December 29, 2018 To Win The 2020 Race Trump Will Need To Fire More Of His Staff We pointed out that overruling his advisors by ending the U.S. war on Syria was a decision that will define Trump's presidency: This was the first time Trump took a decisive stand against the borg, the permanent neoconservative and interventionist establishment in his administration, the military and congress, that usually dictates U.S. foreign policy. It was this decision, and that he stuck to it, which finally made him presidential. Three analysts explain why Trump will need to go further down that road by finding people who diligently implement his foreign policy instead of undermining it. Gareth Porter describes how the U.S. military under Secretary of Defense Mattis implemented its own policy, one far from President Trump's wishes. It delayed his policy of withdrawal from Syria again and again. Trump finally broke the scheme: Mattis and Dunford were consciously exploiting Trump’s defensiveness about a timeline to press ahead with their own strategy unless and until Trump publicly called them on it. That is what finally happened some weeks after Trump’s six month deadline had passed. The claim by Trump advisors that they were taken by surprise was indeed disingenuous. What happened last week was that Trump followed up on the clear policy he had laid down in April. The former Indian Ambassador Bhadrakumar also calls Mattis resignation a defining moment in U.S. foreign policy. He points out that the resistance of the borg against the elected president's policy is in defiance of the will of the people: The really stunning part is that the bulk of America’s political class, think tanks and the media have rallied to support Mattis in an astounding display of defiance and spite toward their elected president. Suffice to say, there has been an insurrection against Trump’s foreign policy agenda and Mattis was a key figure in that enterprise. Quintessentially, the established American political system – what Trump calls the “Swamp” – refuses to make way for the elected president, his mandate from the people for his political platform notwithstanding. Isn’t it a sham that the US claims to have a government “of the people, by the people, for the people”? The majority of the people indeed agree with Trump's policy: Fifty-two percent of respondents said they back the moves in Syria and Afghanistan, which came as a surprise to the president’s own national security advisers when it was announced last week. By contrast, 48 percent said they oppose the troop withdrawals and reductions, the poll found. Now, that the decision is made, even Obama's Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, who personally instigated the insurgency against the Syrian government, comes out in favor of the Trump ordered retreat: Many observers have asserted that the withdrawal gives victory in Syria to Russia, Iran and the Syrian government. That’s absurd. Bashar al-Assad’s regime already controls about two-thirds of Syria, including all of the major cities. The portion of Syria that U.S. forces control alongside their Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) allies is mostly either desert or drought-prone plains. The oil fields there produce high-sulfur, low-value crude, and production has long been diminishing. Oil revenue made up only about 5 percent of Syrian gross domestic product before the 2011 uprising, according to the International Monetary Fund. In sum, holding northeastern Syria would not have enabled Washington to leverage any important concessions from Damascus, Tehran or Moscow. In a clear rejection of John Bolton's and Mattis' overt manipulation of Trump's policies, Ford urges Trump to bring the people under him in line with his own ideas: [T]he president needs to consider how his own foreign policy team got so far out ahead of him on Syria. He needs a National Security Council staff that can more clearly relay his cautions and concerns about U.S. foreign policy to the people in charge of executing it. That staff needs to make clear to officials in the departments that, while he hears various departments’ views, those departments must act on his guidance. Ensuring implementation is the NSC’s job. The president would benefit politically and, more importantly, U.S. national security would benefit from a more effective foreign policy team. Porter makes a similar point: The Syria withdrawal affair is a dramatic illustration of the fundamental quandary of the Trump presidency in regard to ending the state of permanent war that previous administrations created. Although a solid majority of Americans want to rein in U.S. military deployments in the Middle East and Africa, Trump’s national security team is committed to doing the opposite.

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Trump is now well aware that it is virtually impossible to carry out the foreign policy that he wants without advisors who are committed to the same objective. That means that he must find people who have remained outside the system during the permanent war years while being highly critical of its whole ideology and culture. If he can fill key positions with truly dissident figures, the last two years of this term in office could decisively clip the wings of the bureaucrats and generals who have created the permanent war state we find ourselves in today. Bhadrakumar sees a continuous struggle ahead, but believes that Trump knows of the importance to assert his policy: [Mattis'] exit is not going to be the end of the vicious struggle going on in American politics. The good part is that Trump seems to understand that it will be a downhill slope ahead of him unless he took a last-ditch stance and dug in now to assert his constitutional prerogative as the president to push his foreign policy agenda. The point is, that agenda also happens to be linked to Trump’s campaign platform for the 2020 election. To win in the 2020 elections Trump needs to show that he fulfilled the promises he made during the 2016 campaign. Draining the swamp and ending U.S. military involvement throughout the world were two of his major points. Both have a large constituency. Finally finding people who support these policies, instead of undermining them, would definitely increase his chance to win the next election. Who will he choose? Posted by b on December 29, 2018 at 18:59 UTC | Permalink Comments next page » next page »