Trump has created his biggest foreign policy crisis yet, CNN.com
by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Updated 1:51 PM ET, Fri January 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. His new book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.
(CNN)A consistent theme of Donald Trump’s presidency is how the seemingly endless post-9/11 wars in the greater Middle East have wasted trillions of dollars.
Trump believes he was elected, in part, to draw down from these wars — and in the past year he has done just that, both in Afghanistan and in Syria.
Then came Thursday’s air strike, ordered by Trump, that killed arguably the most important commander in the Middle East, the Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani.
As global affairs analyst Max Boot pointed out Friday on CNN, the US has not killed a senior military leader of another country since 1943, when it shot down the plane carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind of Pearl Harbor.
This represents a serious escalation of the long-simmering confrontation between the United States and Iran, since Soleimani was effectively the leader of Iran’s armed forces.
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has vowed to avenge Soleimani’s death.
And given Iran’s proxies across the Middle East — from Lebanon to Iraq, from Syria to Yemen — as well Iran’s substantial military and ballistic missile capabilities, it’s a threat that must be taken seriously.
Indeed, on Friday, the United States urged the evacuation of all US citizens from Iraq immediately.
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And Trump now faces what is likely the most significant foreign policy crisis of his presidency — part of which he has created for himself.
To paraphrase Leon Trotsky: You may not be interested in the wars of the Middle East, but those wars are interested in you.
But Trump is not the first American president to learn how difficult it can be to fully extricate the US from the region.
President Jimmy Carter was confronted by the hostage crisis at the US embassy in Tehran that helped contribute to his one-term presidency.
President Ronald Reagan had to pull back from Lebanon after 241 US servicemen were killed in Beirut by a truck bombing in 1983 that was mounted by the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia.
And Reagan’s presidency was nearly derailed by the harebrained Iran-Contra scheme to swap arms with Iran in return for American and European hostages that were held by Hezbollah in Lebanon.
President George H.W. Bush had to respond to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 that seemed to also threaten neighboring Saudi Arabia by sending hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to expel Saddam from Kuwait.
Bill Clinton’s presidency saw the rise of al Qaeda. On Clinton’s watch, the terrorist group bombed two US embassies in Africa, killing more than two hundred people in 1998.
Two years later, the group attacked the USS Cole in Yemen, killing 17 American sailors.
9/11 was one of the hinge events of American history. As a result, President George W. Bush launched a war in Afghanistan against al Qaeda and the Taliban — and also a war of choice two years later in Iraq.
President Barack Obama dramatically increased the covert CIA drone campaign targeting al Qaeda in Pakistan and in Yemen.
Obama also oversaw the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq in 2011. Three years later, after ISIS was almost at the gates of Baghdad, Obama sent thousands of American troops back into Iraq to combat the terrorist army.
Trump’s natural inclination is to get out of the Middle East, but just like every other American president over the past four decades, he is now being pulled back in. Indeed, Trump himself has contributed to this crisis by pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal.
On October 3, 2017, Trump’s then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that Iran was adhering to the nuclear agreement. When Sen. Angus King, an independent, asked Mattis whether he believed the deal was in US national security interests, Mattis replied, “Yes, Senator, I do.”
But Trump had asserted for the past two years that the Iran agreement was the “worst deal ever,” and so in 2018 he pulled out of the deal. He also added new sanctions that have devastated the Iranian economy and contributed to widespread street protests against the regime.
Iran announced in July that it was breaching the terms of the nuclear deal by enriching uranium beyond the 3.67% purity allowed by the agreement, enriching it above 4.5%.
This was still a very long way from the 90% purity that would be needed for a nuclear weapon, but it was a small step down the road to reactivating Iran’s nuclear weapons program — the program that Trump had repeatedly said he would never allow.
Since June, Iran has been punching back in other ways, bringing down an unmanned US surveillance drone and allegedly attacking some of the world’s most important oil facilities in Saudi Arabia (an attack it denies carrying out), while Iran-backed militias have also attacked American bases in Iraq.
Now the United States and Iran stand on the brink of a war that neither side really wants, but Iran likely feels it must respond in a meaningful way to the killing of Soleimani.
As a result, both sides may go up the “escalatory ladder” to a wider conflict.
The killing of Iran’s General Soleimani is hugely significant, CNN.com
by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Updated 11:06 PM ET, Thu January 2, 2020
Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.
(CNN)The significance of Thursday’s US strike against Qasem Soleimani cannot be overstated because he ran Iran’s military operations across the Middle East.
Iraqi state TV reported Thursday that Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, was killed by rockets hitting his vehicle near Baghdad International Airport. The Pentagon then confirmed it was an American strike ordered by President Donald Trump that killed Soleimani.
Here is how General Joseph Votel, the then-commander of US Central Command that oversees American military operations in the Middle East, explained Soleimani’s role in 2018: “Wherever you see Iranian activity, you see Qasem Soleimani, whether it is in Syria, whether it is in Iraq, whether it is in Yemen, he is there and it is the Quds Force, the organization which he leads, that I think is the principal threat as we look at this and the principal ones that are stoking this destabilizing activity.”
During the past decade Iran has conducted proxy wars across the Middle East in Iraq, Syria and Yemen and it also controls much of Lebanon through its proxy force there, Hezbollah. Soleimani was in charge of all these operations.
Soleimani also oversaw operations against US servicemen in Iraq by Shia militias in which hundreds of American servicemen were killed following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. While eager to wind down US wars in the Middle East, President Trump has proven willing to respond militarily when American lives are at risk. He authorized five airstrikes on Sunday against targets in Iraq and Syria that were associated with an Iran-backed militia that the US blamed for a recent attack on an American military base in Iraq that resulted in the death of a US contractor and in which several American servicemen were wounded.
The wild card now is: How will the Iranians react? In recent months they have carried out strikes that seemed designed to harass the United States and her allies, but not to provoke an all-out shooting war.
In June the Iranians shot down an American surveillance drone. At first, military action seemed probable, but Trump pulled back airstrikes on Iranian targets saying it wasn’t a “proportionate” response to the unmanned drone that was brought down.
Three months later, a barrage of missiles and drones targeted two of the world’s most important oil facilities in Saudi Arabia.
President Trump then tweeted that the United States was “locked and loaded depending on verification” of who was behind the attacks. Yet when the US administration credibly blamed Iran for the attacks, Trump, it turned out, didn’t want to get embroiled in another war in the Middle East and did not authorize a military operation in response to an attack on a close ally.
But just as he did in October when he authorized a risky operation in Syria to capture or kill the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Trump approved the strike to kill Soleimani, who has the blood of many Americans on his hands.
Thursday’s strike against Soleimani suggests that President Trump is increasingly confident in his use of American military power
Trump’s airstrikes are a well-calibrated use of force, CNN.com
Trump’s airstrikes are a sensible use of force
Opinion by Peter Bergen
Updated 8:27 PM ET, Sun December 29, 2019
Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.
(CNN)Early Sunday, the United States conducted airstrikes against five targets in Iraq and Syria associated with an Iran-backed militia. The militia, Kataib Hezbollah, has been blamed by the Pentagon for a number of recent attacks on American forces in Iraq, such as an attack Friday on a base near Kirkuk that killed a US civilian contractor and wounded four American servicemen.
The Pentagon was careful to note in the statement it released Sunday about the US strikes on the Kataib Hezbollah targets that these actions were “defensive” in nature because they were in response to attacks on American servicemen and contractors.
The military action, in conjunction with prior hesitation by the Trump administration to attack Iranian targets, suggests an emerging Trump doctrine about when he will authorize the use of military force.
Earlier this year, President Trump was hesitant to use force against Iran after Iranian forces shot down an American surveillance drone. At first, military action seemed probable, but on June 20 he pulled back airstrikes on Iranian targets that could have killed as many as 150 people, claiming it wasn’t a “proportionate” response to the unmanned drone that was brought down.
Three months later, on September 14, a barrage of missiles and drones targeted two of the world’s most important oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, knocking out about half of the country’s oil capacity and immediately spiking oil prices around 15%. A day after the attacks in Saudi Arabia, President Trump tweeted that the United States was “locked and loaded depending on verification” of who was behind the attacks. Yet when the Trump administration credibly blamed Iran for the attacks, Trump, it turned out, didn’t want to get embroiled in another war in the Middle East and chose to impose additional sanctions on Iran instead of a military response to the attack on a close ally.
Taken together, these examples indicate the administration has developed a set of principles when it comes to conflict with Iran or its proxies.
Trump will not carry out military operations against Iran for attacks against unnamed American drones. He will also not respond when a close ally such as Saudi Arabia suffers significant attacks on the key node of its economy.
Trump will, however, respond militarily when Americans are killed or wounded by Iran or its proxy forces.
Sunday’s strikes in Iraq and Syria are a sensible and proportionate use of force by a commander in chief who, despite his often-hyperventilating rhetoric, has hitherto proven reluctant to get into a shooting war with Iran.
Trump always has the Saudis’ back, CNN.com
Trump always has the Saudis’ back
Peter Bergen
By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Updated 4:27 PM ET, Tue December 10, 2019
Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Portions of this article are adapted from Peter Bergen’s new book “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos,” which is published Tuesday. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.
(CNN)The FBI is treating Friday’s shooting at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, in which three US sailors were killed as an “act of terror.”
This makes the alleged shooter, Saudi Air Force officer Mohammed Alshamrani, the first foreign national to carry out a lethal terrorist attack in the US since 9/11.
Every other lethal jihadist terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11 has been carried out by a US citizen or legal permanent resident, according to New America, a research institution.
President Donald Trump’s reaction to the attack in Pensacola was uncharacteristically subdued, and he hasn’t characterized it as act of terrorism even though the FBI is treating it as such. Trump spoke to Saudi Arabia’s King and to its Crown Prince and said, “They are devastated by what took place in Pensacola. And I think they’re going to help out the families very greatly.”
Do this thought experiment: What if the Pensacola shooter wasn’t a Saudi but instead a national of a country such as Yemen that is on the Trump “travel ban” list of seven largely Muslim-majority countries whose citizens are subject to “extreme vetting.” Trump would be crowing about his travel ban, as he has in recent weeks when he has invoked it several times at campaign rallies, claiming that it has made the US safe from terrorists.
Saudi Arabia is not on the travel ban list, despite the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers who killed nearly 3,000 people in America on 9/11 were Saudis.
The Pensacola attack reminds us that Trump, even more than his predecessors, has gone all in with the Saudis, defending their controversial war in Yemen and blockade against Qatar and continuing to support the regime after a US-based journalist critical of the government was murdered in a Saudi consulate. Trump has been particularly consistent in defending Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, widely known as MBS.
How the ‘bromance’ began
A snowstorm helped to seal the alliance between the House of Saud and the House of Trump. Only seven weeks into the Trump administration, on the morning of March 14, 2017, the Saudis’ then-deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was scheduled to meet briefly with President Trump at the White House.
After that, the President was supposed to have lunch with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but a massive snowstorm was making its way across the northeast of the United States, resulting in more than a thousand flight cancellations at the three Washington-area airports.
Merkel was already close to the airport in Germany, waiting to take off for the United States and insisted she wanted to hear from Trump himself if her trip was going to be put off, according to a Trump administration official. So, Trump called Merkel, telling her, “I really hate to postpone, but this storm is huge.”
The postponement of Merkel’s trip meant that the brief meeting between Trump and Mohammed bin Salman was extended to include a formal lunch with the President and key members of his Cabinet, which was quite an honor for the 31-year-old prince.
MBS’s father, then-81-year-old King Salman, was monarch in name, but it was clear that his youngest and favorite son was the emerging center of power in the Saudi kingdom.
Both the scions of wealthy families and only a few years apart in age, MBS and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner bonded over a belief that together they could transform the Middle East. MBS approached his courtship of Kushner with considerable ardor. Kushner once mused, “Mohammad bin Salman rushed me in ways that no woman had ever rushed me,” an observation that I learned from a Trump administration source and is reported here for the first time.
The Saudis understood the power of family relationships and an alliance with Trump made intuitive 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 2015 nuclear agreement with their archrivals, the Iranians.
Subcontracting US policy to the Saudis
The Trump administration subsequently subordinated much of its Middle East policy to the Saudis. When the Saudis blockaded their gas-rich neighbor Qatar in June 2017 shortly after Trump had visited Saudi Arabia, Trump went along for the ride despite that fact that Qatar housed the key US military base that was coordinating the war against both ISIS and the Taliban.
President Trump immediately aligned himself with Saudi talking points about Qatar, tweeting, “So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries 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!” Was Trump simply unaware of Qatar’s importance to the United States?
Then came Iran: The International Atomic Energy Agency repeatedly certified that Iran was sticking to its agreement with the United States and wasn’t developing nuclear weapons.
Yet on May 8, 2018, Trump announced that he was pulling out of the Iran nuclear agreement, saying, “The fact is this was a horrible one-sided deal that should never, ever have been made.”
The Saudis were elated at the actions taken against Iran. The Saudi Foreign Ministry announced that it welcomed the Trump administration pulling out of the deal and the reimposition of draconian sanctions on Iran.
Yemen war
In 2015, MBS had launched a ham-handed war against Iran-backed rebels in neighboring Yemen which the UN said has precipitated the worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world.
As a result, last year the US Senate voted to end any American support for the war in Yemen, and the House approved a similar measure. To no one’s great surprise, Trump vetoed the resolution on April 16, 2019.
A month later, against considerable congressional opposition, Trump pushed through $3 billion of arm sales to the Saudis citing purported national security concerns.
The killing of Jamal Khashoggi
Finally, consider the murder on October 2, 2018, of Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi writer, who entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain paperwork so he could marry his Turkish fiancée. A contributor to the Washington Post, the 59-year-old Khashoggi was a critic of the Saudi regime who was living in self-imposed exile in the United States.
After Khashoggi’s murder, Trump was on the phone regularly with Saudi King Salman and with his son. The conversations between Trump and King Salman and MBS were kept very secret. Typically, there would be several senior officials listening in to a call with an important foreign leader, and then a transcript of the call would be circulated to those officials. To prevent leaks, no transcript was made of Trump’s calls with King Salman or with MBS.
In public, Trump was defending the Saudis, but when he spoke to King Salman he was blunt, saying, “This is a huge problem. Where’s the body? We’ve got to resolve this. We’ve got to get his body back to his family,” a Trump administration official told me. Salman always denied any knowledge of the murder plot.
According to the official, Trump also spoke to MBS separately, asking him, “Did you know anything about this? Did you have any role? Mohammed, I need to know. Was there a bone saw? Because if there was a bone saw, that changes everything. I mean, I’ve been in some pretty tough negotiations. I’ve never had to take a bone saw with me.” These conversations are reported for the first time here.
MBS told the President, “I don’t know. We’re trying to find out. Where the body is, we don’t know. We know it was given to a Syrian.”
Trump asked the Crown Prince quizzically, “Just a random Syrian walking around in Turkey?”
MBS replied, “Well, we don’t know. We’re trying to find out. It was given to a Syrian living in Turkey, and we don’t know where he took the body.”
Trump said, “Okay. Well, keep us updated. We got to know. We got to know.”
Trump added, “You know, we’re sticking by you. This is an important relationship,” the official said.
And that in a nutshell is Trump’s response to anything involving the Saudis — “We’re sticking by you” — even when that involves a Saudi military officer allegedly killing three American sailors on Friday.
London terrorist attack brings home a chilling reality, CNN.com
London terrorist attack brings home a chilling reality
Peter Bergen
Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Updated 7:06 PM ET, Sat November 30, 2019
Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new book, “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos,” will be published in December. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.
(CNN)The terrorist attack in London on Friday — in which two people were killed by what appears to be a lone suspect, according to British authorities — is bound to raise questions about the UK Home Office’s decision earlier this month to lower the terrorism threat level from “severe” to “substantial,” the lowest point since August 2014.
The Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, which works closely with UK intelligence services, made the recommendation to lower the threat based on an evaluation of available intelligence along with an analysis of terrorist capabilities and intentions, according to the Home Office.
Surely the destruction of ISIS’s physical caliphate in Syria and Iraq, the last vestiges of which were expunged in March, played a role in the assessment.
Indeed ISIS has seen a dramatic decline in the recruitment of “foreign fighters.” In 2017, the US military said as many as 40,000 people from 120 countries including the UK had joined ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
Today, that number has slowed to a trickle. Very few want to join the losing team.
There has also been a sharp drop in terrorism deaths in Europe, from 150 in 2015 to 13 in 2018, according to European Union figures.
But even when the UK Home Office announced it was lowering the terrorism threat level, it issued a warning that there were “around 800 live” counterterrorism investigations across the nation and that 24 terrorist plots had been thwarted since March 2017.
So far, the British police has declared Friday’s attack on London Bridge “a terrorist incident.” The suspect, who wore a fake suicide vest, stabbed several victims on London Bridge before he was killed by police. Authorities have not ascribed a specific motivation to the suspect. But the incident bears a close resemblance to an attack in 2017. ISIS-inspired terrorists wearing fake suicide vests plowed a van into pedestrians on London Bridge before launching a knife attack at the neighboring Borough Market, killing eight people before they were shot dead by police.
Just as school shooters learn from other school shooters, terrorists learn from other terrorists. While British police have not described Friday’s attack as jihadist terrorism, the similarities between the two attacks are striking.
On Friday evening, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the incident has been contained “to the best of our knowledge,” suggesting that the terrorist involved was not part of a larger group.
Friday’s attack highlights the persistent threat of “lone actor” terrorists who are often radicalized online by ISIS or other militant groups. But their capabilities for lethal action generally do not match those of trained terrorists, like the ones behind the 2015 attacks in Paris, who killed 130 people after training in Syria.
ISIS’ territorial defeat earlier this year marks a significant victory given its role as a training ground for terrorists to carry out attacks in the West. What remains are “lone actors” who are often radicalized online. Given what we saw in London on Friday, they too can be lethal — and in many ways, much harder to detect.
The Generals Tried to Keep Trump in Check. What Happens to Foreign Policy Now That They’ve Left? TIME
The Generals Tried to Keep Trump in Check. What Happens to Foreign Policy Now That They’ve Left?
Illustration by Eleanor Shakespeare for TIME; Source Photos: Getty Images (7)
BY PETER BERGEN DECEMBER 5, 2019
IDEAS
Bergen is a CNN analyst. His new book, Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos, from which this article is adapted, will be published by Penguin Press on Dec. 10
Early in his presidency, in mid-April 2017, Donald Trump and his top national-security officials gathered in the Oval Office for a briefing on North Korea. Trump sat behind his massive Resolute desk as officials crowded in around him. The briefing consisted largely of highly classified images of North Korea’s nuclear facilities and military sites. The briefers knew Trump was more a visual learner than a briefing-book kind of guy, so the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency had made a three-dimensional model of a secret North Korean facility that they brought to the Oval Office.
Trump was also shown a well-known satellite image of North Korea at night. On North Korea’s northern border was China awash in pinpricks of light, while to the south was South Korea also all lit up at night. Between China and South Korea was an almost entirely dark North Korea with only a tiny, faint light emanating from its capital, Pyongyang. The image eloquently told the story of the almost total failure of the North Korean economy.
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The President had been regularly briefed that North Korea possessed vast artillery batteries that, in the event of war, could kill millions in Seoul. The photo seemed to bring the briefings home.
“They have to move,” he said, referring to the inhabitants of Seoul.
The officials in the Oval Office weren’t sure if Trump was joking. Trump repeated, “They have to move!” Seoul, with a population of 10 million, has roughly as many residents as Sweden. Was the President seriously suggesting 10 million people needed to leave their homes in Seoul and move elsewhere? No one knew what to say.
In this previously unreported episode, Trump demonstrated what his supporters admired so much about him: his unorthodox thinking. To his critics this was the kind of idea that underlined just how ignorant and impetuous the President was.
Trump is the first American President not to have previously served in public office or in uniform, so when he first assumed the presidency he needed the cover of senior officers around him with plenty of fruit salad (as medals are jokingly called) on their chests. No modern President has appointed so many generals to Cabinet posts: retired general Jim Mattis as Secretary of Defense, retired general John Kelly first as Secretary of Homeland Security and later as chief of staff, and retired Army lieut. general Michael Flynn as National Security Adviser, who was then replaced in that role by Lieut. General H.R. McMaster.
At first Trump reveled in the generals on his team, especially the “killers.” Trump respected the raw power embodied by the U.S. military, and he needed Cabinet officials around him who understood how the levers of national-security power actually worked and who had experience in America’s long-running wars on terrorism.
In the beginning Trump’s alliance with the generals worked well, and they guided him to some sensible decisions. Trump’s first inclination was to pull out all the American troops in Afghanistan, but the generals led by McMaster made the case that a precipitous withdrawal would create a vacuum that terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS would exploit. In August 2017 Trump announced an open-ended commitment to Afghanistan as well as a small surge of troops in order to combat the resurgent Taliban.
For a year and a half until May 2018, the generals–along with another member of the so-called axis of adults, then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson–were able to persuade Trump not to scrap the Iran nuclear deal. The International Atomic Energy Agency had repeatedly certified that Iran was sticking to the agreement and wasn’t developing nuclear weapons. Mattis wanted to stay in the Iran deal not only because it was working but also because it had been negotiated by the U.S. together with close American allies–the British, French and Germans. In Mattis’ view, if the U.S. had made an agreement, you should stick to it. Otherwise, you risked eroding what America’s word meant. Mattis lost that fight when Trump announced that he was pulling out of the nuclear deal.
Even on Russia, despite Trump’s repeated kowtowing to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump’s Administration actually followed a tough line at times–when, for instance, the U.S. expelled 60 Russian diplomats in March 2018 after Russian intelligence’s attempt to assassinate a former Russian spy in the United Kingdom using a nerve agent.
But Trump’s romance with his generals eventually turned disastrously sour. The differences between Trump and U.S. military leaders were partly stylistic: Trump’s lack of decorum and rudeness are certainly at odds with the military’s honor-based values. But the differences were also about policy; Pentagon officials want to sustain overseas military commitments, which they see as vital to securing world order, whether that is to defeat ISIS, contain a nuclear-armed North Korea or prevent Afghanistan from reverting to control by the Taliban. Trump believes that he was elected to end foreign entanglements and that alliances like NATO are financially ripping off the U.S. The generals knew that NATO allies had fought shoulder to shoulder with them in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks.
Trump fixated on getting close NATO allies like Germany to “pay up” even when they didn’t owe any money. He found it particularly irksome that while the Germans had the second largest economy in the alliance, they ponied up only around 1% of their GDP on defense while the U.S. spent around 4%. On March 17, 2017, German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrived in Washington on her first official visit to President Trump. Trump interpreted the Germans’ underspending on defense as if he were a landlord collecting overdue rent, which drove the Germans nuts. Trump’s staff produced a chart showing that Germany was purportedly $600 billion in arrears. Trump waved the “invoice” at Merkel, who told Trump, “Don’t you understand this is not real?” This was the kind of performance by the President that the generals found deeply puzzling.
And then there was the manner in which Trump conducted himself personally. In an astonishing display of insensitivity, during a 2017 meeting about how to best prosecute the Afghan war, Trump said in Kelly’s presence that the young American soldiers who had died in Afghanistan had died for a worthless cause. Trump said, “We got our boys who are over there being blown up every day for what? For nothing. Guys are dying for nothing. There’s nothing worth dying for in that country.” Kelly had lost a son in Afghanistan, 29-year-old Marine First Lieutenant Robert Kelly. Trump either didn’t know or didn’t care.
Trump set records for the level of turnover at the White House and in his Cabinet. Flynn was fired within a month of Trump’s assuming office for lying to Vice President Mike Pence. McMaster, who never really connected with Trump, was pushed out after just over a year as National Security Adviser. Kelly left when he was no longer on speaking terms with the President, which made his job as chief of staff untenable. Mattis resigned after two years because of Trump’s cavalier treatment of American allies.
Trump’s split with Mattis was a long time coming; they had fundamental policy differences that began to add up over time. The Saudi-led blockade of neighboring Qatar in June 2017 was one of the first. As the former Central Command commander, Mattis knew that in many ways the most important American base overseas was Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, as this was where the wars against ISIS and the Taliban were coordinated. Yet initially Trump heartily endorsed the blockade because of his close alignment with the Saudis.
White House officials became increasingly frustrated with what they believed to be Mattis’ efforts not to provide a range of military options to the President, in particular for any kind of potential showdown with Iran. When it came to Iran, Mattis simply ignored the President’s directive to develop military options.
Similarly, when Vice President Pence and McMaster planned for a war game at Camp David in the fall of 2017 so they could better understand the military options the U.S. had in North Korea, Mattis never sent any military planners for the war game and so the session never happened, an episode recounted here for the first time.
Mattis believed that at any moment the President could do something irrational, so he had to be the force for reason. Mattis often said, “We have to make sure reason trumps impulse.” White House officials realized that Mattis believed Trump was a loose cannon and didn’t want to enable any bad decisions by providing military options that Trump could seize upon. White House officials started to refer to “Mad Dog” Mattis as “Little Baby Kitten” Mattis.
By the end of 2018 the axis of adults–Kelly, Mattis, McMaster and Tillerson–had all departed. Kelly saw his tenure in the White House as best measured by what he had prevented Trump from doing–for instance, pulling out of Afghanistan, as was the President’s first instinct; withdrawing from NATO; or pulling American forces out of South Korea, according to an interview he gave the Los Angeles Times.
Fired Navy Secretary Criticizes Trump’s ‘Shocking and Unprecedented’ Intervention in Navy SEAL Case
Trump could change his mind on a dime about any issue, something more likely to happen after the departures of the axis of adults. This was demonstrated by his abrupt decision to pull U.S. forces out of Syria in December 2018. Trump changed his mind on Syria, opting to leave a residual force there, then changed his mind again, announcing a total withdrawal in October. He then re-reversed himself by leaving several hundred soldiers in Syria. On Iran, he whipsawed between offering talks with the Iranian regime and authorizing a military strike against Iranian military targets, which he then called off.
The consistent inconsistency left both allies and enemies puzzled about his intentions. If geopolitics were as relatively simple as a Manhattan real estate deal, a whiplash strategy might have been effective. Instead, over time, America’s enemies such as the Iranians, North Koreans and Russians pegged Trump as an inconsistent bully whose bark was far worse than his bite, and adjusted their policies accordingly. North Korea started testing ballistic missiles again and continued nuclear-weapons production, while Iran started enriching uranium beyond the limits of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and Russia persisted in its large-scale information operations against the U.S.
With the departures of the generals, the world got to see Trump increasingly unplugged. Meetings between Trump and Kim Jong Un in Vietnam and at the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea yielded no tangible results. Newly imposed sanctions on the Iranians certainly had begun to bite, but Iran also restarted its uranium-enrichment program. The Trump Administration announced a partial withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and conducted peace talks with the Taliban with no input from the Afghan government. But then, on Sept. 7, 2019, Trump surprised even his close advisers with a tweet that “the major Taliban leaders and, separately, the President of Afghanistan, were going to secretly meet with me at Camp David on Sunday.” Trump wrote that he had “cancelled the meeting and called off peace negotiations,” because the Taliban had “admitted to an attack in Kabul that killed one of our great soldiers.” The Afghan war grinds on with the Taliban more empowered and the Afghan government weaker.
Trump was now surrounded with yes-men and was running his Cabinet as he had run his real estate company, as a one-man show. The danger of having Trump surrounded by a team of acolytes was underscored by what became potentially the greatest threat to his presidency–the call he made on July 25, 2019, to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, when Trump asked the Ukrainians to investigate Joe Biden as well as his son Hunter. Kelly says he warned Trump during his final days as his chief of staff not to hire a “yes-man” to replace him, saying he risked being impeached if he did.
The generals who had once guided his national-security policies were all now long gone from his Administration. What remained was a chief executive who thrilled to the ceremonial aspects of being Commander in Chief but was generally reluctant to send American forces into harm’s way, inconsistent in his strategy and given to second-guessing the military (as he did in issuing pardons to convicted soldiers). What still isn’t clear is how the mercurial President might react to a genuine crisis.
Trump did score a real win in October when he authorized the operation in Syria in which the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, died. There were significant risks, because U.S. Special Operation forces deployed for the operation had to fly across “denied” Syrian airspace controlled by the Russians, who have sophisticated air-defense capabilities. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, called his Russian counterpart to warn him that the U.S. would be conducting an operation in his airspace. After al-Baghdadi blew himself up with a suicide vest, Trump held a press conference saying the ISIS leader had “died like a dog.” Trump used these words deliberately as a message to young men who might be contemplating joining ISIS. He told his advisers, “I don’t need people to walk back what I said.”
The teenager who had reveled in his time at the New York Military Academy boarding school– “I felt like I was in the military in a true sense”–was now finally his own general.
Bergen is a CNN analyst. His new book, Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos, from which this article is adapted, will be published by Penguin Press on Dec. 10
This appears in the December 16, 2019 issue of TIME.
Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol, book event New America DC
Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol
The Explosive Story of M19, America’s First Female Terrorist Group
EVENT
In 1981, as President Ronald Reagan announced that it was “morning in America” and as the radical left wing movements of the 1970s receded further, a new terrorist organization consisting of six women – veterans of the protest movements against the Vietnam War and U.S. imperialism, and for black and Native American liberation, came together to wage war under the name M19. In his new book Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol: The Explosive Story of America’s First Female Terrorist Group, William Rosenau tells their story – how they carried out some of the most daring operaitons in the history of domestic terrorism, including prison breakouts, robberies, and a bombing campaign at the nation’s capitol. Rosenau uses original photos and declassified FBI documents among other sources to tell the once-hidden story and draw out its lessons for an era in which domestic terrorism and the role of gender in terrorism is again being discussed.
William Rosenau, PhD, is a fellow with New America’s International Security program and a senior research scientist at CNA who has worked with RAND, as a counterterrorism adviser at the State Department, and as a staffer on the U.S. Senate terrorism subcommittee.
Join the conversation online using #M19Story and following @NewAmericaISP.
Participants:
William Rosenau
Fellow, New America’s International Security program
Author, Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol
Moderator:
Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President, New America
What Now for Britain? New America, DC
What Now for Britain?
EVENT
On November 7th, join New America’s International Security Program and Political Reform Program to analyze and reflect on the latest Brexit chapter.
The deadline for the UK’s departure from the EU was extended to October 31st, after then British prime minister, Theresa May, failed to get her proposed deal through the UK Parliament in March. The appointment of Boris Johnson as prime minister in July brought renewed hope for Brexit supporters. In the days after this latest Brexit deadline, seemingly immovable obstacles remain and the path forward remains unclear. What does the political landscape hold for the UK and its EU neighbors? What will happen next and what do we need to unpick and understand to make sense of the coming weeks?
Introductory Remarks:
Shane Greer
Joint-Chair UK Conservatives Abroad, Washington D.C.
Speakers:
Ryan Bourne
R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics at Cato Institute
Mehdi Hasan
Senior Contributor at The Intercept (TI) and host of TI’s Deconstructed podcast
Emer Rocke
Ireland’s Deputy Head of Mission to the United States, and former Director British-Irish Relations
Amanda Sloat
Robert Bosch Senior Fellow – Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe, Brookings
Moderator:
Peter Bergen
Vice President of Global Studies and Fellows, New America
US House Committee on Homeland Security, Global Threats to the Homeland
https://homeland.house.gov/download/091019testimonybergen
Terrorism in America, Eighteen Years After 9/11
https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/terrorism-america-18-years-after-911/