Beware the White Knight McMaster

February 23, 2017–Do you hear the swooning? The country is almost heaving sighs of relief over President Trump’s appointment of Army Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster to preside over the National Security Council (NSC) staff in place of the departed Michael T. Flynn. The oohs! and aaahs! are audible. Suddenly the perception is that Mr. Trump is enlisting an adult to run his inside-the-White House national security staff, so rationality will prevail. The gossip is also that the NSC structure Trump laid down in one of this early presidential directives will be revised (again) to bring back the director of national intelligence, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CIA chieftain. Before we go too far, though, I want to register a “Not so fast!”

Part of the continuing problem is structural. What President Trump did, long before appointing McMasters as national security adviser, is create competing centers of power at the White House. None of them is the NSC staff. The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, obviously has The Donald’s ear any time he needs it. Strategist Stephen Bannon reflects the political base of Trump’s power, and he has an agenda. He will not be crossed, or dismissed, unless the president decides on radical surgery and holds on to the tiller come what may. Reince Priebus mirrors the Republican party hierarchy that Mr. Trump needs to govern. He has an agenda too. For all of them the national security adviser is a target, someone to enlist to further their goals. Some objectives of the assorted White House power centers may overlap but others do not–and no amount of overlapping is going to do away with the equally thorny competition among the potentates for who gets the credit for each thing they do.

From this point of view Mike Flynn actually had an advantage. As an ideologue on his own account, one whose opinions were close to Trump’s, Flynn almost had the jets to stand up to the policy predators. General McMaster lacks such preordained positions. He might have strong prescriptions for strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq, but across the Trump administration policy spectrum McMaster has an empty file cabinet waiting to be filled. Expect to see more, rather than less, engagement from the predators.

Much of the relief bandied about with General McMaster’s appointment centers on the historical conclusions he drew in a Vietnam history published in 1997, Dereliction of Duty. Many see McMaster as finding the military leaders at the time of Vietnam as wanting–failing in their duty to tell truth to power and kowtowing to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s (LBJ) agenda by keeping their silence and not telling him his strategy was flawed. That construction is mistaken. General McMaster actually delivered a much more conventional interpretation in which LBJ, the military’s civilian leaders, and the White House staff shared responsibility. The secretary of defense at the time, Robert McNamara, in this version of history, moved from distrusting the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to misleading them, and McNamara plus LBJ created the illusion that decisions to attack North Vietnam were alternatives to war rather than war itself. According to this logic the course led to planning for failure, and then a war without direction.

I critiqued McMaster’s analysis in 2009 in my book Unwinnable War  where I noted a number of things off with that construction. For one, LBJ’s views on Vietnam were opaque, and varied from day to day. McMaster cited only the telephone conversations where Johnson wanted no war, not those where LBJ spoke of “touching up” Hanoi. It is true that Robert McNamara rode herd on the JCS, but the charge the military were derelict is thin. Quite the opposite is true: every time they were asked for an opinion the Chiefs recited a litany that included cross-border operations into Laos, bombing, mining, and ground troops in great numbers. That litany would be recited as early as the Tonkin Gulf incident of August 1964, and over time they added more elements. In 1967, when Congress held hearings on the bombing, the military openly and publicly denounced McNamara’s approach. As for the directionless war, there is no evidence the Joint Chiefs had any more innovative a military strategy in mind than did the president.

Meanwhile, senior military leaders were well aware of the political impact of their public views. Then–as now–the military were guarded and diffident about what they said. H. R. McMaster should have been well attuned to that aspect, which, at the time he was writing, had most recently been demonstrated in the Gulf War of 1990-1991, when Joint Chiefs chairman Colin L. Powell had kept silent his differences with then-defense secretary Dick Cheney. What goes around comes around–in the prelude to the Iraq invasion of 2003, Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki did openly express a different view from his political superiors–and he was promptly let go. The diffident silence which McMaster found so objectionable when looking back at Vietnam is the norm, not the exception.

In the Trump administration today the military has a different planetary configuration. It is not only General McMaster as security adviser, but also General James Mattis as secretary of defense, and General John F. Kelly as secretary for homeland security. Other military men occupy numerous positions on the NSC staff, including McMaster’s current deputy. Some of the public’s relief at the McMaster appointment actually stems from the thought these officers will be the “adults” who rein in the outlandish proposals of the president and his henchmen, but that is unlikely for two reasons: the norm of deferring to the political leadership (reinforced in McMaster’s case, by the way, because he remains on active duty, and therefore subject to regulations about what can be said about [and to] a chief executive); and the limited knowledge and experience of these military men outside their chosen profession. Meanwhile McMaster will be under intense pressure to conform to the views of the various White House power centers.

The McMaster appointment does not get citizens out of the woods. President Trump’s activities will continue to provoke and  distress. A more likely role for the military men in this presidency–as General Mattis has already shown–is to sooth nerves shaken up by the president. We’ll see.

Farewell Marilyn Young– Warrior Against War

February 20, 2017– When the Federal Bureau of Investigation went after the Concerned Committee of Asian Scholars (CCAS), there was nothing of the diffidence they are showing in their supposed look-see into Russian interference in the 2016 United States election. Perhaps the FBI under James Comey plays to a different set of favorites than it did during J. Edgar Hoover’s day. Those were the times of the Bureau’s COINTELPRO and their “inquiries” into the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The motive was very definitely to chill citizens’ relations with others, simply because of their political beliefs. The CCAS was a group that opposed the Vietnam war and favored better relations between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China–both directions in which the-then Nixon administration was moving–but that did nothing to shield these Americans.

Marilyn B. Young was among the founding members of CCAS. I became aware of them while studying Southeast Asia at Columbia. Some Vietnam veteran friends of mine were members, and CCAS published excellent newsletters and occasional journals. They were on the cutting edge of scholarship on Asia. But that’s not what put them on the FBI’s radar scope. Their passion–and passionate opposition to the Vietnam war did that. Indeed Young, who studied at Harvard with Ernest R. May and John King Fairbank as her advisers, was squarely within the cohort. In the 1971 marches on Washington, to protest the invasion of Laos, and then “May Day,” hyped to be a more focused attempt to prevent the government from conducting business as usual, Young participated with a affinity circle that included Howard Zinn, Daniel Ellsberg, and Noam Chomsky, not to mention Fred Branfman (later of Indochina Resource Center fame), who also passed away recently and deserves being marked in his own right.

Marilyn did not just wear her beliefs on her sleeve. Decades later, having inspired generations of students at the University of Michigan and New York University (NYU), and an active member of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), Young was elected president of that body. In a customary SHAFR presidential address she reflected on how her studies and teaching had led her backwards and forwards, through wars past and future, until it seemed like war was less a progression than a continuation. There is no longer a discrete move from prewar, through conflict, peace, and postwar. Indeed in our last collaboration, which was a panel at a SHAFR conference a few years back, intended to draw parallels and lessons from the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, Marilyn presented something very much like that view.

At Harvard in the 1960s, Young examined the international side of the turn-of-the-century Boxer Rebellion in China, where she found U.S. participation influenced by the quest for an “Open Door,” that is, freedom for American trade. It was not difficult to link those historic events with Washington’s policies pursued after World War II, and, of course, “war for oil” became a slogan attached to both Bushes and their Gulf Wars. The continuity with which Marilyn Young constructed her views was something John King Fairbank would have enjoyed. Ernie May I am less certain, but he would have appreciated Marilyn’s coherence and historicity.

It was my privilege to know Marilyn Young quite well for decades. Many times we attended conferences together, shared podiums, participated in seminars and institutes. I contributed essays to books she edited. We broke bread innumerable times in myriad places. Her raucous laugh was a delight. I did not mind at panels when she came after me from the left. I watched, distressed, as Marilyn’s health declined. Talk about war, she waged a long–and long successful–struggle against cancer. Her passing will be a sadness for diplomatic history, a loss to historians, indeed to the NYU History Department, where she was emeritus. Some time ago I decided to dedicate my next book to Marilyn, and the only thing good in all this is that I told her a couple of months ago, so she got a little pleasure from that. Marilyn, we loved you. Fair winds and following seas.

West Wing Chaos

February 15, 2017–It used to be said of Frank Wisner, operations chief of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the high Cold War, that he would give the identical assignment to a half dozen different people and then sit back to see who brought him the first results. As a device for pushing the CIA toward producing outcomes, Wisner’s technique might have had something going for it, but as a management tool it was a vehicle that produced a state of constant chaos.

Donald Trump–would you believe it?–is up to something very similar. Political strategist Stephen Bannon, chief of staff Reince Priebus, “adviser” Jared Kushner, all seem to have the same instructions. The difference between the way CIA’s Wisner utilized this method, and the way it is in the West Wing today, is that in the Cold War the object of the action was foreign nations, while in Trump’s White House today the aim is simply to seize control over the reins of government.

The fall of Michael T. Flynn as national security adviser inaugurates the next phase in this inside struggle. A weak national security staff never found its footing, leaving one of the most important functional areas of U.S. government action up for grabs. Since President Trump himself has articulated nothing more than vague, subjective visions, the person who can turn the Trump’s longings into a concrete foreign policy stands to gain control of the process.

Meanwhile the bloodletting across government will continue and deepen. I made the point in this space at least as early as the election itself that Trump would purge the U.S. intelligence agencies because they knew stuff damaging to him that flowed from events during the political campaign. The fall of General Flynn shows that point to have been precisely correct. One place the attrition will take aim quickly will be CIA at Langley, and its other companion agencies. So much for Trump’s day-after-the-inauguration appearance at Langley, where he promised the spooks so much backing they’d get sick of it.

While all this is going on, have you noticed a “United States foreign policy”? Right. Neither have I. The infighting is creating a policy vacuum. That might not be such a bad thing, since so many of Mr. Trump’s inchoate visions are so dark, but the point is that instead of taking grasp of the reins of government, the president is the helpless driver of a runaway stagecoach, its reins slapping along the ground. Senator John McCain is right to say the White House is “dysfunctional” on national security.

Flynn’s Suspenders Showing

February 10, 2017–Yesterday in this space appeared a discussion of the new National Security Council staff headed by retired general Michael T. Flynn. There I referred to a still-concealed disaster in Flynn’s management of the Defense Intelligence Agency as a potential scandal waiting to happen. Today’s news reminds that there is a bigger controversy in Mr. Flynn’s involvement in backchannel contacts with the Russians both before last year’s elections and during the interregnum between Barack Obama’s presidency and Donald Trump’s entry into the White House.

The column yesterday referred obliquely to Flynn’s connections with Putin’s Russia, where he boasted of having been invited into the inner sanctum of the Russian military intelligence service GRU. He had also sat to dinner with Vladimir Putin on a public occasion, and taken money for the visit. During the election campaign Flynn was in touch with the Russian ambassador to the United States, both personally and on the phone, and by tweet. He spoke with the ambassador on the same day in December when then-President Obama imposed additional sanctions on Russia for its intervention in U.S. politics. Senior American intelligence officials largely agree Flynn discussed the sanctions with the Russian diplomat.

Flynn’s activities are disturbing at best, and may have impeded Obama’s conduct of U.S. foreign policy. There’s a legality issue as well, but I won’t go there because the facts are still too murky. Suffice it to say there’s already enough smoke for Trump spindoctors to be working, with their usual veering close to alternate facts, to minimize Flynn’s contacts and obscure his purposes. General Flynn’s suspenders are showing. Stay tuned!