-security team believe that it is American power, not multilateral institutions, that keeps the West afloat.”47
Sometimes the language was overtly aggressive: “energy security” was now “energy dominance,” for example, not quite the vocabulary of an interdependent world. The text set the stage for the Department of Defense to announce the following month, “We will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists, but great power competition—not terrorism—is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.”48 There was also a clear subtext challenging the relevance of the post–World War II institutions spawned by NSC-68. The burden was now on those institutions to show they were still fulfilling their purpose.
Schadlow’s work got deservedly good marks for “normalizing” the language of an often rambling, inconsistent, and overly dramatic president. Relying on the talents of a solid staff and the expertise of career professionals, she crafted a document about which serious people could argue rather than simply dismiss out of hand.
And argue they will. Despite the president’s electoral win, it is not at all clear that Americans are ready to fully embrace the policies of what Richard Haass has called “the first post–World War II American president to view the burdens of world leadership as outweighing the benefits.”49 A Chicago Council of Global Affairs national opinion survey in the summer of 2017 found that popular support for the United States taking an active role in world affairs was about the same that it was in 1974 (63 percent now, 66 percent then). The percentage saying that maintaining alliances was a very effective way to achieve foreign policy goals actually went up from 38 percent in 2014 to 49 percent today. A record number of Americans now say that international trade is good for American consumers (78 percent), for the economy overall (72 percent), and even for U.S. job creation (57 percent). And the percentage who believe immigrants represent a critical threat to the United States dropped from 55 percent overall in 1998 to only 37 percent today (even though the number of Republicans who believe that they are a threat has remained stable at about 60 percent).50
Then there were questions about how much the relatively moderate language of the document actually represented the president, rather than what one observer called a cri de coeur from inside the deep state signaling that some of traditional America endures.51
In tone, the administration said that the NSS was all about championing America, but I wondered what America that was: the national/nativist state defined by blood, soil, and shared history? Or America the creedal nation, the Madisonian embodiment of Enlightenment ideals? I suspected that it was the former, since the champion, Donald Trump, had already alleged that American elections were “rigged,” three million people had voted illegally (all against him), the seat of government was a “swamp,” the free press was the “enemy of the people,” crime was at record rates, and the American judicial system was a “joke.”
In all that, he sounded a lot like an Internet troll on a botnet controlled from Saint Petersburg. Or like Vladimir Putin.
Whom he never could quite admit had worked to get him elected.
But Putin had. And then some.