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When U.S. Officials Ignore The President The Outcome Is Chaos
Since Donald Trump became president many of his subordinates have tried to subvert his policies. Instead of implementing Trump’s idea and preferences they have tried to implement their own. Some have done so because they believed that it is the “right thing to do” while others have ignored Trump’s wishes to play their own game.
A recent example can be found in a Washington Post Ukrainegate story:
Trump’s conversations with Putin, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and others reinforced his perception of Ukraine as a hopelessly corrupt country — one that Trump now also appears to believe sought to undermine him in the 2016 U.S. election, the officials said.
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The efforts to poison Trump’s views toward Zelensky were anticipated by national security officials at the White House, officials said. But the voices of Putin and Orban took on added significance this year because of the departure or declining influence of those who had sought to blunt the influence of Putin and other authoritarian leaders over Trump.
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American policy has for years been “built around containing malign Russian influence” in Eastern Europe, a U.S. official said. Trump’s apparent susceptibility to the arguments he hears from Putin and Orban is “an example of the president himself under malign influence — being steered by it.”
The president does not like how the ‘American policy’ on Russia was built. He rightly believes that he was elected to change it. He had stated his opinion on Russia during his campaign and won the election. It is not ‘malign influence’ that makes him try to have good relations with Russia. It is his own conviction and legitimized by the voters.
Trump’s policies look chaotic. But one big reason for that is that some of his staff, like the ‘U.S. official’ above, are trying to subvert them. They have tried and still try to cage him in on nearly every issue. When Trump then wields his Twitter sword and cuts through the subversion by publicly restating his original policies the look from the outside is indeed chaotic. But it is the president who sets the policies. The drones around him who serve “at his pleasure” are there to implement them.
Instead they have tried (and try) to make their own ones:
White House and State Department officials had sought to block an Orban visit since the start of Trump’s presidency, concerned that it would legitimize a leader often ostracized in Europe. They also worried about Orban’s influence on the U.S. president.
“Basically, everyone agreed — no Orban meeting,” said a former White House official involved in internal discussions. “We were against it because [we] knew there was a good chance that Trump and Orban would bond and get along.”
The effort to keep distance between Trump and Orban began to fray earlier this year with the departures of senior officials and the emergence of new voices around the president. Among the most important was Mulvaney, who became acting chief of staff in January and was seen as sympathetic to Orban’s hard-right views and skepticism of European institutions.
One “senior official” who tried to sabotage the Orban visit was Fiona Hill who until recently served as the Russia analyst at the National Security Council.
One wonders if Ms. Hill ever read her job description. The people in the NSC do not get hired to implement their own policy preferences. The task of the National Security Council is to “advise and assist” the president and to “coordinate” his policies within the administration. That’s it.
The same rules apply to the Pentagon and other agencies.
Aaron Stein points out that those aides who disregarding the declared policy of the president are responsible for the current chaotic retreat from Syria:
Trump has been clear about his intentions in Syria. As he told the world in April 2018, after years of fighting foreign wars, in his view it was time for the United States to withdraw from Syria, passing responsibility for the mission to hold territory taken from the Islamic State to regional states. I was listening, and wrote in War on the Rocks that the longer the president’s own staff continued to treat the world’s most powerful man like an infant, the more likely it became that he would simply order a hasty withdrawal. This chaotic U.S. exit from Syria was obviously coming, for anyone paying attention to the opinion of the man who matters most in the United States: the president.
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For over a year, it was obvious Trump wanted to leave Syria and, as I wrote in April 2018, Trump “has made his preferences for U.S. policy in the Middle East clear” and it was time “for his national security staff to listen to him and to devise a sequential drawdown policy that fits with the spirit of the president’s demands, but takes deliberate and uncomfortable steps to protect U.S. interests.” This did not happen.
Rather than plan and begin to implement a coordinated withdrawal, the president’s appointed envoy for Syria and the Department of Defense worked to ensure Washington could stay, and ignored the reality that Trump would eventually order an American withdrawal. Such delusions have not served the United States and its friends well.
The lack of planning for the option the commander in chief had already decided on led to the current mess. The Pentagon practically sabotaged trump’s announced policies by continuing to build up bases in Syria and by falsely telling the Kurds that the U.S. would stay. It should instead have planned and prepared for the announced retreat from the country.
One can clearly see that this current withdrawal was not prepared for, neither politically nor militarily, in any orderly way. Yesterday the Pentagon said it would pull the troops out of Syria but station them nearby in west Iraq. But no one had asked the Iraqi government what it though of that idea. The inevitable outcome is that Iraq now rejects it:
U.S. forces that crossed into Iraq as part of a pull-out from Syria do not have permission to stay and can only be there in transit, the Iraqi military said on Tuesday.
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The Iraqi military statement contradicted the Pentagon’s announcement that all of the nearly 1,000 troops withdrawing from northern Syria are expected to move to western Iraq to continue the campaign against Islamic State militants and “to help defend Iraq”.
“All U.S. forces that withdrew from Syria received approval to enter the Kurdistan Region so that they may be transported outside Iraq. There is no permission granted for these forces to stay inside Iraq,” the Iraqi military said.
There was also the idea that some 200 soldiers would be left behind in Syria to deny the Syrian government access to its own oil fields in east Syria. Not only would this be obviously illegal but nobody seems to have given a thought on how the logistics for such remote unit could be sustained. The oil fields are geographically large and the 200 strong unit would have to be dispersed into tiny outposts within a hostile country and resupplied over unsecured roads. To defend them from surprise attacks the U.S. would need to put combat air patrols above them for every hour of each day.
One hopes that the Pentagon and State Department recognize that the high political and financial costs of such a deployment are not justified for making a minor political point that will not change the inevitable outcome of the war.
Trump ordered that all U.S. troops leave Syria. An illegal occupation of Syria’s oil fields would keep the U.S. in Syria but in an clearly indefensible position. Whoever came up with or supported that idea needs to be fired.
Here is a sign that the Pentagon has finally recognized that its utter lack of planning for the implementation of Trump’s decision to leave Syria resulted in a bad outcome. It is now trying to avoid being (again) be caught with its pants down with regards to Afghanistan:
The Pentagon recently began drawing up plans for an abrupt withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan in case President Donald Trump surprises military leaders by ordering an immediate drawdown as he did in Syria, three current and former defense officials said.
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Ending wars like the one in Afghanistan was one of Trump’s chief campaign promises in 2016, and administration officials have privately expressed concern that as the 2020 election approaches, he’ll be more likely to follow through with threats of troop withdrawal, as he did last week in Syria.
Trump has made clear to his advisers that he wants to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by the 2020 election, NBC News reported in August.
Trump made his decision in August but the Pentagon is only now reacting to it. That is too slow.
Trump should have been and should be more rigorous with his staff. Those who sabotage his policies need to be fired early and often. It would make his polices look much less chaotic than they currently seem to be.
Karlof1@31 ‘Where will Trump go from here?’
To Make America Great Again Trump has, from the start, emphasized rebuilding the U.S.’s industrial capacity, and erasing the U.S.’s chronic trade deficits. As a result of de-industrialization, the U.S. is no longer able to compete with the likes of China and Germany, Korea, Japan, etc.; thus Trump is building economic walls around a U.S. led world (comprised of the U.S. and a few of its allies: North America, Britain, others?). Once economically isolated, the U.S. will have the opportunity to rebuild its economy in a protected environment.
The U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency, which guarantees an overvalued dollar, runs counter to the need to economically isolate the U.S. and rebuild its industrial capacity. Trump has long criticized the overvalued dollar, and in my view he will be quite happy to see the dollar’s decline.
Regarding, International Relations, Trump has from the start said that he wants to get out of foreign entanglements, and has been working to do this from the start. I think that Trump’s focus on Iran was payment to the likes of Adelsen who financed his campaign. And his policies with respect to North Korea, and his Middle East Peace Plan, led by Kushner, were his attempt to quickly resolve these long festering issues that provided on-going excuses for foreign entanglements. Having been blocked at every turn by the Globalists, Trump appears to have lost interest, and now simply wants to pull the troops back home.
Where to now? Well, for the ‘Globalists’ (which includes the Neo-Cons), it appears that Trump’s last minute refusal to bomb Iran in June was the last straw, and they are now committed to removing him from power as quickly as possible, and by any means available. Trump is therefore in a fight to the finish with the ‘Globalists’. All other issues will be put on pause until after he is re-elected in 2020.
Karlof1@31 ‘Where will Trump go from here?’
To Make America Great Again Trump has, from the start, emphasized rebuilding the U.S.’s industrial capacity, and erasing the U.S.’s chronic trade deficits. As a result of de-industrialization, the U.S. is no longer able to compete with the likes of China and Germany, Korea, Japan, etc.; thus Trump is building economic walls around a U.S. led world (comprised of the U.S. and a few of its allies: North America, Britain, others?). Once economically isolated, the U.S. will have the opportunity to rebuild its economy in a protected environment.
The U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency, which guarantees an overvalued dollar, runs counter to the need to economically isolate the U.S. and rebuild its industrial capacity. Trump has long criticized the overvalued dollar, and in my view he will be quite happy to see the dollar’s decline.
Regarding, International Relations, Trump has from the start said that he wants to get out of foreign entanglements, and has been working to do this from the start. I think that Trump’s focus on Iran was payment to the likes of Adelsen who financed his campaign. And his policies with respect to North Korea, and his Middle East Peace Plan, led by Kushner, were his attempt to quickly resolve these long festering issues that provided on-going excuses for foreign entanglements. Having been blocked at every turn by the Globalists, Trump appears to have lost interest, and now simply wants to pull the troops back home.
Where to now? Well, for the ‘Globalists’ (which includes the Neo-Cons), it appears that Trump’s last minute refusal to bomb Iran in June was the last straw, and they are now committed to removing him from power as quickly as possible, and by any means available. Trump is therefore in a fight to the finish with the ‘Globalists’. All other issues will be put on pause until after he is re-elected in 2020.
If Trump survives impeachment, is able to purge the Deep-State, with the help of Bill Barr and wins in 2020 then I look for him to refocus on economically isolating the U.S. (with a few of it’s allies). I look for him to bring the troops home, and look focus rebuilding the U.S as an industrial power. The dollar will need to fall, and the massive U.S. deficits will need to be dealt with. The deficits can be handled by slashing military spending, which will no longer be needed, lowering interest rates and economic growth as a result of a much weaker dollar and investment in production in the U.S.
If the ‘Globalists’ win and Trump does not survive as president, then we can look forward to the continued collapse of the U.S., and much higher levels of international conflict as the ‘Globalists’ return to their quest for global domination.
Posted by: dh-mtl | Oct 22 2019 21:43 utc | 53
The tone of this post is correct: yes, there is a Praetorian Guard cum Stoic Opposition element in the USG — what we call here informally as the Deep State — but it is true it is not that all-powerful as many conspiracy theorists (specially from the anti-Zionist brigade) think.
There is conflict within the American elite. On one side, there’s the majority faction that believes America’s efforts should be directed towards the destruction of Russia (because it is the successor State of the USSR and, as such, is the only nation today that can completely destroy the USA thanks to its huge nuclear arsenal); on the other side, there’s the minority faction that believes America’s efforts should be directed towards the destruction of China (since it is the closest to America economically and is a socialist nation). At the middle, there’s the Chicoms — the ones who believe China should be destroyed now, by any means necessary and at all costs, because China is both the immediate competitor economically and the successor of the USSR (as the torch bearer of communism in the 21st Century).
Ideally, there wouldn’t be this division, and the USA should have resources to destroy both Russia and China at the same time, thus taking control of the entire Eurasia. However, the Americans don’t have said resources: they must choose either one or the other (i.e. they have a “short blanket”). This contradiction didn’t exist during the Cold War because the USSR was much stronger than modern Russia and China was extremely poor and very easily exploitable by American capital, but that conjuncture changed: now Russia stabilized in a precarious, but not at a full-Third World level (like, e.g. Brazil) and China demonstrated the possibilities of the socialist system for the whole world to see.
In this scenario, what was an ace in the sleeve became a liability (NATO), because it pushed the Russian Federation to an alliance with China. Had the Americans immediately dissolved NATO right after the USSR fell, there would be a very good possibility they could absorb Russia and turn it into an Eurasian Brazil, i.e. a completely dominated whale economy whose sole reason would be to export cheap commodities to feed the Western industrial apparatus.
But that didn’t happen. And it didn’t happen, I think, mainly for two reasons:
1) the USSR dissolved, but many of its toys, infrastructure and legacy (both political, ideological and cultural) were still around for even decadent Russian leaders to play around and do something useful; plus they were too big for only one man (Yeltsin) to destroy in eight years;
2) the USA’s own economy begun to enter in exhaustion, i.e. it lost its dynamic capability to quickly Americanize and develop its vassal nations like it did to Western Europe with the Marshall Plan in just 13 years. Put it in another way, by the 1990s, America could no longer govern by consensus: the rest of the world would be treated like Latin America.
The result of this is that, for the entire 21st Century until now, the USA had to rely on wars on minuscule countries with a high concentration of wealth in the commodity form (i.e. oil and gas) in order to maintain its economy young (by feeding its MIC). But even that has its limits, and 2008 crisis happened.
Now, the moment finally came, where the USA will have to wage a hot war against a big enemy: Russia and/or China. To the shock of the “Deep State”, an anti-China capitalist won the 2016 election for POTUS against an anti-Russia representant.
In my opinion, there’s no “right” side on this coin: both doctrines are sound. On one side, China can be decapitated by a preemptive massive nuclear strike — but it will happen at a great cost to the domestic economy, since Walmart can’t exist without China, plus the US Treasury has too much debt sold to them. On the other side, the anihilation of Russia would mean the conquest of much of the Eurasia at little to no damage to the domestic economy — but the risk of direct anihilation by the USA is too big (MAD). Sincerely, I don’t think the USA has — outside a full-fledged revolution from the inside — any good options.
The only x factor I can see here is the American working classes: will they do a revolution or not?
Posted by: vk | Oct 22 2019 22:18 utc | 57
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