A Dubious Choice for NSA
Noah Rothman 2016-11-18
The Trump administration is beginning to take shape. With the president-elect’s announcement of his choice for National Security Advisor, America has gotten its first glimpse at how a Trump administration will approach defense and security-related issues. Unfortunately, Trump’s choice for NSA, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, is deeply unsettling. Flynn may not be capable of dispassionately advising the president on matters related to the protection and preservation of American national interests.
Flynn has made a name for himself as a straight shooter and a farsighted soldier with a keen eye on the radical Islamist terror threat. In 2010, he blew the whistle on America’s deteriorating position in Afghanistan, compelling the president to devote more attention and resources to that conflict. As director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014, he warned his colleagues that Osama bin Laden’s death had not neutralized the terrorist threat. The administration didn’t want to hear this admonition, but Flynn was right.
Flynn was, however, reportedly forced out of his position a year ahead of schedule because his managerial style was “chaotic” and “the scope of his plans met resistance from both superiors and subordinates.” Flynn’s opposition to departmental budget cuts and his reported desire to reshape the DIA into a participant in—rather than a planner of—field operations apparently met with resistance, too, but those traits do not necessarily make for a problematic NSA. Rather, it is Flynn’s objective conflicts of interest and his dubious judgment that have observers concerned.
The retired lieutenant general has a bizarrely close relationship with key elements of Vladimir Putin’s power structure in Russia. He frequently appeared on the Kremlin-funded news network RT and even attended an anniversary gala for the network where he was seated directly next to the Russian President. Flynn has defended the network by insisting that it is not Kremlin-run (it is) and then defended the practice of state-run media by contending that CNN and MSNBC are RT’s equivalents. Flynn has claimed that Putin is a “totalitarian dictator and a thug who does not have our interests in mind,” but legitimizing that thug’s propaganda outlet is an odd way to display contempt.
Flynn’s antipathy toward CNN led him to retweet a critic of the network: “The USSR is to blame,” the original tweeter asserted sarcastically linking to a report on Russia’s hand in the hacking of Democratic National Committee servers. “Not anymore, Jews. Not anymore.” To this, the general favorably replied, “The corrupt Democratic machine will do and say anything to get #NeverHillary into power. This is a new low.”
It is unclear whether Flynn has ever taken money directly from RT and, thus, the Russian government. He will not say. But Flynn was compensated by the Flynn Intel Group, where he serves as a principal and which has registered as a lobbying firm for a Dutch company owned by a Turkish businessman with close ties to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The relationship is more than professional, apparently. Flynn has called for the extradition to Turkey of the cleric Fethullah Gülen, whom he called a “shady Islamic mullah” who lives in exile in the Poconos and on whom Erdogan has blamed a failed July coup attempt (among a host of other sins).
As NSA, Flynn promises to sever his ties to that firm, but he was already sitting in on classified intelligence briefings with then-candidate Donald Trump with these relationships intact. The conflict of interest and Flynn’s dereliction of responsibility in this matter is so significant that a revolt inside the national-security community may be brewing. Norm Eisen, President Barack Obama’s ethics advisor and ambassador to the Czech Republic told Yahoo News that, if Flynn became NSA, “there will be wholesale resignations of national security professionals, and I believe some have already drafted their resignation letters.” Given the number of Republican national security professionals who publicly opposed Trump in the campaign, the president-elect cannot afford to sacrifice any available talent.
There are times when Flynn can devolve from “straight talker” unfettered by the constraints of “politically correct speech” to the unrestrained id of the online right’s most cloistered and conspiratorial fringe.
The general has reportedly come to the conclusion that the Islamic Sharia Law is on the march in the United States. That is just one of what Flynn’s DIA subordinates derisively dubbed “Flynn Facts” during his tenure. “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL,” Flynn insisted in a tweet. He also demanded his followers watch a video contending that Muslims seek the enslavement or extermination of non-believers and that a fearful response to that religion’s practitioners was only natural and sane.
Flynn later shared an image of Hillary Clinton wearing a head scarf while on a state visit to the Muslim world and insisted that “This is not showing respect.” He added: “This is showing disrespect for American values and principles.” In the wake of the deadly truck attack in Nice, France, the general tweeted: “In the next 24 hours, I dare Arab & Persian world ‘leaders’ to step up to the plate and declare their Islamic ideology sick and must B healed.”
It is the job of the National Security Advisor to be a clear-eyed voice for American security priorities around the world. Flynn would step into a role previously filled by venerable figures like Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, and Condoleezza Rice. His strange fits of rage, his bizarre misjudgments, his checkered history, and his conflicts of interest make President-elect Trump’s choice for NSA a dubious one. This choice reflects what may be a core Trump conviction—that America’s place in the world as the sole global hegemon can and should be ceded to rising regional powers and the greatest threat to U.S. security are non-state actors. This is a short-sighted and defeatist worldview. Let’s hope the reality of governing as president compels President Trump to abandon it.
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A Dubious Choice for NSA
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The Confused and the Confusing
"I don't get confused."
Noah Rothman 2018-04-19
Nikki Haley, America’s ambassador to the United Nations, is not confused. “With all due respect,” she said in a pithy and empowering statement to Fox News anchor Dana Perino, “I don’t get confused.”
She issued this pointed assertion in response to National Economic Council chief Larry Kudlow, who accused Haley of getting “ahead of the curve” and suffering a “momentary confusion” when she announced on Sunday morning that the Trump administration planned more punitive sanctions on Moscow over its support for the murderous Assad regime in Syria. But Haley seems to have been on firm ground when she made those remarks.
Shortly after Donald Trump’s address last Friday night announcing strikes on Syrian targets, the Republican National Committee distributed to its surrogates a set of “White House talking points” previewing a new round of “specific additional sanctions against Russia.” President Donald Trump reportedly intervened as late as Sunday night to put a halt to a policy that was all but in motion. The only person who was confused here seems to have been the president. Kudlow later apologized for his remarks about Haley’s competence.
The bewildering 24-hour period between the coordinated announcement of new Russia sanction and the administration’s retreat from that policy is typical of this administration. The source of the White House’s confusion is not hard to identify.
Before Haley suffered the insults of those dedicated to insulating Donald Trump from the consequences of his indecision and ambiguity, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was the man in the barrel. Tillerson surely thought he was representing American diplomatic interests when he revealed last September that the U.S. was “probing” North Korea for an opening that might lead to direct negotiations. “Save your energy, Rex,” the president tweeted. The comment cut the legs out from under his chief diplomat, who he said was “wasting his time” by seeking talks with the Kim regime.
When Tillerson conspicuously continued to lobby the North Korean government for an introductory first meeting “without precondition,” a spokesperson for the president’s National Security Council corrected him. There could be no talks, the NSC spokesman said, until North Korea stops testing missiles and nuclear devices for an unspecified period of time. “The President’s views on North Korea have not changed,” the White House said. But the White House was engaging in back-channel communications with the Kim regime with the goal of a face-to-face encounter between both nations’ principals.
The president’s Northeast Asia policy is about as clear as his Middle East policy. When Trump announced to an Ohio crowd in late March that the U.S. would withdraw its approximately 2,000 troops from Syria “very soon,” to let “the other people take care of it,” it came as a surprise to his administration. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said she was “unaware” of any plan to pull troops out of Syria, and Pentagon officials had spent that same week previewing plans to augment U.S. deployments to Syria. The White House later disclosed that Trump had been convinced of the virtue of maintaining a footprint in Syria indefinitely.
In fact, the president has a bad habit of forcing his staff and allies to clean up after his messes.
When Donald Trump explicitly agreed to a Democratic proposal to make the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program permanent without reciprocal border security legislation at an on-camera meeting with legislators, he had to be reminded that his comment did not reflect the GOP’s position. The transcript of the event was initially written to omit the president’s injudicious comments.
In a similar meeting with lawmakers regarding American gun policy, Donald Trump declared his support for legislative measures that would expeditiously strip guns from the hands of potentially dangerous people. Due process rights, he said, were a secondary consideration. The remarks sent Trump’s GOP allies reeling, and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders quickly dialed the president’s position back to one that was recognizably Republican.
Former Press Secretary Sean Spicer has had to correct the president for misstating the number of Guantanamo Bay detainees released under the Obama administration. In response to Trump’s comments about the value of raciallycharged protests that culminated in violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer, the White House released a statement clarifying that Trump “of course” condemns white supremacists.
The White House has had to walk back Trump’s criticism of German trade policy, his claims about specific terrorist events in Sweden, his support for blanket tariffs on a variety of commodities, his intention to leave three college basketball players in a Chinese prison in response to personal criticism from one of the player’s fathers, and a statement about whether or not the travel ban was (as Trump called it) a “ban.”
The White House corrected the president’s myriad eye-popping assertions made before an audience of Boy Scouts last year, confirming that no one called Trump to congratulate him on “the greatest speech that was ever made” before this audience. They were also compelled to admit that Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto did not call Trump to confess that the flow of Central American migrants north through Mexico had ebbed to a trickle as a result of Trump’s policies on the border.
Trump has reserved for himself both sides of the issue when it’s come to major U.S. policy initiatives such removing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords, corporate tax rates, whether ObamaCare will be stabilized or allowed to “explode,” and almost every aspect of America’s strategic relationship with Russia. Trump has promised to eliminate the carried-interest loophole, reduce individual tax brackets to just three tiers, and create targeted tax credits for working parents with elderly or young dependents—proposals Congress simply ignored.
If there is confusion within the administration as to what Donald Trump’s policy preferences are at any given moment, the president only has himself to blame. Nikki Haley might have been the first administration official to refuse to take the fall for Trump’s lack of clarity, but she is unlikely to be the last.
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Identity Politics in the Hereafter
Grievance even in grieving.
Sohrab Ahmari 2018-04-18
As if the peddlers of identity politics hadn’t done enough to poison Western culture in the here and now, they have now set their sights on the afterlife.
That is the metaphysical meaning of the expression “rest in power,” which has replaced the old “rest in peace” among the woke crowd. When a member of an intersectionally oppressed group passes away, a properly woke mourner offers “rest in power” in condolence, in the solemn hope that the departed might take up in the hereafter the power which was denied him or her (or xir) in this earthly vale of tears.
Thus, when Nelson Mandela’s second wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, passed away earlier this month, the appropriate condolence was “rest in power.” Ditto for Vel Phillips, the African-American judge and Wisconsin secretary of state, who died on Tuesday. Even the late Barbara Bush received a “rest in peace and power” farewell and from none other than the Women’s March, though use of the expression in the former first lady’s case was not without controversy. Many wokesters took to Twitter to object, and they didn’t even need to spell out why: Barbara Bush was white and, worse, a Republican. Better that she rest without power—if at all!
The attempt to carry the struggle beyond the grave is a reminder that liberal identity politics is a quasi-religious or quasi-spiritual movement. On Earth, it makes radical claims for group justice, even as it denies any universal standard of justice. In the realm beyond death, it restages the same old campus and Twitter battles against structures of oppression. Even in the afterlife, we are supposed to check our privileges, unpack our biases, and problematize and dismantle hierarchies. Even the afterlife is the battlefield of race against race, sex against sex, trans against cis, and so on.
Onward to the beyond, then, comrades! Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise fighting the patriarchy.
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Pompeo and Circumstance
Podcast: North Korea talks and Trump's legal troubles.
John Podhoretz 2018-04-18On our latest COMMENTARY podcast we wonder at the fact that Democrats are going to vote en masse against Mike Pompeo as secretary of state for no real reason other than that they don’t like Trump—and how this marks the fulfillment of a degradation in the advise-and-consent process that’s been accelerating for the past couple of decades. Also, we talk about Stormy Daniels, alas. Give a listen.
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Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistical Deficits
The other last refuge.
JOHN STEELE GORDON 2018-04-17
Someone in the 19th century (Mark Twain attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli, but that’s dubious) said that there are three forms of lying: lies, damned lies, and statistics. If you would like a beautiful example of the last category of mendacity, check out David Leonhardt’s April 15th column in the New York Times, entitled (try not to laugh) “The Democrats Are the Party of Fiscal Responsibility.”
In it, he compared the deficits run up by each Democratic and Republican administration from Jimmy Carter on to the present with the GDP of that time. Precisely how he did this is anything but clear. Is he, perhaps, confusing the debt with the deficit? For instance, he has the ratio for George H. W. Bush’s term as 0.4 percentage points. But the total deficits in those years were $932 billion and the total GDP was $23.9 trillion. That’s 3.8 percentage points. And how the national debt could double in eight unprosperous years under Obama while the “change in deficit, in percentage points of GDP” went down 0.1 percent is totally mystifying
Thus, Leonhardt committed the cardinal sin of statistics: using obscure methodology, which is the way people lie with statistics—presuming they are not just making the numbers up.
Whatever his methodology, Leonhardt was comparing apples and oranges. For instance, he ignores such factors as the raging inflation of the Carter years, when income tax brackets were not adjusted for inflation, pushing people into higher and higher brackets when their real income had not increased at all (This, of course, was one of the reasons why Carter carried fewer states in 1980 than Herbert Hoover won in 1932).
Leonhardt implicitly ascribed to the president the power to shape the budget and, thus, the deficit. But presidents have been effectively bit players when it comes to federal spending levels since the wildly misnamed Budget Control Act of 1974. It was not Bill Clinton who slew the deficit dragon in the 1990’s but the Congress, which the public transferred to Republican control in 1994 for the first time in 40 years following an outcry over Democratic profligacy. The Republican Congress increased spending by a mere 18 percent between 1995 and 2000, while the roaring economy increased tax revenues by 51 percent.
Nor did Leonhardt take into account the phony accounting the federal government uses to obscure reality. Officially, we ran surpluses (meaning, by definition, that income exceeded outgo) in 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001. But the national debt went up, not down, in each of those four years.
Nor did he take into account the fact that recessions cause government spending to go up and government revenues to go down—something quite beyond the control of Congress or the President. The brutal recession of the early 1980’s (when unemployment reached 10.8 percent), for instance, skewed Reagan’s numbers while Carter’s four years were largely recession-free.
There’s plenty of blame for both parties, of course. As Jesse Unruh famously said, “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” But in the last forty years, the only time the federal government made a serious, sustained effort to rein in the deficit was when a Republican Congress was writing the checks.
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Eating Their Own
A frontal assault on soft targets.
Noah Rothman 2018-04-17
The ubiquitous coffeehouse chain Starbucks is at the center of a scandal—the familiar kind fueled by new media’s obsessive litigation of grievances that have a perceived societal dimension. This one occurred in Philadelphia where two young black men were humiliated and led out of the café in handcuffs by police. They were accused of trespassing and declined to leave when asked, saying that they were merely waiting for a friend. The story of the incident went viral, and it became a scandal—justifiably so. The decision to prosecute this episode of harmless loitering is suspicious, and the insult these men suffered deserves redress. Asking whether racial bias was a factor here is a perfectly valid question, and that deserved to be investigated. But that’s not what has happened.
Within 24 hours of this incident, the store’s manager had issued a formal apology. So, too, did the corporation. Twenty-four hours after that, that supervisor resigned. If there was an investigation here, it was a quick one. The store itself soon became the site of protests. “Anti-blackness anywhere is anti-blackness everywhere,” one protester chanted. “We don’t want this Starbucks to make any money today,” another demonstrator told reporters. By 1 p.m., the protesters had achieved their aim; the store was forced to close for the day.
It wasn’t long before this incident involving one Starbucks location and three people came to be seen as a reflection of this sprawling multinational company and the United States as a whole. Rosalind Brewer, Starbucks COO and a young African-American woman, called the incident a “teachable moment for all of us” and recommended “unconscious-bias” training for every Starbucks staffer. Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson joined ABC’s “Good Morning America” to personally apologize to the men involved in this incident when protesters interrupted his appearance. “A whole lot of racism, a whole lot of crap, Starbucks coffee is anti-black,” they chanted. You can’t blame these demonstrators for noticing that the terms of engagement had broadened significantly.
Who knows? Maybe there is a culture of implicit racial bias at Starbucks. On Monday, as protesters were shutting down this Philadelphia-based branch, another Starbucks location in Los Angeles was also being accused of racial bias. In January, a white non-customer at that location managed to finagle a bathroom entry code out of a barista when a black non-customer could not. Maybe these two incidents—separated by almost four months and 3,000 miles—are related. Maybe it was wise for national news media and the chain’s protesters to skip right past personal agency and permissive local cultures to assume this is a reflection on all 13,900-plus U.S. Starbucks locations, to say nothing of the society in which they are situated. After all, that’s precisely what the chain’s executives did. In fact, the Starbucks C-suite’s willingness to lend credence to the accusation that their company was rotten with pervasive racial prejudice likely fueled the pushback that the chain received from social-justice activists.
Starbucks is one of an increasing number of firms that wears its liberal politics on its aprons. A few years back, its baristas were encouraged to write “race together” on their customer’s cups explicitly to encourage discomfiting racial dialogue in their stores. It has aggressively promoted same-sex marriage on its products and has financially backed Planned Parenthood. In response to President Donald Trump’s “travel ban,” Starbucks dedicated itself to hiring at least 10,000 refugees. The company’s increasingly impatient shareholders have routinely questioned the value of alienating socially conservative coffee-drinkers, but now it seems time to question whether its affinity for the left is yielding diminishing returns even among its allies. It is difficult to avoid concluding that the scope of these protests is augmented by the fact that, for the social justice left, Starbucks is a soft target.
Starbucks isn’t the only progressive ally that has received no special dispensation for being “woke.” A Washington Post report on Tuesday illustrates the Starbucks phenomenon with a dispatch from a liberal church dedicated to racial justice and economic egalitarianism that has come under fire from its confederates. According to the Post, the racial conflict at the 1,100-member All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington D.C. is indicative of a number of racial conflicts that the Unitarian Universalist Association has helped resolve in the last year.
The scandal involves the resignation of an African-American reverend who alleged that she was passed over for career advancement and judged more harshly than her white counterpart behind the pulpit (who, by the way, claims to have dedicated his career to the promotion of social justice). She even alleged that the congregants of this racially conscious church were themselves subtly racist because of the “micro-aggressions” she endured. Specifically, that effrontery was evinced by the number of church-goers who referred to her by her first name rather than her title. Maybe all these men and women of faith were subtly racist; maybe they were just friendly. In either case, this particular community’s predisposition to treat even dubious allegations of racial bias seriously will ensure that this grievance is resolved to the complainant’s satisfaction.
It is easy to see why this kind of activism is more satisfying than, say, going on about Chick-Fil-A’s Christian values. Despite a six-year-long liberal campaign dedicated to educating the public on the deliciousness of its products, the benefits and time off afforded its employees, and franchising opportunities in underserved urban markets, this chain just keeps on expanding. Imagine that. Routinely rebuffed assaults on a fortified position are exhausting. They are nowhere near as rewarding as a direct attack on a receptive target that yields a quick and gratifying victory. That explains why social justice activists are increasingly focused on exacting concessions from like minds: young adult novelists, liberal filmmakers, Hollywood executives, painters, restauranteurs, university professors and administrators, socially conscious corporations, and the left-of-center politicians who have folded these activists into their core constituencies.
These intramural feuds are transforming the progressive movement from within, but it’s not clear that the social-justice movement has secured anything other than the illusion of efficacy.
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