Former Obamaites credit Trump for action:
.....
“He’s proved he’s not Obama—and that’s useful to him,” one former senior Obama official told me, one of many veterans of the previous administration I spoke with Friday who were supportive of Trump’s airstrike on Syria.
.........
Whether it represents a new strategic approach to the world or merely a snap political decision to act decisively where Obama would not, Washington foreign policy hands—in both parties—were widespread in praising Trump for doing what they believed Obama should have done many years ago. Though there were notable exceptions on both the left and the right, the praise from much of the American national security establishment was so lavish in the immediate aftermath of the bombing that at times you could be forgiven for wondering: Did Donald Trump just join the hawkish Beltway mob that Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes so dismissively called The Blob?
“Great move.” “Brilliant.” “Finally!” were some of the comments I heard from veteran foreign policy hands in both parties Friday morning. Elliott Abrams, the Reagan and Bush veteran rebuffed by Trump to be his deputy secretary of state, took to The Weekly Standard website to laud the president who wouldn’t hire him as having proved this week he “finally accepted the role of Leader of the Free World.”
Just a few days earlier, when news of the Syrian chemical attack broke and Trump’s team said nothing much, Senator John McCain, the Republican who has emerged as the leader of his party’s tough-on-Trump faction, had called their response “another disgraceful chapter in American history.” By Friday, McCain was praising the president, consulting with him and his team and promising the action heralded the “beginning” of a renewed involvement in the troubled Middle East.
Many of the most head-snapping comments I heard came from Obama’s own top advisers, who had long pushed him to confront Assad more aggressively and viewed his 2013 refusal to take military action against Syria after drawing a “red line” on chemical weapons use as a major American foreign policy debacle. There’s no love lost for Trump in this group, whose members found themselves in the uncomfortable position of cheering a leader they still both loathe and fear.
“Our administration never would have gotten this done in 48 hours,” one former senior official of the Obama administration told me. “It’s a complete indictment of Obama.”
“I feel like finally we have done the right thing,” Anne-Marie Slaughter, who served as Obama’s first-term chief of policy planning at the State Department and long publicly urged a more forceful response to Assad’s horrific attacks on civilians during the six years of war that have wracked Syria, told me. “The years of hypocrisy just hurt us all. It undermined the U.S., it undermined the world order.”
Slaughter, now the head of the New America Foundation and a major backer of Trump’s defeated opponent Hillary Clinton last November, tweeted, “Donald Trump has done the right thing on Syria. Finally!! After years of useless handwringing in the face of atrocities.” I later asked her if it was awkward to be cheering for Trump now. “I’m just glad to see it,” she said. “It was the right thing.”
.........
Russian officials were so confident after Trump’s election they openly talked at European policy forums about the possibility of making a “Yalta 2” deal with the new American president to carve out new spheres of influence in the mode of Franklin Roosevelt’s end of World War II summit arrangement with Soviet leader Josef Stalin.
Instead, just 75 days into Trump’s presidency, Putin is calling Trump’s Syrian intervention a “serious blow” to the U.S.-Russian relationship and Trump critics back in Washington are saying for the first time that if Putin intervened in the American election to help Trump, he might not have gotten what he bargained for. All of which means that Trump’s untested new secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, will head for his first meeting in Moscow on Wednesday with the entire relationship under a cloud.
But that’s where another fact about Trump’s foreign policy comes in—one that may well prove to be as important as his I’m-not-Obama instincts: the hawkish, Pentagon-tinged nature of the team advising him. With Trump new to the complexities of international superpowerdom, his White House national security team under Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster and Defense Department run by Gen. Jim Mattis have emerged as the forces to watch in the new administration, and both are seen as tough-minded veterans of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan whose views fit well within the GOP mainstream.
“These are the people who are going to be talking to him and explaining global events and presenting options, and it’s a much more traditional Republican foreign policy,” said Vali Nasr, an early Obama State Department adviser-turned-critic who is now the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “That leaves the president himself to say: Will I be more the ‘America First’ president I promised during the campaign, or more of the ‘indispensable nation’” leader that American presidents have seen themselves to be since the end of the Cold War?
Then again, it’s entirely unclear that Trump thinks about his foreign policy in anything like those terms. Trump is all about winning and losing, who’s up and who’s down. It’s why he still obsesses at every turn about the close results from his election victory over Hillary Clinton. And why, increasingly now that he’s in the Oval Office, the person he most wants to beat these days is Barack Obama.
politico.com
I like McMaster and Mattis. Thank God Flynn is gone and Bannon is sidelined on his way out. Does prayer work? |
