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Cliff May on Bolton (See 1 below.)
And
Hanson on CNN. (See 1a below.)
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George Friedman on Iran and our military options. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Who is Robert O'Brien? (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)John Bolton would counsel against appeasement
In response to Tehran’s latest attack on Saudi Arabia and threats against the U.S.
John Bolton’s sudden departure from the White House last week cheered progressives who believe America has no enemies, just friends whose grievances we’ve failed to address, as well as those conservatives who believe if we leave our enemies alone, they’ll return the favor. And you thought there was no common ground between left and right!
Count me among those not cheered. Mr. Bolton calls himself an Americanist, meaning he believes this nation must be strong and resolute enough to daunt its enemies (because enemies we shall always have), and reassure its friends (because friends are good and useful to have).
President Trump’s former national security advisor is no proponent of nation-building in the sense of planting democracy in arid soils. At the same time, he recognizes that if the U.S. doesn’t shoulder some significant global responsibilities, no other nation – and certainly no transnational organization – will.
My point is not that you – or, more consequentially, Mr. Trump – should admire Mr. Bolton’s moustache and agree with his every policy preference. My point is that Mr. Bolton has been providing the president with strategic thinking grounded in a serious reading of our adversaries’ histories, ideologies, intentions and capabilities.
H.R. McMaster, who preceded Mr. Bolton as national security advisor, did the same. Their personalities are very different – Gen. McMaster is an even-tempered soldier/scholar, Ambassador Bolton a bit of a firebrand – but both brought to the Oval Office useful perspectives and reasoned policy options.
Mr. Bolton’s departure was reportedly precipitated when Mr. Trump began to consider giving in to demands from Iran’s rulers to relieve economic pressure on them as a pre-condition for new talks about their nuclear weapons program, support for terrorists, imperialist aggression and other malign activities.
To do so would repeat one of President Obama’s worst errors: the lifting of sanctions following an interim agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran in 2013.
From that point on, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, perceiving that concluding a deal had become politically essential to Mr. Obama, made no concessions. Mr. Obama’s negotiators, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, made one after another. Had the talks been a poker game, Mr. Kerry would have come home shirtless.
It’s unfortunate that Mr. Trump did not have Mr. Bolton advising him over the weekend when Saudi Arabia’s largest oil production facilities were attacked with drones and cruise missiles.
Houthi rebels in Yemen, funded, armed and instructed by Tehran, quickly claimed credit. Almost as quickly, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he wasn’t buying it. “There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen,” he tweeted. “Amid all the calls for de-escalation, Iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply.”
Based on U.S. intelligence reports, administration officials believe the guided munitions were launched from the north – from Iranian soil.
Wherever they came from, we can confidently conclude that Iran’s rulers were responsible. The reason for the Houthi claim: to provide those rulers with sufficient “plausible deniability” to satisfy their sympathizers and apologists, a not insignificant coterie in both Washington and Europe.
The benefit of such subterfuge became apparent when, just hours after the attack, Iran’s rulers offered to help shore up the global economy by increasing their oil output to make up for the 5 percent of global supplies that their act of war has put offline.
Talk about arsonists volunteering to assist the fire brigade! Oh and by the way, in exchange for that favor, they really must insist that the U.S. lift its silly sanctions.
The faux goodwill was soon replaced by menace. “Everybody should know that all American bases and their aircraft carriers in a distance of up to 2,000 kilometers around Iran are within the range of our missiles,” an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard commander noted on Sunday. In case President Trump failed to catch his drift, he added: “Iran has always been ready for a ‘full-fledged’ war.”
Ambassador Bolton would not take such threats lightly. He’d suggest the president review a list of punitive responses. That does not imply another “endless war.” It does imply inflicting pain on the theocratic regime.
An interesting question: Did Iran’s rulers figure that with the administration’s leading hawk out of the picture, now would be the perfect time to flex their muscles and do some damage to an American strategic partner and the global economy? Sophisticated attacks require preparation but who’s to say that the pieces were not already in place awaiting the right opportunity?
As President Trump considers his options, he should remember a cardinal rule: If we reward aggression, we’ll get more of it. This episode also should remind us how foolish we would be ever to allow a regime whose slogan for 40 years has been “Death to America!’ to acquire nuclear warheads and missiles that can deliver them anywhere on the planet.
I’m confident Secretary Pompeo, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, and CIA Director Gina Haspel get all that, and are counseling Mr. Trump accordingly.
1a)
CNN: Everything but the News Victor Davis Hanson
Posted By Ruth King
For a while, we thought MSNBC had temporarily usurped CNN as the font of fake news — although both networks had tied for the most negative coverage (93 percent of all their news reports) of President Trump’s first 100 days in office.
A cynic would argue that CNN had deliberately given Trump undue coverage during the Republican primary on the theory that he would be the weakest Republican in the general election and would therefore be the weakest challenger to Hillary Clinton. CNN president Jeffrey Zucker at one point had bragged that in the primaries, Trump made CNN money. Only later, after Trump’s nomination, did Zucker regret giving so much airtime to Trump and his boisterous rallies.
“If we made any mistake last year, it’s that we probably did put too many of his campaign rallies in those early months and let them run,” the contrite Zucker conceded in October 2016, at a talk at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Yet Zucker admitted that Trump had been a “publicity magnet” as a primary candidate, and, more important, “Trump delivered on PR; he delivered on big ratings.”
So CNN’s Zucker gave copious coverage to Apprentice-star Trump both to win ratings and to ensure the nomination of a candidate who was polling anemically against Hillary Clinton — with the intention of then reversing course and destroying Trump in the general election.
The ratings gambit worked; the second aim, of aiding a Clinton victory, did not. And now CNN is focused on another strategy: to destroy the perceived Frankenstein monster that Dr. Zucker helped to create.
Just recently, MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell broke a story based on a single unnamed sourcewho said that Deutsche Bank documents (which the source had not seen) would soon prove that Russian oligarchs had co-signed a loan application for Donald Trump — O’Donnell was apparently trying to resurrect the Russian-collusion zombie. The story was discredited within 24 hours by denials from the bank — as O’Donnell did his part to destroy what was left of the credibility of progressive cable news.
But soon after, CNN came through, as it always does, with an ever more egregious lie — one that, like O’Donnell’s, was intended to be the magic collusion poison to at last abort the presidency of Donald Trump.
CNN’s Jim Sciutto, a former Obama-administration factotum who had earlier been caught spreading lies about Trump’s supposed prior knowledge of a meeting between his son and Russians, claimed, based on his supposed CIA and administration sources, that the CIA had precipitously pulled a high-level spy out of Moscow essentially because of President Trump’s recklessness in handling classified info. With a wink and a nod, Sciutto implied that the CIA wanted the spy out because Trump’s supposed collaboration with the Kremlin might endanger the man’s life. In essence, Sciutto was claiming that Trump was a traitor or at least a naïf used by Russians to harm his own country:
A person directly involved in the discussions said that the removal of the Russian was driven, in part, by concerns that President Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly mishandled classified intelligence and could contribute to exposing the covert source as a spy. . . . The decision to carry out the extraction occurred soon after a May 2017 meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump discussed highly classified intelligence with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak.
The disclosure to the Russians by the President, though not about the Russian spy specifically, prompted intelligence officials to renew earlier discussions about the potential risk of exposure, according to the source directly involved in the matter.
Sciutto has not apologized for his untruth although even the New York Times — along with the U.S. State Department and the CIA itself — debunked the key claims of his anonymously sourced allegations. The Times, in fact, directly contradicted CNN:
The decision to extract the informant was driven “in part” because of concerns that Mr. Trump and his administration had mishandled delicate intelligence, CNN reported. But former intelligence officials said there was no public evidence that Mr. Trump directly endangered the source, and other current American officials insisted that media scrutiny of the agency’s sources alone was the impetus for the extraction. [Emphasis added.]
The Times also notes that the CIA had tried to exfiltrate the informant in late 2016 – for reasons that had nothing to do with Trump’s handling of classified info, since Trump was not yet in office.
CNN has now lost so much of its prior viewership and its reputation for global reportage that it would be wise for the network to shut down, fire its entire management and most of its journalists, and reboot in a year or so with an entirely new name, team, and a code of ethics.
After all, it is now a rule of thumb that when the public hears of a completely fake news story, or of resignations and firings for journalistic malpractice, when we learn of an anchorperson’s acting crudely or obscenely, when we hear profanity or witness unhinged behavior on screen, or see televised Trump-deranged syndrome, CNN is usually at the center of the story.
Since 2016, CNN apparently has dropped all codes of journalistic prudence and replaced them with a simple directive: The ends of destroying the hated Trump campaign, disrupting his transition, or aborting his presidency justify any means necessary to achieve them.
Consider a sampling of the bizarre, obscene, or utterly unprofessional on-air behavior of CNN anchors, hosts, and marquee reporters. CNN New Year’s Eve host Kathy Griffin in a now infamous photo held a bloody facsimile of Trump’s severed head — and then whined when she discovered that no one wished to listen to or watch such a ghoulish has-been celebrity. Anderson Cooper attacked a pro-Trump panelist by saying, “If he [Trump] took a dump on his desk, you would defend it!”
CNN religious “expert” Reza Aslan called Trump “this piece of sh**.” The late CNN cooking host Anthony Bourdain joked in an interview with TMZ that he’d like to poison Trump by serving him hemlock. These obscenities do not constitute news reporting; they’re just casual editorializing from a self-absorbed generation that has confused its own affluence, influence, and well-being with some sort of unique moral insight.
CNN’s Candy Crawley, the “moderator” during the second 2012 presidential debate, abandoned even the pretense of nonpartisanship to argue with candidate Romney and defend Barack Obama. At least Crawley was honest: She did overtly what most CNNers do covertly. The CNN producer of correspondent Suzanne Malveaux, for example, during the 2016 campaign got caught on a hot mic joking that she wished Trump’s personal plane would crash. In contrast, remember that a Missouri rodeo clown once got banned for life from the Missouri State Fair for wearing an Obama mask as part of his routine during a rodeo show.
CNN security analyst James Clapper was hired despite previous admissions that he had lied under oath to Congress. Predictably, then, he asserted falsely on the air that President Trump was a veritable Russian asset. Former CIA director Michael Hayden, also a CNN analyst, claimed that Trump and his immigration policies resembled those of Nazi Germany under Hitler. CNN apparently could not decide whether the ogre Trump was a right-wing Nazi or enthralled to ex-KGB agent Putin and his post-Soviet Russia.
Apparently, CNN’s strategy was to hire former top-ranking intelligence officials to lie about the sitting president, on the theory that disgracing themselves and their former agencies was a small price to pay for ridding the country of the Trump presidency. Recently, CNN trumped the Clapper and Hayden hires by bringing on air Andrew McCabe, the disgraced and fired FBI deputy director, who has been under criminal referrals for lying to federal investigators concerning FBI leaks and who is still under investigation for his role in surveilling Trump-campaign officials and misleading a FISA court. His qualifications to provide CNN with accurate, unbiased, and truthful commentary? A near-pathological hatred of Donald Trump, such that at one point he tried to stage a veritable coup and remove Trump from office, under the 25th Amendment.
CNN commentator Donna Brazile, a rank partisan, leaked a key primary-debate question to candidate Hillary Clinton, and then repeatedly lied to various news agencies that she had not done so. Julia Ioffe was asked to appear on CNN after Politico fired her for tweeting that the president and his daughter Ivanka might have had an incestuous sexual relationship. Apparently writing such ugliness was a plus for any would-be CNN analyst. It was no surprise that soon an emboldened Ioffewas falsely claiming on CNN that Trump had radicalized more people than had ISIS.
CNN host Sally Kohn and her roundtable panel raised their hands on air to emulate the “hands up, don’t shoot” fake narrative that had followed the Ferguson shootings. However, an Obama Department of Justice investigation later found that Michael Brown neither stopped and put his hands up in the air, nor cried out “hands up, don’t shoot” but instead charged the Ferguson police officer with an intent to renew their earlier struggle. The CNN newsroom was perpetrating an inflammatory lie on the air — again with no consequences for their cheap street theater.
CNN anchor Don Lemon, currently being sued for allegedly making an obscene sexual advance to a bar patron, claimed on the air that “the biggest terror threat in this country is white men” — a false assertion given that Lemon conceded that more Americans have been killed in ideologically driven terrorist attacks by Islamists since 2001 than by “white men.” Note that African-American males, currently about 6 percent of the population, are arrested and charged as responsible for 52 percent of homicides each year.
Often anti-Trump CNN reporters offered blatantly false reports that were designed to destroy Trump’s candidacy, transition, or presidency. Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Harris were more or less forced to resign for the fake news story that the flamboyant and now Trump-hating Anthony Scaramucci was directly connected to a $10 billion Russian investment fund — and therefore by implication part of the vast, right-wing Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy.
CNN’s Julian Zelizer flat-out lied when he reported that Donald Trump never reiterated America’s commitment to honor NATO’s critical Article 5 guarantee to come to the aid of any member under attack. Jim Sciutto, Carl Bernstein, and Marshall Cohen were all caught peddling falsehoods, fed by Lanny Davis (their supposedly ironclad source) that Davis’s client Michael Cohen knew that Trump had foreknowledge of an upcoming meeting between his son and Russian interests. Both Davis and CNN were soon trading accusations over who was responsible for airing a complete lie.
CNN’s Gloria Borger, Eric Lichtblau, Jake Tapper, and Brian Rokus got caught erroneously reporting that former FBI director James Comey in his impending congressional testimony would flatly contradict President Trump’s prior assertion that Comey had told him he was not under investigation. Their story, of course, proved false. But no matter, since it too had incited more Trump hatred.
CNN reporter Manu Raju in December 2017 also had spread fake news stories that Donald Trump Jr. supposedly had prior access to the hacked WikiLeaks documents, a lie that fed other fables that Trump Jr. was about to be indicted by Mueller’s special-counsel investigation.
An increasingly puerile Chris Cuomo — recently caught on tape in public screaming obscenities at a questioner, likewise lied on the air when he assured a CNN audience in 2016 that it was illegal for citizens to examine the just-released WikiLeaks emails, while the media like CNN enjoyed an extra-legal right to view them as they pleased: “It’s different for the media,” Cuomo explained. “So everything you learn about this, you’re learning from us.”
Again, the CNN kamikaze modus operandi: Report outright lies, calculate the likelihood that they will have to be later retracted or apologized for, and consider the gambit a worthwhile short-term effort to destroy Trump, even as it helps ensure CNN’s long-term demise.
What is strange about CNN is neither the incompetence nor the bias, but its sanctimoniousness and cluelessness about its own suicidal trajectory into oblivion. When Donald Trump at his rallies points to the media cameras and hoots, “Fake news,” often directly referencing CNN, many claim that his antics are a crude attack on the press that has repeatedly lied to destroy Trump, his family, and his presidency.
Perhaps. But the better question is whether CNN — which has ruined its reputation and profits in an Ahab-esque effort to destroy the Trump white whale — is any longer a media organization at all, or a failing entertainment channel, or a boring Orwellian Ministry of “Truth.”
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2) US Military Options in Iran
The United States has openly accused Iran of being behind the drone and cruise missile attacks on Saudi Arabia’s largest oil refinery. Now the question is what the United States will do in response.
The U.S. is in a difficult position. The attacks did not directly affect the U.S., save for the spike in oil prices, which actually helps the American oil industry. There is a temptation to let the attacks slip into history. But the United States has formed an anti-Iran alliance in which Saudi Arabia is a key (though weak) player. Saudi Arabia is under internal pressure from members of the royal family who oppose Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and low oil prices have undermined the kingdom’s political cohesion. Doing nothing would call the U.S.-sponsored coalition into question. Saudi Arabia is an important player in the Sunni Arab world – and that world is the main threat to Iranian expansion. Failing to respond to an Iranian attack on a vital Saudi facility could help Iran increase its power throughout the region. During Donald Trump’s presidency, the United States’ inclination has been to avoid initiating direct military action in favor of applying economic pressure instead. He has maneuvered to minimize and halt active military engagement. Military action against Iran, therefore, would both endanger the alliance structure and cut against U.S. strategy.
An alternative option would be to introduce new sanctions, but there are two problems with this move. First, sanctions do not have the psychological impact military action does. The psychological impact would be on both Iran and the Sunni world, and the logic of the situation requires it. Second, the U.S. has already imposed painful sanctions on Iran’s economy. Any further sanctions would have limited effect and insufficient heft.
There is one military option that would have a severe economic shock but would also limit U.S. exposure: imposing a blockade on Iranian ports, with a selective closure of the Strait of Hormuz. This strategy has three weaknesses. First, a large naval force of multiple carrier battle groups would have to be deployed for a potentially unlimited time. Second, the fleet could come under attack from Iranian missiles, and while we would assume that U.S. naval vessels have effective anti-missile capabilities, any mistake could cost the U.S. a major vessel. To counter this, anti-missile air attacks as well as defensive measures would be needed, creating a second potentially costly dimension to this operation. Finally, such a blockade is by definition without a terminal point. If Iran does not fold under the pressure, the blockade could continue indefinitely, since ending it without a successful outcome would be seen as a defeat.
Another possible response would be to launch strikes against Iranian targets. The most appropriate target would be the factories producing drones and cruise missiles, along with storage facilities and so on. Here, the problem is getting accurate intelligence. The U.S. has undoubtedly been cataloging such things, but acting on poor information could result in an Iranian strike on U.S. forces or another sensitive site under informal American protection. This would only compound the problem of the Iranian attacks on the Saudi refinery.
The difficult question the U.S. faces is whether it should take an action so painful that it will block any further actions from Iran. If a blockade doesn’t shatter Iran’s economy, then escalation to eliminate its offensive air capability is needed. As for an air campaign, history has shown that they tend to take much longer than expected and sometimes fail altogether, providing the adversary an opportunity to take offensive action on its own. A U.S. attempt to eliminate Iran’s strike capability can be costly, and hidden Iranian missiles can attack regional targets. As with a blockade, an air campaign can go on indefinitely. Small-scale retaliatory strikes open the door to Iranian countermoves and could escalate into an extended operation.
As for sending in ground troops, not only does that not quickly solve the problem of Iranian air power, but it also returns the U.S. to a posture it has been in since 2001: occupation warfare. The U.S. military fully deployed can defeat the Iranian military and take terrain, but to hold it against a hostile militia would create interminable conflict with casualties that cannot be sustained. Iran is a big and rugged country, with a population of 82 million people, more than twice as large as Iraq or Afghanistan. And the idea that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators is mere fantasy.
Apart from an air attack on Iran designed not to achieve a significant goal but rather to give the Saudis confidence in the U.S., the options for a direct attack are not promising. But there is another way to think about this problem. The United States has been concerned about Iran’s expanding political influence. But this creates potential targets that are of high value to Iran – and hitting these targets would be less daunting than an attack on Iran itself. Iran has its own or proxy forces in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. It has invested a great deal of time, resources and risk in creating these forces that are now holding territory in these countries.
Consider Lebanon, a place where Iran has been highly active since the 1980s through its proxy Hezbollah. If Hezbollah could be crippled, the political structure of Lebanon would shift out of Iran’s control, and Iran’s anchor on the Mediterranean would be gone. Such an operation could not be left to the Israelis partly because their force is much smaller than what the U.S. could bring to bear, and also because collaboration between U.S. and Israeli forces would put the U.S.’ Sunni allies in a difficult position. Such a response would directly hurt Iran’s interests but could be carried out at lower risk and at higher cost than other options.
Indeed, the very threat of an attack on Hezbollah might cause the Iranians to change their strategy. Of course, an attack there might also unleash a torrent of missile strikes from Iran, and that is the downside of this and all the other strategies. But the advantage is that where other strategies would likely fail to achieve their goals, an attack on Hezbollah might well succeed. It would be something Iran would not want to see and would be carried out by secure U.S. forces. Alternatively, the U.S. could attack Iranian forces in Syria, but that would have a lower impact.
This is a theoretical exercise; answering Iran’s attacks with an air campaign on a proxy power is unlikely. The Saudis would have trouble portraying it as U.S. commitment to Saudi security. Attacks in Syria, Iraq and Yemen would all suffer from a lack of clarity and from the fact that Iran itself would not be hit. There is the possibility that the Saudi air force could retaliate, but its ability to sustain losses and conduct an extended air campaign is doubtful. The Saudis could fire missiles at Iran, but that would begin an open-ended exchange, and the U.S. strategy has to be to hurt Iran in a mission with closure.
The Iranians know the dilemma they have posed the United States. They have bet that the risks are too high for the United States to respond. But the problem in Iran’s thinking is it can’t be sure the degree to which the U.S. sees Iranian expansion as a threat to U.S. long-term interests in the region. So the Iranians are asking the U.S.: Are you feeling lucky?
There would appear to be no good military options. Doing nothing could well destroy the anti-Iran bloc the U.S. has worked hard to create. The likely but not certain answer to this problem will be a symbolic retaliation. The problem with retaliations, however, is that they get out of hand.
2a)
Iran’s Whip Hand
Tehran thinks it’s winning the fight over Trump’s sanctions.
The Editorial Board
Saudi Arabia on Wednesday unveiled evidence that it said proved the weekend attacks came from Iran. This adds to U.S. public claims made by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and more hesitant speculation by Mr. Trump. The latest reports say the attacks may have included cruise missiles fired from Iran territory, which means the mullahs don’t feel the need anymore to hide through proxy militias.
The escalating attacks on oil production and tankers are clearly aimed at pressuring Mr. Trump to drop his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. In particular, Iran wants sanctions lifted on its oil exports, which are its main source of financing. Rising oil prices that might trigger a recession could cause Europeans to ignore U.S. sanctions and buy Iranian oil.
The good news is that oil markets have stabilized this week, in part thanks to Saudi efforts to get most of its production back on stream quickly. U.S. shale oil production and exports have helped to fill the gap left by missing Iranian sales, and oil demand around the world is down. What a difference the U.S. shale drilling revolution makes. If this were 2008, the oil price might be spiking again above $100 a barrel.
But no one should expect Iran to stop its provocations, especially as it concludes there is little cost to escalating. The weekend aggression comes after Mr. Trump called off an airstrike in June to retaliate for the shooting down of a $130 million U.S. surveillance drone. On Twitter on Tuesday, Senator Lindsey Graham said the weekend attacks show that Iran sees Mr. Trump’s cancellation of the strike as “a sign of weakness.”
The President shot back that it was a sign of strength that “some people just don’t understand.” But the facts are on Mr. Graham’s side. Mr. Trump has loudly made clear he is reluctant to pursue the military option, and in the Middle East adversaries respect only strength. The U.S. and Saudis have shown they can’t protect the oil fields, and the next attack may hit the United Arab Emirates or Kuwait.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump said Wednesday he has chosen Robert O’Brien, now the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs at the State Department, as his next national security adviser. Mr. O’Brien comes to the White House with a good record on securing the release of American hostages abroad. He has also written incisively on the weakness of Barack Obama ’s foreign policy, predicting that the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran would encourage more adventurism.
Mr. O’Brien’s challenge will be that Mr. Trump wants to be his own national security adviser, and the President’s most influential adviser on foreign policy may be Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican who opposes nearly any use of military force. If the message to Iran is that Mr. Trump has taken military force off the table, the Middle East becomes more dangerous and Mr. Trump may be backed into returning to Mr. Obama’s nuclear deal.
Mr. Trump wants to reduce every foreign controversy to a negotiation with some head of state, and the world’s bad actors are figuring that out. Tehran has a clear policy to become the dominant power in the Middle East, and its actions—including aggression to destabilize its Arab neighbors—support that policy. Mr. Trump had better prepare for more Iranian trouble.
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3)Christian Whiton: Trump’s new national security adviser will help build on foreign policy successes
By Christian Whiton
President Trump’s appointment of Robert O’Brien as national security adviser Wednesday is good news for Americans who believe in peace through strength. It’s bad news for America’s foes — and for those who hope the Trump presidency will fail.
At first glance, O’Brien’s appointment looks unusual. He is not an admiral or general, nor has he climbed the typical civilian rungs of the national security ladder. He doesn’t have a foreign policy degree from the Harvard Kennedy School or the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. While he has a distinct approach to our national interests, he is not instantly recognized as a member of any particular policy faction.
But such an assessment would miss O'Brien’s acumen for grasping what matters about foreign developments, and what Trump likely wants and needs for the role of national security adviser.
Unlike many of the legions of Washingtonians who hold office for the sake of holding office, O’Brien has a record of accomplishment, including serving with distinction as the U.S. special presidential envoy for hostage affairs. He helped bring home more than a dozen hostages and detainees since he was appointed earlier in the Trump administration, fulfilling a key facet of Trump’s "America First” foreign policy.
The job involved not only diplomacy, but close coordination of activity between the State Department and our intelligence bureaucracies as well as the military — skills that will come in handy for O’Brien’s new job.
O’Brien was most recently in the news for helping bring home the American celebrity rapper A$AP Rocky from Sweden, where the rapper was held on trumped-up charges after being targeted and harassed by Afghan asylum seekers.
O’Brien’s involvement led to snickers among the foreign policy elite, but O’Brien, like Trump, understood that Washington could not look the other way while a supposedly friendly European government blamed a prominent American victim of a crime rather than the perpetrators of the crime.
O’Brien also was a major in the Army’s Judge Advocate General Corps, and was one of the most successful litigators in California. He attended UCLA and obtained a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley. The fact that he did so and remained a conservative who believes that a strong America is good for the world is a testament to his character.
It's better to have someone who has been through the left-wing crucible and stayed true to course than someone who is untested and looking to become popular among the Washington elite.
O’Brien also backed Trump for president when other denizens of the Republican foreign policy elite opportunistically vowed to support Hillary Clinton, despite her disastrous track record on foreign affairs.
O’Brien also advocated “peace through strength” and getting tough with China before those positions were popular. O’Brien’s book, "While America Slept," is a compilation of his criticisms of the Obama-era hollowing out of the U.S. military and weakness in dealing with Iran and China. The book foreshadowed some of the arguments Trump used during his campaign and while in office.
Perhaps more important than his positions is the way O’Brien is likely to run the National Security Council. The job is often done best not by creatures of the military establishment — like now-retired Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who held the job earlier in the Trump administration — or by gunslingers like John Bolton, whom President Trump dismissed.
The job is done best by those who offer private counsel to the president, arbitrate fairly in the unruly national security bureaucracy, and privately press that bureaucracy to execute the president’s vision.
In that sense, O’Brien’s role as an affable but determined litigator and negotiator should serve Trump well. Trump has reversed disastrous Bush-Obama policies on trade, appeasing China and Iran, ignoring Islamists, underfunding the military, sideshow wars, and pretending natural climate change is a national security issue.
The job now is managing the implementation of Trump’s tougher alternatives to those policies during the time it will take a new, safer world to emerge.
We are in the equivalent of the mid-1980s gap between when President Reagan began that era’s version of peace through strength and the later, resulting collapse of the Soviet empire. Our turbulent transition may resemble that one at times, especially as a new world emerges with alliances and power dynamics that will be very different than the status quo so far in this century.
By appointing O'Brien, Trump has demonstrated confidence in his own vision, and his grasp of how he wants to run the White House and the larger national security apparatus. Trump is doubling down on his own winning strategy.
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