In an apparent win for rationality and new National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump's alt-right ideologist, has been removed from the National Security Council. But don't break out the champagne.
For, while the ex-Breitbart "News" boss's unseemly elevation to the NSC Principals Committee and the coincidental demotions of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the national intelligence director have all been reversed, Trump is nevertheless embarked on several very risky geopolitical moves which remain essentially unexamined amidst all the "reality TV" melodrama of TrumpWorld. And the fast shuffle con artist-in-chief has come up with another big distraction from those moves and from his fatefully odd linkages with Russian power players.
And, oh yes, General McMaster, while a welcome upgrade at the NSC, brings his own unexamined and somewhat problematic ideological issues. To be clear, as you will see, nothing in the much lauded elements of his background is inconsistent with the string of heightened and largely secret U.S. military interventions around the world which are already taking place under Trump.
Since we are where we are in the culture, let's cut through the melodrama of personality, then address the much graver peril of unexamined policies.
The ultra-nationalist cultural conservative ideologue Bannon may be losing out in the White House infighting so breathlessly depicted in media reports. Or he, and more to the point, Trump, may just have given up on a foolish over-reach. After all, one needn't have a specific office to have influence, and Bannon's portfolio is certainly broad enough to influence the free-form Trump on any topic. It was ridiculous to have a long ago Navy lieutenant with no record to point to as a geopolitical analyst (his archive as a columnist is free of geopolitical substance) on the NSC Principals Committee. Especially when the highest-ranking armed forces officer and the putative head of the intelligence community were removed in the bargain.
Meanwhile, Trump is furiously playing his trademark shell game around the Russia scandal and pursuing very risky new courses in several countries.
His latest fast shuffle is around former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, who made herself a permanent target for right-wing media when she went on the big Sunday shows during President Obama's re-election campaign to claim that the 9/11 anniversary Benghazi disaster was the result of a demonstration against an anti-Islam video gone very wrong. When the then UN ambassador became Obama's national security advisor, she had a somewhat lower media profile but remained an obvious political target.
Now, with his shell game around his fact-free claim that Obama tapped his Trump Tower phones during the campaign getting caught in its own contradictions -- silly House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes goes to the Trump White House to get information from Trump staffers (one of them the young NSC intelligence director McMaster has tried and failed to fire) backing his claim of incidental surveillance of Trump associates, and then uses it to brief Trump himself (lol) -- Trump has latched on to yet another move in the endless fast shuffle. Rice, he claims, broke the law in getting intelligence agencies, who did so at their own legal discretion, to tell her the identities of Americans having intriguing discussions with foreign intelligence targets.
As longtime readers know, I criticized Rice very early and very often for her ridiculous Benghazi spin. And for Obama's remarkable slowness in ordering air strikes on Isis while the jihadists, who were motorized infantry rather than true guerrillas and thus highly vulnerable to air strikes, roamed around the Iraqi countryside seizing territory.
But while I'm no Rice fan, in this instance she was very much doing her job. One needn't be an advocate of a foolish new cold war with Russia to see that TrumpWorld has very suspicious ties with key Russian figures and has gone to great lengths to hide it all. Rice was simply piecing together what Russian operatives were up to with Trump and his close associates, something very much a national security matter in light of Russia's unprecedented intervention in our presidential election.
Though an effective candidate when not behaving very erratically, Trump is proving to be a disastrous president. His presidency is awash in chaos, ignorance, and dysfunction, and has already suffered several major policy debacles. Unlike a candidate, who can bob and weave and shift on substance and distract by attacking his opponent until the campaign is over, a president ultimately has to focus on specific policies in order to be successful.
The danger with a failing president who has a short attention span and little legislative or administrative ability is that he will attempt to recoup with something he actually can order into action, i.e., the armed forces and intelligence agents.
And Trump, with little public attention paid and less official acknowledgement, has already escalated American military intervention in Iraq, Yemen (site of the world's greatest emerging humanitarian disaster), Somalia, and Syria (this even before his belated emotional response to the apparent use of chemical weapons by Assad regime forces against a rebel coalition that is essentially already beaten).
And Trump, at least rhetorically, has been spurring on broader crises with Iran, North Korea, and China. Then there is the still secret global drone war. If anything, the Trump presidency is even more secretive than Obama's.
Diplomacy?
Ex-oil tycoon Rex Tillerson, the silent secretary of state, seems not only oddly mute on most matters but also intellectually unprepared for his office and unwilling to lift a finger to preserve important "soft power" programs from meat cleaver Trump budget cuts. In fact, the man whose hand seems barely on the tiller of the State Department, who excluded State's highly regarded and very substantive press corps from his plane during his recent Asian tour in favor of a lone far right blogger with no geopolitical knowledge, has actually been one of the biggest saber rattlers on North Korea and its perennially bumptious nuclear and missile programs. North Korea could easily devastate nearby Seoul with artillery barrages. Tillerson, who rose to the helm of Exxon Mobil for his expertise in working the Russian petroleum system, may well have been totally unaware of that fact before becoming secretary of state.
It's all over-wrought and under-cooked.
Which brings us to Trump's generals, and new National Security Advisor McMaster in particular.
I'm comfortable with military officers in general and with officers playing big roles in this administration. Unlike most of Trump's decidedly mercenary pirate crew, they have actual relevant knowledge and experience and have sworn to uphold the Constitution.
Word has it that Trump's generals have spent much of their time and energy dealing with the ever encroaching incipient chaos that surrounds Trump.
But beyond that, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the retired Marine four-star, is an Iran hawk who, like many older officers who remember the Cold War, doesn't particularly like Russia. He's no Islamophobe, though, having tried to get former Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson in as undersecretary for policy. Patterson worked with the only democratically elected Egyptian president, USC PhD engineer Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. But she was blocked from office (as was Mattis pick Michelle Flournoy, another Obama administration veteran, who was the general's choice as deputy secretary). Trump just feted the Egyptian military dictator who clapped former Cal State professor and NASA consultant Morsi in prison. How much power does Mattis really have if he can't get his own top deputies approved by the White House?
As for McMaster, the active duty Army three-star found his apology to Britain for Trump's ludicrous claim that Obama out-sourced the tapping of Trump's phone to British intelligence superseded by the president himself.
And, while I have an underlying faith in McMaster as a very fine officer and intellect, all these escalations and potential confrontations are taking place on his watch. Which, as it happens, is not inconsistent with his background.
Most of the media went wild with praise when McMaster replaced Mike Flynn, a brilliant intelligence officer who was right early on about Isis but subsequently went down some very dark paths.
But the media chorus of huzzahs for McMaster skimmed the surface, missing some potentially problematic elements of the very things for which McMaster has been praised.
McMaster is best known as something of a military maverick and architect of the army of the future, principally for his role as a "COINista" (advocate of counter-insurgency) and authorship of the book 'Derelection of Duty' about the Vietnam War.
The reality is that the much ballyhooed doctrine of counter-insurgency, part of what made the Iraq War "surge" a very temporary success, was really the intellectual equivalent of refried beans. It was something recycled and spun up for the credulous as a supposedly revolutionary military doctrine for a new generation of war-fighting.
And while 'Derelection of Duty' can be read as "speaking truth to power" about the inadvisable politicization of decision-making around an ill-advised war in Vietnam, it can also be read as an argument for the politicians letting the war-fighters do their thing in order to achieve victory. Indeed, historian Ronald Spector's 1997 New York Times review of the book makes the familiarity of some of McMaster's principal themes clear, as you can see.
It's McMaster's standing as a leading COINista, thus a protege of General David Petraeus, that made his career. McMaster was a major when he wrote the Vietnam War book, which grew out of his University of North Carolina doctoral dissertation. As a colonel, he was passed over two years running for promotion to brigadier general before Petraeus intervened with a new promotion board to get him his star, without which he would have had to retire.
My original faculty advisor, dean of naval historians E.B. Potter, the official biographer of legendary Admirals Nimitz and Halsey, advised me back in the day that I would be helped as a naval reservist if I underwent advanced infantry and long-range reconnaissance training. So I went through one of the Recondo schools that still existed in the post-Vietnam military. The Recondo schools, a condensed version of the Army Ranger School, were established by General Westmoreland in order to have more skilled soldiers for long-range recon patrols than could be produced by the relatively small and more time-consuming Ranger School, which was often packed with career Army officers bagging an elite credential. (Recondo stands for recon commando.)
In my usual neurotic intellectual over-preparation, I read through all sorts of Army manuals on small unit tactics, combatives, what have you. Including something called, wait for it, counter-insurgency.
So when General Petraeus and his COINistas emerged, it all sounded uncannily familiar to me. No "strategic hamlets," of course, but the rest felt like a flashback to the '70s.
None of which is to knock McMaster. He's a steady hand, an exceptional officer with a notably courageous war record and I'm glad he's there.
And COIN, while certainly not the silver bullet its Army, Bush/Cheney, and media cheerleaders claimed, did have its points. The COINistas are an Army clique, but they are anything but troglodytes. They affirm the humanity of the folks we're supposed to protect and win over. And COIN did help create the political space that enabled the Bush/Cheney administration to initiate an orderly U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.
McMaster, like Petraeus (who I preferred, notwithstanding some disagreements, among all the names Trump considered for secretary of state), is a sophisticated person who takes steps to avoid being the ugly American and is anything but a know-nothing. He is neither an Islamophobe nor a climate change denier.
But it is important to recognize what powerful people do and do not think. And both the very familiar COIN doctrine, which in its incarnation back in the day was used to extend the clearly losing Vietnam War, and the McMaster book are actually very compatible with a geopolitical strategy which emphasizes military intervention over diplomacy.
And that, despite candidate Trump's frequent protestations that Hillary Clinton would bring more war while he, with his "America First" approach, would bring us peace is very much the present direction of the Trump presidency.
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