Biden is walking a tightrope on Saudi Arabia, CNN.com

Biden is walking a tightrope on Saudi Arabia
Peter Bergen

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. The views expressed in this commentary belong solely to the author. View more opinion at CNN. ”

(CNN)Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation that led to journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal assassination in 2018, according to a declassified US intelligence report the Biden administration released on Friday.

While the four-page report supports a conclusion already reached in 2018 by the CIA — that the man known as MBS was responsible for Khashoggi’s murder — it sends a new signal: that President Joe Biden is willing to publicly challenge what he once called a “pariah” state.
The US State Department also announced on Friday a new “Khashoggi Ban” that restricts the visas of 76 Saudis as part of a wider effort to retaliate against anyone who is involved in state-sponsored efforts to crack down on dissidents around the world.

This, however, falls far short of taking direct action against MBS.

The administration’s decision reflects the reality of the longtime marriage of convenience between the world’s longest-standing democracy and the world’s most absolute monarchy established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Saudi King Adul Aziz in 1945. This relationship has always been based on mutual interests around oil and, in recent years, counterterrorism against al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Biden is now trying to walk a tightrope. By releasing the damning intelligence report late on Friday and announcing the new “Khashoggi ban,” the new administration is hoping a mere rebuke and a slap on the wrist will be enough to signal the changing tides of US foreign policy after the Trump administration. At the same time, the Biden administration wants to maintain an alliance that has served both countries’ interests reasonably well for the better half of the last century.

Indeed, the story of Khashoggi’s murder says a great deal about bin Salman, and the Trump administration’s desire to ally with him, seemingly at any cost, including brushing Khashoggi’s assassination under the carpet.

MBS and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, both the scions of enormously wealthy, powerful families and only a few years apart in age, bonded early on during the Trump administration over a belief that together they could transform the Middle East.

The Saudis understood the power of family relationships and an alliance between the House of Saud and the House of Trump made sense to them, particularly after their tense relationship with President Barack Obama, who seemed intent on upending the traditional power dynamics of the Middle East with his nuclear agreement with their archrivals, the Iranians.

For his part, Kushner believed that MBS could help deliver a US-brokered solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that their personal relationship could achieve what decades of professional diplomacy hadn’t.

This was part of the geopolitical backdrop against which the murder of Khashoggi — a 59-year-old contributor to the Washington Post who was critical of the Saudi regime — played out.

In September 2018, Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey to obtain paperwork verifying his divorce so he could marry his Turkish fiancée, Hatice Cengiz.

Officials told him to come back to pick up the paperwork, and a 15-man team of Saudi intelligence agents, military officers and members of the Saudi Royal Guard traveled from Riyadh to Istanbul on October 2 — the day Khashoggi returned to the consulate.

The US intelligence report released Friday states some of the members were associated with the Saudi Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Royal Court — led by a close adviser of MBS who once publicly claimed he did not make decisions without the crown prince’s approval.

Others were identified by the report as members of the Rapid Intervention Force, a subset of the Royal Guard that answers only to MBS. It had taken part in other “earlier dissident suppression operations” and it was unlikely to have participated in the operation against Khashoggi without MBS’s approval, according to the report.

Audio recordings from the Saudi consulate revealed Khashoggi struggling and saying, “I can’t breathe,” before his body was dismembered with a saw as the perpetrators were advised to listen to music to block out the sound. Khashoggi’s remains were never found, which is particularly grave in Islam, a religion that puts a great premium on the swift burial of the body.

The then-Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Khalid bin Salman, who is MBS’s brother, quickly said claims that Saudi Arabia killed or detained Khashoggi were “absolutely false, and baseless.”

This was the beginning of a series of lies, cover stories and rationalizations that the Saudi government told about Khashoggi’s murder. The Saudis floated a story that the murder was the result of rogue killers during an interrogation gone wrong.

This story was undercut by the fact that the hit team included a forensic pathologist and that Khashoggi’s body was dismembered with a saw, which suggested a high degree of premeditation.

Despite the fact that Khashoggi was both a legal resident of the United States and a journalist who was contributing regularly to a major American media institution, President Trump stood with the Saudis and issued a statement that conflicted with the CIA’s own assessment that MBS authorized the killing. “It could very well be that the crown prince had knowledge of this tragic event — maybe he did and maybe he didn’t,” the statement read. “We may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi. In any case, our relationship is with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

According to journalist Bob Woodward’s book “Rage,” Trump doubled down on protecting MBS and said, “I saved his ass. I was able to get Congress to leave him alone.”

Trump rationalized his inaction when he told CBS 60 Minutes that “we’d be punishing ourselves” by canceling American arms sales to Saudi Arabia, deals that he frequently trumpeted as amounting to more than $110 billion, even though that figure was wildly inflated.

Trump’s defense of MBS was of a piece with his repeated defenses of other tyrants, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin in his efforts to swing the 2016 American presidential election against Hillary Clinton and the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, who Trump has praised lavishly.

Having enjoyed a very close relationship with the Trump administration, the Saudis are now getting just a taste of what could be a recalibrated relationship with the Biden administration. Biden will almost certainly not be looking to cause permanent damage to the US-Saudi relationship, but MBS will no longer have a free pass to murder his opponents outside of the kingdom, which is saying something.

The release of Friday’s report should leave no doubt that the US government, from President Biden to the intelligence community, holds him personally responsible for Khashoggi’s death.

Hold Trump accountable for incitement, CNN.com

Hold Trump accountable for incitement
Peter Bergen

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is senior editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and author of the new book “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.”

(CNN)On Wednesday a pro-Trump mob assaulted the Capitol, breaking through windows and doors, resulting in five deaths. They also interrupted the election certification of President-elect Joe Biden and the peaceful transfer of power that has been the hallmark of American democracy for more than two centuries.

These domestic terrorists attacked the great symbol of American democracy and they should be held accountable — and so should their Inciter-in-Chief, President Donald J. Trump.
Let’s start with the President. There are limits to the First Amendment. It is a crime to incite or solicit others to commit crimes if you have reason to believe they may actually carry out those crimes. The relevant statute is U.S. Code, Title 18, Section 373.

Take Zachary Chesser, who is serving a long prison sentence, in part because he incited violence against the creators of the cartoon show “South Park” on a jihadist forum in 2010 after they portrayed the Prophet Mohammed in an unflattering light.

To a crowd of thousands of his supporters, some wearing body armor and many wearing quasi-military outfits, on Wednesday Trump spouted a geyser of baseless conspiracy theories about his loss in the presidential election.

Trump then urged the mob to go to the Capitol, saying, “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.” The mob, unfortunately, took the President at his word.

Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who has lost the moral standing he had as mayor of New York during the 9/11 attacks, also incited the pro-Trump mob on Wednesday, telling them they needed to contest the election results with “trial by combat.” Giuliani should also be charged with incitement and/or solicitation of violence.

The domestic terrorists who assaulted the Capitol should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, especially if investigators find that there were leaders of the mob who conspired to commit these crimes. Conspiracy laws are often used in jihadist terrorism cases and result in lengthy prison terms.

As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Americans are long overdue to understand the reality that domestic, right-wing terrorists now threaten the United States far more than foreign terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and its affiliates, which have not carried out any successful terrorist attacks in the US since 9/11. (There remains some debate about whether al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen actually directed the terrorist attack in Pensacola, Florida, in 2019 in which three US sailors were killed by a Saudi military officer, or whether the Saudi officer simply apprised al-Qaeda of his plot.)

Meanwhile, according to the think tank New America, far-right terrorists have killed 114 people in the US since 9/11, while jihadist terrorists have killed 107, and a far-left terrorist killed one person.

The US should wage a real campaign against far-right terrorism, as it did against jihadist terrorism in the years after 9/11. There is no federal domestic terrorism statute since that charge is exclusively related to individuals who have some association with a foreign terrorist organization. But now that Congress has been on the receiving end of a domestic terrorism assault, surely it is time for congressional action to implement such a statute.

A quarter of a century ago, in his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” the critic Neil Postman warned Americans, “Our politics, religion, news…have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.”

President Trump’s antics stopped being amusing some time ago, but now they also have had lethal consequences. It’s long past time for him, his family and his entourage to depart for Mar-a-Lago, where hopefully they will all have plenty of time to consult with their lawyers about criminal prosecutions that may proliferate against Trump once he no longer has the shield of the presidency.

Biden team inherits Trump’s ocean of troubles, CNN.com

Biden team inherits Trump’s ocean of troubles

Peter Bergen

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is senior editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and author of the new book “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own; view more opinion at CNN.”

(CNN)President-elect Joe Biden’s new national security team will soon be swimming in an ocean of troubles. The world is in many ways a more dangerous place than when Donald Trump took office.

North Korea’s nuclear program is further along, despite all the “love letters” Trump exchanged with the dictator Kim Jong Un. The Taliban is on the march in Afghanistan, unimpressed by the Trump administration’s negligible “peace” talks. Trump’s hasty push to bring US troops overseas home by January, days before the inauguration, is going to leave his successor boxed in, both in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Then there is the defunct US nuclear deal with Iran. The world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe, in Yemen. And China’s expansionist behavior, assault on democracy in Hong Kong and human rights abuses against the Uighurs.

There is also the worsening pandemic. And looming over everything else, the planet-wide threat of climate change.

Against this scary backdrop, the people Biden has chosen to fill key national security and foreign policy posts reflect his wish to restore order and to value competence and experience. The six picks for national security posts, whom Biden formally introduced at an event in Wilmington, Delaware, on Tuesday have around one and half centuries of public service among them.

Antony Blinken, Biden’s choice for secretary of state, is a centrist Democrat well known to foreign leaders from his time in the Obama administration as deputy secretary of state and principal deputy national security adviser. He is a savvy diplomat who can help restore morale at the State Department, which largely collapsed during the indifferent tenures of secretaries Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo.

Blinken’s overseas interlocutors will know that he speaks for President Biden, as the two have worked closely together for almost two decades, since Blinken was staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Biden was its chair.

Blinken will reassure longtime American allies that the United States will once again take its place as the first among equals in NATO and stop kowtowing to adversaries like North Korea and Russia.

Avril Haines, who is also leading Biden’s foreign policy and national security transition team, is a deft pick to be director of national intelligence, coordinating the work of the 17 US intelligence agencies. She is a former deputy director of the CIA and a former principal deputy national security adviser in the Obama administration. She would be the first woman DNI, and the ideal leader to restore morale in the much-battered intelligence community.

Jake Sullivan, a former Rhodes scholar, who was Vice President Biden’s national security adviser, now will be the President’s national security adviser. It’s one of the toughest jobs in Washington, as it requires managing the often unwieldy “interagency process” to give the president the best possible menu of policy options when he has to make tough national security decisions.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield should be a safe pair of hands as ambassador to the United Nations given her three and a half decades of diplomatic experience. Biden has said he will elevate the role to a cabinet position, signaling to the world that he is serious about reinvigorating international bodies.

The Department of Homeland Security, a behemoth agency with more than 240,000 employees, has never been easy to manage. Alejandro Mayorkas, an immigrant son of Cuban refugees, would be the first Latino to be nominated to run DHS.

He was the agency’s No. 2 under President Obama, and before that the head of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, which handles naturalizations. He is widely respected by immigrant-rights advocates for his work for the “Dreamers” by setting up the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which has helped hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants work and go to school, while protecting them from deportation.

Biden has yet to name his choice for Secretary of Defense. Many expect it to be Michèle Flournoy, a former top Obama Pentagon official. Are there other candidates that Biden may still be mulling, such as Jeh Johnson, an Obama administration veteran who was the general counsel at the Pentagon and then the secretary of homeland security, who would be the first Black man to be Secretary of Defense were he to be nominated and confirmed?

Whoever Biden picks in that role will surely have a world of troubles to contend with.

To be sure, fixing some of them will be relatively easy. America’s NATO allies are already pivoting quickly to support the President-elect.

Rejoining the Paris Agreement on climate is also a relatively simple matter, since it’s not a binding treaty that needs to be ratified by the Republican-controlled Senate.

Reversing the Trump administration’s pique-filled rejection of the World Health Organization is also a no-brainer in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century.

Biden will surely bring more savvy and humility to the North Korean nuclear issue than Trump, who thought he would succeed where every other president since Bill Clinton had failed and instead who got played like a Stradivarius by Chairman Kim.

Despite the rise of an ISIS affiliate in Afghanistan and the recent significant battlefield advances by the Taliban, Trump is now pushing to remove all but 2,500 troops from Afghanistan by January 15 unilaterally and with no regard for the deteriorating conditions on the ground.

This is bad for Biden. No president wants to have to send more Americans back into Afghanistan, and Biden opposed a large-scale troop presence there when he was vice president. Trump’s pullout also ends the meager leverage his negotiating team has with the Taliban, since the Taliban’s principal goal is the removal of US troops.

Trump is pushing a withdrawal from Iraq. Biden knows well what happened when the Obama administration pulled all US troops out of Iraq in 2011. Three years later, ISIS took over much of the country and Obama had to send thousands of troops back there. The Biden team surely doesn’t want to see this history repeat itself.

In 2018, the Trump administration exited the Iran nuclear agreement negotiated by President Obama’s team, and since then the Iranians have restarted the modest production of nuclear fuel.

While Biden has said he will revive the nuclear deal, the Iranians have sent mixed messages about whether they will go along, and what price they will extract.

Trump gained little from his embrace of the Saudi Crown Prince, Muhammad bin Salman, who continues to act erratically in the Middle East, pursing his failed war in Yemen.

The Trump administration is now contemplating designating the Houthi rebel group there as a terrorist organization, which would likely hamper efforts to make peace between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed Yemeni government.

And then, of course, there is China which has continued its efforts to turn the South China Sea into a Chinese lake. China also continues to extirpate what remains of democracy in Hong Kong and has interned some one million Uighurs in what it euphemistically terms “re-education camps.” The Biden administration must try and pull off the delicate task of containing China’s rising power and calling out its human rights violations, while also not endangering the economic ties that are key to a well-functioning global economy.

Then there is the coronavirus. Under Trump, the United States has fared poorly among advanced nations about its own handling of the virus, and while there is promising news on vaccines, it will take many months to manufacture and widely distribute them. Something approaching normality is only likely to return in the fall of 2021.

The baleful effects of a warming planet are all around us, from the vast forest fires in the American West to the record number of destructive hurricanes in the southern United States. This will likely be the hottest year since record-keeping began, according to meteorologists.

By appointing the former senator and secretary of state John Kerry to a new cabinet-level position for climate change, Biden is widening the aperture about what really constitutes our “national security.”

And that may be his most consequential move of all.

2020 ‘VIRTUAL’ GLOBAL SECURITY FORUM

2020 ‘VIRTUAL’ GLOBAL SECURITY FORUM
NOVEMBER 16-19, 2020

Established in 2018, the Global Security Forum is an annual international gathering bringing together a multi-disciplinary network of experts, practitioners, and policy-makers from government, security, academia, media, entertainment, international organizations, the humanitarian sector, the private sector and beyond to come together to discuss the world’s most pressing topics. This global event provides a unique platform for international stakeholders to convene and offer solutions that address the international community’s leading security challenges.

This year’s Forum will explore, through a series of fireside chats and panel discussions, the evolution of global security challenges posed by complex geopolitical realities that have been exacerbated by the global COVID-19 pandemic, including disinformation, extremism, and governance and legitimacy. In 2019, the Global Security Forum on ‘Security Challenges in the Era of Modern Disinformation’ explored the proliferation of modern disinformation and the serious implications on an increasingly interconnected world. The inaugural 2018 Global Security Forum on ‘Returning Foreign Fighters: Policies and Actions to Address the Threat and Protect Vulnerable Communities’ addressed the global challenge of returning foreign fighters.

KEY SPEAKERS

Alphabetical Order
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Michèle Coninsx

Executive Director Of Counter-Terrorism
Executive Directorate
null

Ambassador Bilahari Kausikan

Former Permanent Secretary of the
Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs
null

Gilles de Kerchove

EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator
null

Director Christopher C. Krebs

Director of CISA
Department of Homeland Security
null

Ambassador Robert C. O’Brien

United States National Security Advisor
null

Congressman Max Rose

U.S. Representative for New York’s
11th Congressional District
null

Ambassador Nathan A. Sales

Ambassador-at-Large and Coordinator
for Counterterrorism at the State Department

PARTICIPANTS
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KEVIN BARON

Executive Editor
Defense One

null

Peter Bergen

CNN National Security Analyst and
Vice President Global Studies & Fellows
New America

null

Jason M. Blazakis

Professor of Practice Director
Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism
Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey

null

Colin P. Clarke

Senior Research Fellow
The Soufan Center

null

STEVE CLEMONS

Editor-at-Large
The Hill

null

Kimberly Dozier

TIME Contributor and
CNN Global Affairs Analyst

null

Joseph Donnelly Sr

Chairman of The Board
The Soufan Center

null

Joshua Geltzer

Former NSC Senior Director
for Counterterrorism

null

BOBBY GHOSH

Journalist
Bloomberg

null

Alex Gibney

Award-Winning
Director

null

Karen J. Greenberg

Director
The Center on National Security
Fordham Law

null

Rami G. Khouri

American University of Beirut Director of Global Engagement,
and Harvard Kennedy School nonresident senior fellow

null

Adrienne LaFrance

Executive Editor
The Atlantic

null

Fionnuala Ní Aoláin

United Nations Special Rapporteur on
the Promotion and Protection of Human
Rights while Countering Terrorism

null

Nicholas J. Rasmussen

Executive Director
Global Internet Forum to
Counter Terrorism (GIFCT)

null

Bret Schafer

Media and Digital Disinformation Fellow
Alliance for Securing Democracy

null

David Scharia

Chief of Branch
Counter-Terrorism Committee
Executive Directive (CTED)

null

Ali Soufan

Founder
The Soufan Center

null

Maria J. Stephan

Co-author, Why Civil Resistance Works:
The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict;
co-editor, Is Authoritarianism Staging a Comeback

null

Meredith Stricker

Senior Fellow
The Soufan Center

null

Charles Spencer

Assistant Director
FBI

null

ALI VELSHI

MSNBC Anchor and Correspondent
for NBC News and MSNBC

null

Rebecca Ulam Weiner

Assistant Commissioner
NYPD Intelligence Bureau

null

Lawrence Wright

Staff Writer
The New Yorker

ORGANIZER

PARTNERS

For more information please contact
events@thesoufancenter.org
© All rights reserved 2020

What happened on the way to Obama’s ‘Promised Land’, CNN.com

What happened on the way to Obama’s ‘Promised Land’
Peter Bergen

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is senior editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and author of the new book “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own; view more opinion at CNN.”

(CNN)Around the fifth anniversary of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, in late spring of 2016, President Barack Obama did an interview with CNN. Obama was seated at the head of the long conference room table in the White House Situation Room and after I asked the President a number of questions about his decision to authorize that operation, I changed direction. I asked: “Donald Trump. What are your thoughts, if he was to be sitting in this chair, about how he would be handling these decisions?”

Obama replied, “Well, I don’t have those thoughts. Because I don’t expect that to happen.”

Trump wasn’t yet his party’s official nominee, and even after he was, a lot of folks didn’t expect that to happen. And then, of course, it did.

Trump hangs over Obama’s moving, beautifully written memoir of his first three years in office like an onrushing train that both the reader and author know is hurtling down the tracks to collide with what Obama hoped to achieve. In Obama’s own words, he was striving to “see if we can actually live up to the meaning of our creed” and to continue the work-in-progress of making a more perfect, racially equitable “promised land” that has already produced “Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers…Jackie Robinson…Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan, Billie Holliday…Lincoln at Gettysburg.”

“A Promised Land,” a copy of which was obtained by CNN, is a tome of more than 700 pages that covers Obama’s early political career as Illinois state senator, time as a junior US senator and his at-first seemingly quixotic run for the presidency — where he faced Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary and then Sen. John McCain in the general election.

Obama describes Sarah Palin, McCain’s 2008 running mate, as a sort of proto-Trump who publicly accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” Meanwhile, Palin presented herself as a “real American” yet “on just about every subject relevant to governing the country she had absolutely no idea what she was talking about…like a kid trying to bluff her way through a test for which she had failed to study.” Obama goes on to note that Palin’s “incoherence didn’t matter to the vast majority of Republicans…a sign of things to come.”

Indeed. It was, of course, Trump who put into play repeatedly the lie — concocted to try to invalidate Obama’s presidency — that he wasn’t American, wasn’t born in the US (and might even be a secret Muslim). As Obama explains of Trump, “For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.”

The cost of politics

Obama is clear-eyed about the toll that his political career has taken on his family. His mother died of cancer in 1995 and he was not at her bedside in Hawaii because he was running for Illinois state senate. Obama writes, “me not there, so busy with my grand pursuits. I know could never get that moment back. On top of my sorrow, I felt great shame.”

His love story with and marriage to his wife Michelle gets “strained” by the demands of his career and the arrival of their two children, Sasha and Malia. When Obama lost his race for a US House seat in Illinois in a landslide in 2000 Michelle asked him, “Is it worth it?’ Obama writes, “I couldn’t admit to her I was no longer sure.”

Obama also emphasizes the role that luck played in his career. During his run for US Senate in Illinois in 2004 his Republican opponent Jack Ryan dropped out of the race when his ex-wife revealed that he had “pressured her to visit sex clubs and tried to coerce her into having sex in front of strangers.” Then the Republican Party, as Obama put it, “bafflingly recruited conservative firebrand Alan Keyes” who was from Maryland — to oppose him. Obama beat Keyes by over 40 points.

But as Seneca wisely observed, “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” — and Obama obviously is very good at creating his own luck. Raised by a single mother who was often traveling because of her work in international development and by his grandparents, he ascended to the most important job in the world at the relatively young age of 47 by dint of seizing the chances that came his way, such as being the first Black president of Harvard Law Review — his first brush with national attention.

“Osama bin Laden dead, General Motors Alive”

“A Promised Land” chronicles the early period of Obama’s presidency that then-vice president Joe Biden characterized as “Osama bin Laden Dead, General Motors Alive,” when Obama and his economic team helped to pull the US out of the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Obama also recounts the passage of his signature domestic policy achievement, the Affordable Care Act — “Obamacare” — that gave 20 million Americans health insurance and which has survived almost all of the efforts of the Trump administration to undo it, including a challenge this week at the US Supreme Court that seems to have fizzled. Turns out that even most of the conservative judges on the highest court in the land are quite loath to undo popular pieces of actual legislation, while the Trump administration has never produced any real plan to “repeal and replace” Obamacare in the midst of the worst public health crisis in a century.

Was the Obama economic stimulus too small to quickly pull the US out of the Great Recession? Did Obamacare significantly raise insurance prices for already-insured Americans? I will leave it to others more expert in these issues to answer and gauge how Obama himself represents them on the page. Instead, I will focus on the two related national security decisions, the most important of Obama’s first term: to “surge” tens of thousands of US troops into Afghanistan at a time when the Taliban were significantly strengthening and to authorize the operation that killed bin Laden.

Obama the wartime President

Obama arrived on the national stage as a candidate who had opposed the Iraq War but never had to vote on it, unlike his opponents Senators Clinton and McCain, who stood behind it in Congress. Yet, Obama was more comfortable with the use of American military force than either many of his fans or his detractors had pegged him. When in October 2002 Obama spoke at an anti-war rally in Chicago he said, “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war.”

Five years later when Obama was running for president he said he would take a shot at bin Laden if the Pakistani government was unable or unwilling to do so, which led both Joe Biden (who then opposed him for the nomination) and John McCain to castigate him as “not ready to be president” because at the time Pakistan was regarded as a staunch ally in the fight against al-Qaeda, which was really only partly true.

When Obama unexpectedly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, his acceptance speech was largely a defense of “just war” theory, making him likely the first recipient of the Peace Prize to use his acceptance speech to defend necessary wars.

Obama ran on the idea that Iraq was a distraction from the “good war” being fought in Afghanistan. When he came into office the Taliban were resurging dramatically and so the first major national security decision he had to make was what to do about the Afghan War.
An additional 30,000 troops in Afghanistan

The new US commander in Afghanistan was Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal who had turned Joint Special Operations Command into a superlative warfighting machine. Obama — who draws wonderful, quick portraits of the characters in this book — writes of McChrystal, “the man was all muscle, sinew and bone, with a long angular face and piercing avian gaze.”

McChrystal and his team compiled a secret assessment of the war which made the point that the war was going badly and asserted that this could only be remedied by a fully resourced counterinsurgency strategy that would require at least 40,000 more US troops on top of the more than 50,000 troops already in country.

As is the Washington way, the assessment quickly leaked to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post who wrote a story headlined “McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure.'”

Obama was furious, summoning Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, for a dressing down in the Oval Office, telling them he wanted “to stop having my military advisers telling me what I have to do on the front page of the morning paper.”

In the end Obama authorized an additional 30,000 troops but set “a timetable of eighteen months to start bringing them home,” a policy that Obama announced at West Point on December 1, 2009.

Frayed relations with the US military

The announcement of the withdrawal date was too clever by half since it undercut the Afghan government and also morale among many Afghan who interpreted it as an American rush to the exits, while it bolstered the Taliban and those in Pakistan’s security apparatus who were supporting them.

Obama’s relations with the military frayed further when Rolling Stone ran a story in June 2010 featuring unflattering anonymous comments about Obama’s war cabinet attributed to McChrystal’s staff. Obama angrily told Gates that McChrystal “got played” by Rolling Stone.
Military leaders on what war can teach us about fighting coronavirus

After 24 hours of deliberation, Obama decided that he couldn’t keep McChrystal on because in his view the episode underlined the “air of impunity that seemed to have taken hold among some of the military’s top ranks during the Bush years; a sense that when the war began, those who fought it shouldn’t be questioned.” For Obama this undercut the bedrock principle of civilian control of the military; after all he was the commander in chief.

McChrystal flew back to Washington to meet with Obama and offered his resignation, which the President accepted. Obama, who admired McChrystal’s smarts and work ethic, told an aide afterwards, “I liked Stan.”

The decision that could have cost Obama a second term

And it was to Joint Special Operations Command, which McChrystal had transformed from doing a few raids a month to hundreds of raids a month during the five years that he commanded the secretive unit, that Obama turned the following year when he made the riskiest play of his presidency: the operation to bring bin Laden to justice. Obama writes, “I was likely to end up a one-term president if I got it wrong.”

During the final White House meeting on April 28, 2011 to discuss whether to launch a Special Operations raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan where bin Laden was possibly hiding, Obama says Gates advised against the raid — citing Desert One, the botched mission to rescue the US hostages held in Iran in 1980.

As Obama writes, Biden also advised against the raid option, “given the enormous consequences of failure.” Biden has since said that he didn’t advise Obama against the raid. If that’s the case it’s quite strange that Obama doesn’t mention in it in his book.

Obama heard out his war cabinet and went to his residence to make the final decision. Obama had great confidence in Bill McRaven, McChrystal’s successor as the commander of Joint Special Operations Command, who was overseeing the operation, and ultimately, the fact that it was a 50-50 call if bin Laden was even at the compound in Pakistan still made it the best bet to find al-Qaeda’s leader since he had disappeared in the months after 9/11.

Of course, the operation was a success. This is where Obama leaves us at the end of his first of two planned volumes about his presidency.

We will have to wait for Obama’s next volume, which will surely likely describe other key national security and military decisions: the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement; the choice not to enforce the “red line” against the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapon against its own people in 2013; the 2011 removal of US troops from Iraq and the decision to send them back into Iraq three years later after ISIS had taken over much of the country, and the 2011 US drone strike that killed an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who had risen to become a leader of al Qaeda in Yemen.

That will surely be another very compelling book, Mr. President.

Can Joe Biden clean up the mess? CNN.com

Can Joe Biden clean up the mess?

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is senior editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and author of the new book “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own; view more opinion at CNN.”

(CNN)The biggest question facing the world after Donald Trump’s defeat is: Can Joe Biden clean up the mess?

It took days for Biden to be declared the winner of the presidential election because the race was tight in key battleground states, but still he won, and as commander in chief he has broad latitude to put forward his own foreign policy and national security agenda.
Biden needs to assemble the right team and adopt policies that can restore America’s global reputation, reassert its leadership of the alliance of liberal democracies and expunge the cramped and counterproductive “America First” policies of the Trump administration.

Here’s who Biden should select for the key posts:
There was no “blue wave” that some had predicted and Republicans may well retain control of the Senate, so Biden will have to pick his confirmation battles carefully as he selects his cabinet.

Since “personnel is policy,” Biden should assemble a strong national security team that in his words “looks like the country” — racially diverse and with women in senior roles.
Michèle Flournoy is widely and rightly regarded to be the leading contender for secretary of defense and would be the first woman to hold that position. Flournoy knows the Pentagon and its massive bureaucracy well because she served in the key role of undersecretary for policy in Barack Obama’s Pentagon.

She is also widely respected on both sides of the aisle, so much so that Trump’s first secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, wanted Flournoy to be his top deputy at the Pentagon. Flournoy went to meet with a couple of officials on the Trump transition team, but in the end, she decided to drop out of consideration for the job given her misgivings about Trump.

Biden should advance Flournoy’s nomination to be secretary of defense as soon as is feasible.

For secretary of state, Biden should pick Susan Rice. The new President seriously considered Rice as his running mate. He worked closely with her during the Obama administration when she was national security adviser. Rice has the requisite experience to re-energize the State Department, where morale has suffered under Trump: he has often presented the department as part of a purported “deep state,” and many senior diplomats have departed as a result.

If she were tapped for the role, Rice would likely get some tough questions during her Senate confirmation hearing about the 2012 terrorist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, during which four Americans were killed. But the statute of limitations has long run out on this pseudo-scandal, which revolves around the fact that immediately after the Benghazi attack Rice recited Obama administration talking points about the incident that turned out to be inaccurate.

Tony Blinken has worked closely with Biden for decades. He served as both deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state during the Obama administration, and he would be the best choice for national security adviser, since he understands how to make the interagency process work well and Biden trusts him implicitly. Jake Sullivan, who served as Biden’s national security adviser when he was vice president, would make a strong deputy national security adviser.

Trump has deeply politicized the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), one of the largest US government agencies. Biden should install a savvy leader to help to restore morale there. A great pick would be Rep. Val Demings (D-FL) who Biden had seriously considered to be his running mate. Demings, the former police chief of Orlando, sits on the House committees on Homeland Security, Intelligence, and Judiciary and understands well many of the issues that would come with running DHS.

Trump has consistently undermined the US intelligence community. To fix that, Biden needs to install an adept leader as the director of national intelligence to coordinate the work of the 17 US intelligence agencies. Avril Haines was tapped by Biden to run his foreign policy and national security transition team and is both a former deputy director of the CIA and deputy national security adviser for Obama. Haines has the intelligence experience and political savvy to be an effective director of national intelligence.
The Trump administration has turned the once-important job of US ambassador to the United Nations into a Trivial Pursuit question. At the beginning of his administration Trump selected a national figure, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, to be his UN ambassador. Quick: Who can name today’s American ambassador to the UN? It is Kelly Craft, a hitherto obscure diplomat whose main qualification for the job appears to be the large sums she and her husband have donated to the 2016 Trump campaign. Two years ago, the Trump administration downgraded the UN ambassador position to a non-cabinet level role — as it was during both Bush administrations. It is a job that was once held by diplomatic heavy hitters such as Richard Holbrooke and Susan Rice.

The UN ambassador job should be reinstated to its former status to show that the Biden team is serious about re-engaging with the UN. The former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, who ran for the Democratic nomination and is now on the Biden transition team, would be an excellent pick for this position. Buttigieg speaks several languages, including Arabic, Dari, French, Italian and Spanish, which would make him quite a hit at the UN. If he were to be selected and confirmed, he would be only the second person who identifies as gay to serve in an American cabinet.

Biden should also follow an honorable post-9/11 bipartisan tradition when it comes to counterterrorism as was the case even during the Trump administration which, until 2017, kept National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) Director Nick Rasmussen, who held that role during the Obama administration. The current NCTC director, Christopher Miller, a former Special Forces officer, was Trump’s senior director for counterterrorism at the White House and is well qualified to remain in his current position.

Similarly, the Trump administration kept in place Brett McGurk, who oversaw the “Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS” at the Department of State under Obama. The Biden team should leave in place his successor Ambassador James Jeffrey, a senior career diplomat, and his deputy, Syria envoy and retired army Colonel Joel Rayburn, both of whom have deep expertise in the Middle East.

Biden should do something a little unexpected at the CIA and tap one of the nation’s top retired military officers who have publicly endorsed him to be the director of the agency. It could be someone like Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who revolutionized Joint Special Operations Command to make it the superlative war fighting machine that it is today, or his successor in that role, Admiral Bill McRaven, the architect of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. Both McChrystal and McRaven have deep knowledge of the intelligence world and of how to connect the various elements of the US national security enterprise to make them work effectively.

This national security team would signal to the world that Biden wants to restore America’s place in the world as the first among equals in a rules-based international order that has served American interests so well since World War II.
(Disclosure: I have reported on national security issues in Washington DC for more than two-and-half decades, so I know many of the current and former officials mentioned in this story; some well and others only slightly.)

Here’s what policies Biden should pursue:

Trump has styled himself as a “wartime president” fighting Covid-19, but his response has been at best feckless and he has barely acknowledged the more than 230,000 Americans killed by the disease.

The New York Times reports that as soon as Biden takes office, he will begin “ramping up testing, ensuring a steady supply of protective equipment, distributing a vaccine and securing money from Congress for schools and hospitals.” And Biden would lead by example, which Trump is incapable of doing, by wearing a mask in public consistently and only attending events with proper social distancing.

But Biden could go further by creating a new White House position for the Covid-19 era, a deputy national security adviser for health who is a public health expert. This would do more than simply restore the pandemic directorate at the National Security Council which was dissolved by the Trump administration and which Biden has pledged to bring back, and it would help to coordinate the government response to the most serious public health crisis in a century.

It’s a role that could be filled by Dr. Anthony Fauci who has advised six presidents and is widely trusted by the public, or by someone like Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota who is one of the nation’s leading infectious disease experts and who served as the Science Envoy for a year at the State Department during the Trump administration. He has spent much of his career publicly warning of the type of global pandemic that we now face.

Biden’s national security team should also bring badly needed regular order to American national security decisions that are now often made by presidential tweet rather than by the deliberations of the National Security Council.

To give one telling example: In October, commander-in-chief Trump tweeted that all American soldiers should be going home from Afghanistan by Christmas, and his national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, said that there will be a drawdown from Afghanistan from the 4,500 troops currently there to 2,500 soldiers by early 2021. But General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told NPR that on the matter of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, “Robert O’Brien or anyone else can speculate as they see fit. I’m not going to engage in speculation. I’m going to engage in the rigorous analysis of the situation based on the conditions and the plans that I am aware of and my conversations with the president.”

Does anyone have a clue what the Trump administration’s Afghan policy is? The confusion surely only benefits the Taliban, whose main aim is the withdrawal of all US troops from Afghanistan. Trump officials are now negotiating some kind of peace deal with the Taliban, but they have zero leverage since Trump is already volunteering that all US troops will leave soon anyway.

Biden, who had long been a skeptic of large-scale US troop deployments in Afghanistan, should retain a light Special Operations Forces footprint for counterterrorism missions in Afghanistan and he should say publicly that the US commitment to Afghanistan is a durable one, rather than making constantly muddled statements, as President Trump has done, about US intentions in Afghanistan that confuse America’s allies and give comfort to her enemies.

As soon as he assumes office, Biden has promised that he will reverse the Trump administration’s moves to exit the World Health Organization (WHO), which made some early missteps combatting the coronavirus by not challenging Chinese falsehoods about the virus when it first emerged. This is the right move since the WHO is still the only body that can respond around the world to what is, after all, a global pandemic.

In an article he wrote for Foreign Affairs earlier this year, Biden says he will immediately rejoin the Paris climate agreement, which is a sound decision, as 2020 is on course to likely be the hottest year since record-keeping began, according to meteorologists. The agreement calls for the US to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 26% of their 2005 levels within the next five years. Under the Trump administration the US has formally left the Paris agreement on Wednesday.)

Biden says he will reenter the Iran nuclear deal if the Iranians observe their end of the agreement. After the Trump administration left the agreement in 2018, the Iranians restarted their production of nuclear fuel, albeit at a relatively low level that is not weapons-grade. Whatever your view of the theocratic regime in Iran, surely it would be much worse if it were on a path to acquire nuclear weapons, which the Obama administration delayed until at least 2030 with its 2015 nuclear agreement with that nation.

The President-elect should also take the simple step of no longer disrespecting our close allies, such as the Germans and the Canadians, as Trump has done repeatedly. He should also cut off praise–such as Trump has delivered– for autocrats like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. This approach to allies and enemies has yielded Trump precisely nothing over the past four years; the North Korean nuclear program continues to grow according to North Korea experts, while President Trump is widely reviled among America’s closest North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies, according to Pew polling released in September.

What is the strategic benefit of all this geopolitical trumpery to the United States? It has never been clear, although it’s certainly long been a key aim of Russian President Vladimir Putin to weaken the NATO alliance.

Biden should reaffirm American commitments to NATO which Trump’s then-secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, publicly described in 2017 as the “most successful and powerful military alliance in modern history,” something that Mattis’ former boss has never seemed to understand.

At the same time, Biden should make it clear to Putin that the Russian leader’s bromance with Trump was an aberration in US foreign policy and that the US will take a strong stand on any interference in American electoral processes–including by indicting and sanctioning any of Putin’s allies who are involved in these activities.

To its credit, the Trump administration took a skeptical view of China’s military expansionism and its unfair trade practices. Biden should continue with this, but should do more to publicly criticize China’s imprisonment of some one million Uyghurs—who the Chinese government claim are only being held in “re-education camps” — and China’s deconstruction of a democratic Hong Kong.

The new president should also reverse some of the more odious immigration policies of the Trump administration, which separated more than 500 children from their families at the southern border. Biden has vowed to form a task force to reunite the kids with their families.

The Trump administration says it will let in only 15,000 refugees in the next year when the world has more refugees than at any time since World War II, according to the UN. Rightly, Biden has said he would allow 125,000 refugees to settle in the US.

Biden says he will end the “travel ban,” aimed mostly at Muslim-majority countries. The ban did nothing to prevent the jihadist terrorist attacks that occurred over the past four years in the United States which were carried out variously by US citizens, legal permanent residents of the United States and a Saudi military officer who killed three American sailors at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida in December 2019. Saudi citizens are not subject to the travel ban.

Relatedly, Biden should end the Trump administration’s warm embrace of the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohamed bin Salman, known as MBS, who launched a catastrophic war in Yemen in 2015 that helped to precipitate the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, according to the UN, and did not achieve its goal to reduce the role of the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. Biden says he will cease any US backing for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, according to the piece he wrote in Foreign Affairs.

Above all, Biden should be, as he has promised, the leader of all Americans, not just the ones who voted for him.

On the key issue of Covid, President Trump didn’t do himself any favors during Thursday’s debate, CNN.com

Who won the debate

(CNN)CNN Opinion asked contributors for their takes on how Donald Trump and Joe Biden did in the final presidential debate. The views expressed in this commentary are their own.

Peter Bergen: Trump failed the Covid test
On the key issue of Covid, President Trump didn’t do himself any favors during Thursday’s debate.

Trump’s record speaks for itself: More than 220,000 Americans are dead from Covid and more than 8 million are infected with the coronavirus, while tens of millions of Americans have lost their livelihoods during the crisis. Americans now face a true winter of discontent with the “twindemic” of Covid roaring back and the onset of flu season.

During the debate Trump reached into his usual bag of tricks about the virus: He claimed his actions saved more than two million lives from the “China virus” and that a vaccine will be forthcoming “within weeks.”

Of course, that figure of more than two million deaths referred to a projection on mortality that would result from inaction—something no functional government would have allowed in the face of an onrushing pandemic. And, yes, the virus did originate in China, but it also came into the US from Europe and then it spread like wildfire inside the United States, all while the President mocked mask-wearing, which is the most effective tool against the virus.
During the debate Trump did not lay out any kind of real plan to mitigate the worst public health crisis in the United States in a century. If he had done so, he might have won over some undecided voters, but he seems incapable of doing so.

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is senior editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and author of the new book “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.”

Mike Pence’s impossible task, CNN.com

Peter Bergen: Mike Pence’s impossible task

Vice President Mike Pence had an impossible task Wednesday night. As the head of the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force, Pence had to defend the administration’s record when more than 210,000 Americans are already dead from Covid-19.

Pence flunked that test, not least because his boss has Covid and is working in the Oval Office without quarantining himself, in defiance of his own administration’s guidelines about what to do if you have the disease.

The Trump administration always focuses on the visuals. The images from the debate told one story as both vice presidential candidates were separated by plexiglass and sat more than 12 feet away from each other — while Pence resorted to his usual set of bromides about the greatness of the Trump presidency,

At one point, Pence was asked why the US had fared worse than a similar industrialized democracy — Canada — with its response to the pandemic. Pence really had no good answer to that question, instead blaming China.

The Chinese certainly deserve some blame for their early missteps in Wuhan, where the virus originated, but that was back in late 2019 and early 2020. Nine months later and Pence articulated no real plan about how a second Trump administration might try and finally lick this virus.

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is senior editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and author of the new book “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos

How President Trump wound up in the hospital, CNN.com

How President Trump wound up in the hospital
Peter Bergen
Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 2:11 PM ET, Sat October 3, 2020

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is senior editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and author of the new book “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own; view more opinion at CNN.”

(CNN)President Donald Trump has had a lot to say about the coronavirus, a great deal of it misleading or simply false, and he has also modeled and even encouraged irresponsible behavior, all of which has surely contributed to the spread of the virus, since the President has the most powerful megaphone in the United States.

Now all Trump’s delusional thinking has finally caught up with him. Of course, Americans and people around the world wish the President a speedy recovery, which he is likely to have since he is getting some of the best medical treatment available.

But it would be a huge service if Trump spent some of his time at Walter Reed hospital reflecting on how he ended up there. He should also think about the more than 208,000 Americans who have already died from Covid-19 and start formulating a real plan about how to mitigate the spread of this scourge.

A key to such a plan would be an effort to erase all the misinformation Trump has spread since the early days of the pandemic.

First, in February, Trump said that cases would go down to zero “within a couple of days.”

Second, Trump said that come Easter Sunday, the US should be “opened up” because he “just thought it was a beautiful time.”

Third, Trump claimed that the coronavirus was no more dangerous than the seasonal flu.

Fourth, Trump said in March that “anybody that wants a test can get a test,” when tests were actually hard to get at the time. Even this summer, many patients had to wait several days for results, which meant that their tests were essentially useless in helping stop the spread of the virus.

Fifth, Trump suggested that injecting bleach might prove to be a treatment for the virus. (The president later said he was being “sarcastic.”)

Sixth, Trump said that hydroxychloroquine was likely a “game changer” and that he was even taking the drug himself. In June, the Food and Drug Administration revoked “emergency use” of hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 patients, in part, because it could cause heart problems.

Seventh, Trump said the virus could take a summer vacation once the weather warmed up. It didn’t.

Eighth, Trump publicly denigrated his top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci as an alarmist.

Ninth, Trump claimed that the only reason coronavirus cases were rising in the US was because there was more testing.

Tenth, Trump has repeatedly asserted that an effective vaccine is just around the corner, while top scientists in his own administration say that such a vaccine will likely only be widely available by the middle of next year.

Eleventh, Trump has repeatedly failed to wear a mask in public, while he has publicly ridiculed those who do wear masks as a routine matter. On Tuesday, for instance, when Trump debated former Vice President Joe Biden, the President mocked his opponent, saying, “Every time you see him, he’s got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away from them and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.”

Twelfth, Trump has insisted on holding a series of campaign rallies around the US with thousands of attendees, many of them unmasked. He has also hosted events at the White House with large numbers of attendees socializing without masks as if they were at a pre-Covid-19 party, such as the announcement of the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court a week ago.

Trump’s falsehoods and cavalier behavior have had real impacts. A Cornell University study released last week found that that mentions of “Trump within the context of different misinformation topics made up 37% of the overall ‘misinformation conversation,'” based on a sample analysis of 38 million articles in English from around the world.

An Axios/Ipsos poll in July found that more than three quarters of Democrats said they wore a mask at all times outside the house, while only under half of Republicans said they did so. Also, eight in 10 Americans polled said they would not get a vaccine if President Trump said it was safe, but most would trust their doctor.

Trump still can use his bully pulpit to reverse some of these damaging trends.

Biden won on the most important crisis facing the US, CNN.com

Peter Bergen: Biden won on the most important crisis facing the US

The coronavirus is the worst public health crisis the country has faced in a century, yet in the presidential debate Tuesday night President Donald Trump didn’t make even a pro forma statement acknowledging the pain and the suffering of the more than 200,000 American families who have had loved ones die of Covid-19. Nor did the President make any kind of empathetic gesture to the 7 million Americans who have become infected with the coronavirus, many of whom will face health complications that may not be lethal, but that will still leave them seriously ill.

Instead, during the debate, Trump, as he has done repeatedly before, gave himself a giant pat on the back for the “great job” his administration has done combating Covid-19.

As Biden was quick to point out, the US has 4% of the world’s population but more than 20% of the reported deaths from the virus.

During the debate, Trump presented no plan for what he would actually do about the coronavirus should he be elected to a second term, other than to shout some slogans about Biden wanting to close the country down and the US being “weeks away from a vaccine,” while top scientists in his own administration say that any potential vaccine likely won’t be widely available until summer 2021.

Biden jumped on Trump about his past delusional thinking about the coronavirus: That it would be gone by Easter; that taking bleach might help eliminate the virus and that warm weather would chase the virus away.

The coronavirus, of course, didn’t take a summer vacation. Instead, in states such as Minnesota, Montana, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin and Wyoming over the past week there have been record one-day rises in the rates of coronavirus infection, according to Reuters.

So, whoever assumes the presidency on January 20, 2021 will have to deal with the arguably the most complex crisis facing the US since World War II.

Trump certainly made no case that he was the right guy for dealing with this crisis on the debate stage on Tuesday night.

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is senior editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and author of the book “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.”