How Trump Made America Less Secure in 100 Days

[babylonsister]

April 28 2017 5:54 AM
How Trump Made America Less Secure in 100 Days

His foreign policy makes no sense, and nearly every military move has been a mistake.
By Phillip Carter


If the only measure of national security success during a president’s first 100 days were avoiding catastrophe, then, OK, President Trump has succeeded. No attacks on the U.S., no new wars, and no nuclear Armageddon—these are good things, and in the moment we can breathe a sigh of relief.

However, those outcomes arguably owe more to the national security machine built by Trump’s predecessors than any decisions of the 45th president. By any other benchmark, Trump has failed at national security and foreign policy. Trump’s failures of personnel, process, and policy have combined to create a perfect storm of insecurity.

There’s an old Washington cliché, “Personnel is policy.” The saw reflects the wisdom that any president’s agenda depends on his political appointees to refine and implement that vision. Trump’s White House has failed first and most spectacularly in this requirement, both by building a dysfunctional White House and National Security Council, and by failing to staff his national security agencies with the appointees necessary to oversee and direct foreign policy.

The palace intrigue coming out of the Trump White House could fill volumes. It includes the ongoing warfare between the populist camp led by strategist Steve Bannon, and the establishment camps led by Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, economic adviser Gary Cohn, and son-in-law Jared Kushner. The establishment appears to have won the early rounds, benching Bannon from the NSC and hiring longtime national security professionals H.R. McMaster, Dina Powell, Tom Bossert, and Nadia Schadlow to run Trump’s security portfolio. However, these new professionals bring with them their own ideas about foreign policy, contrasting with the “America First” nationalism that Trump rode to the presidency. For now, the mashup of Trump’s political favorites with his new establishment professionals likely means incoherence on the national security front for some time, with the White House lurching from one crisis to the next, its actions and words disconnected from any broader doctrine.

Bad personnel decisions have also dogged the Trump administration during its first 100 days. Michael Flynn and K.T. McFarland hardly did well in leading the NSC during their brief sojourns there. Lower-level hires have also performed poorly, from Sebastian Gorka’s continuing struggles with reported Nazi ties to intelligence aide Ezra Cohen-Watnick’s continuing battles with the intelligence community. The net effect has been to deprive Trump of a functioning NSC at a time when he has desperately needed something or someone to develop, articulate, and coordinate national security policy.

The most obvious foreign policy failure is that there is no policy, no doctrine, no strategy that knits together Trump’s desired ends with government ways and means.

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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/04/trump_s_first_100_days_of_national_security_and_foreign_policy_were_a_failure.html