Elizabeth Drew, Washington-based journalist & author/Project Syndicate
With no compromise in sight to end the federal government shutdown, and no one left in President DonaldTrump’s cabinet who can restrain him, Americans and their allies are staring into the abyss that has been looming since the 2016 election.
For those who hadn’t yet figured it out, the price of having a US president who disdains expert opinion and who is impulsive, mendacious, not very smart, disturbed, uninformed, incurious, incompetent, intemperate, corrupt, and a poor negotiator became irrefutably clear in recent days. Three large developments from last Wednesday through Saturday unnerved even some of Donald Trump’s Republican protectors, who had rationalized that, after all, he had cut taxes (mainly on the rich and corporations) and put two conservatives on the Supreme Court bench. But the dangers of having such a person in the Oval Office were now becoming harder to ignore.
All three big events were alarming, and on a bipartisan basis: each was damaging to US national interests, and each was avoidable. Worse, because they came in rapid succession, they created the sense that now (as opposed to previous alarms) the Trump presidency was truly spinning out of control.
On the morning of Wednesday, December 19, Trump tweeted that ISIS had been defeated and that the US would, therefore, withdraw its troops from Syria. The decision came as a bolt from the blue for all but a small number of government officials – every one of whom had tried to dissuade him. Key members of Congress hadn’t been informed, much less consulted; nor had America’s allies, some of whose troops have been dependent on the presence of the US military. Major foreign policy decisions simply aren’t made that way: allies are consulted beforehand; relevant congressional figures are at least informed before any such announcement. Such precautions are about more than good manners: an administration might learn something as it consults and informs.
The decision was immediately and widely denounced. Trump’s usual Senate ally, Lindsey Graham, said, “ISIS has been dealt a severe blow but are not defeated. If there has been a decision to withdraw our forces in Syria, the likelihood of their return goes up dramatically.” The withdrawal, to begin immediately, abandons the Kurds, whom the US had been protecting from Turkey, and preempted a planned joint attack on ISIS. The withdrawal leaves Syria to the mercies of Bashar al-Assad, Russia (Assad’s patron), and Iran.
The only foreign leaders who welcomed the decision were Turkey’s authoritarian leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. It later emerged that Erdoğan had persuaded Trump, who had said earlier, as a general proposition, that he wanted to withdraw US troops from Syria, to do so). Then came the news that Trump had also decided – again with scant consultation – to withdraw half the US troops in Afghanistan, despite the US being in the midst of negotiations with the Taliban.The announcement of the sudden withdrawal from Syria was too much for defense secretary James Mattis, the most respected member of Trump’s cabinet – though it was far from the only provocation. On Thursday, Mattis, widely seen as the only hope for reining in Trump’s most dangerous impulses, stunned almost everyone by resigning. His eloquent resignation letter made clear that he objected not just to the Syrian blunder, but to a pattern of behavior: Trump’s confusion of allies and opponents; his willingness to abandon friends, such as the Kurds; and his trashing of alliances, such as NATO. Mattis’s friends explained in television interviews that what most troubled the retired four-star Marine general and defense intellectual was not just that he could no longer affect policy, but also that his remaining in the cabinet was taken as an affirmation of Trump, a position he could no longer bear.Even that doughty loyalist, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, issued a statement on Thursday afternoon that he was “distressed” by the departure of Mattis (a significant sign, many believe, of McConnell’s private worry about Trump’s effect on the Republican Party.) Members of Congress expressed outright fear of a Trump presidency without any guardrails.
The list of departures from Trump’s administration is unprecedentedly long. Though some were forced out for blatant corruption (and shouldn’t have been hired in the first place), others have been fired because Trump has turned against them, and some left because of the president’s abusive treatment.