[RC] The man who knows next-to-nothing who thinks he knows everything

[BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community]

 
 


The New  Yorker 
Why is Donald  Trump so Horribly Witless  
about the  World? 
Robin  Wright 
August 4,  2017 
Max Boot, a lifelong  conservative who advised three Republican 
Presidential candidates on foreign  policy, keeps a folder labelled “Trump 
Stupidity 
File” on his computer. It’s  next to his “Trump Lies” file. “Not sure which 
is larger at this point,” he told  me this week. “It’s neck-and-neck.” 
Six months into the Trump  era, foreign-policy officials from eight past 
Administrations told me they are  aghast that the President is still so 
witless about the world. “He seems as  clueless today as he was on January 
20th,” 
Boot, who is now a senior fellow at  the Council on Foreign Relations, 
said. Trump’s painful public gaffes, they  warn, indicate that he’s not 
reading, retaining, or listening to his  Presidential briefings. And the newbie 
excuse no longer flies. 
“Trump has an appalling  ignorance of the current world, of history, of 
previous American engagement, of  what former Presidents thought and did,” 
Geoffrey Kemp, who worked at the  Pentagon during the Ford Administration and 
at 
the National Security Council  during the Reagan Administration, reflected. 
“He has an almost studious  rejection of the type of in-depth knowledge 
that virtually all of his  predecessors eventually gained or had views on.” 
Criticism of Donald Trump  among Democrats who served in senior 
national-security positions is predictable  and rife. But Republicans—who are 
historically ambitious on foreign policy—are  particularly pained by the 
President’s 
missteps and misstatements. So are former  senior intelligence officials 
who have avoided publicly criticizing Presidents  until now. 
“The President has little  understanding of the context”—of what’s 
happening in the world—“and even less  interest in hearing the people who want 
to 
deliver it,” Michael Hayden, a  retired four-star general and former 
director of both the C.I.A. and the  National Security Agency, told me. “He’s 
impatient, decision-oriented, and prone  to action. It’s all about the present 
tense. When he asks, ‘What the hell’s  going on in Iraq?’ people around him 
have learned not to say, ‘Well, in 632 . . . ’ ” (That  was the year when 
the Prophet Muhammad died, prompting the beginning of the  Sunni-Shiite 
split.*) 
“He just doesn’t have an  interest in the world,” Hayden said. 
I asked top Republican  and intelligence officials from eight 
Administrations what they thought was the  one thing the President needs to 
grasp to 
succeed on the world stage. Their  various replies: embrace the fact that the 
Russians are not America’s friends.  Don’t further alienate the Europeans, 
who are our friends. Encourage human  rights—a founding principle of American 
identity—and don’t make priority visits  to governments that curtail them, 
such as Poland and Saudi Arabia. Understand  that North Korea’s nuclear 
program can’t be outsourced to China, which can’t or  won’t singlehandedly fix 
the problem anyway, and realize that military options  are limited. Pulling 
out of innovative trade deals, like the Trans-Pacific  Partnership, will 
boost China’s economy and secure its global influence—to  America’s 
disadvantage. Stop bullying his counterparts. And put the Russia case  behind 
him by 
coöperating with the investigation rather than trying to discredit  it. 
Trump’s latest  blunder was made during an appearance in the Rose Garden 
with Lebanon’s Prime  Minister, Saad Hariri, on July 25th. “Lebanon is on the 
front lines in the fight  against isis, Al Qaeda, and Hezbollah,” Trump  
pronounced. _He got the  basics really wrong_ 
(https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/07/25/remarks-president-trump-and-prime-minister-hariri-leb
anon-joint-press) .  Hezbollah is actually part of the Lebanese government—
and has been for a quarter  century—with seats in parliament and Cabinet 
posts. Lebanon’s Christian  President, Michel Aoun, has been _allied_ 
(http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Hezbollah-ally-Michel-Aoun-elected-President-of-Leba
non-471301) with  Hezbollah for a decade. As Trump spoke, Hezbollah’s 
militia and the Lebanese  Army were fighting isis and  an Al Qaeda affiliate 
occupying a chunk of eastern Lebanon along its border with  Syria. They won. 
The list of other Trump blunders is  long. In March, he _charged_ 
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/03/18/no-germany-doesnt-owe-am
erica-vast-sums-of-money-for-nato/)  that Germany owed “vast sums” to the 
United States for nato. It _doesn’t_ 
(http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/mar/19/donald-trump/fact-check-donald-trump-says-germany-ow
es-vast-sum/) .  No nato member pays the United States—and never  has—so 
_none_ 
(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/world/europe/nato-trump-spending.html)  is 
in arrears. In an _interview_ 
(https://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2017/04/12/wsj-trump-interview-excerpts-china-north-korea-ex-im-bank-obamacare-ban
non/)  with the Wall Street  Journal, in April, Trump claimed that Korea “
actually  used to be part of China.” _Not  true_ 
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/04/19/trumps-claim-that-korea-actually-used-to-
be-a-part-of-china/) .  After he arrived in Israel from Saudi  Arabia, in 
May, Trump said that he had just come from the Middle East. (Did he  even 
look at a map?) During his trip to France, in July, the President confused  
Napoleon Bonaparte, the diminutive emperor who invaded Russia and Egypt, with  
Napoleon III, who was France’s first popularly elected President, oversaw 
the design of modern Paris,  and is still the longest-serving head of state 
since the French Revolution  (albeit partly as an emperor, too). And that’s 
before delving into his demeaning  tweets about other world leaders and 
flashpoints. 
“The sheer scale of his lack of knowledge is what  has astounded me—and I 
had low expectations to begin with,” David Gordon, the director of the State 
 Department’s policy-planning staff  under Condoleezza Rice, during the 
Bush Administration, told  me. 
Trump’s White House has also flubbed  basics. It _misspelled_ 
(http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/theresa-may-teresa-spel
ling-misspell-donald-trump-republican-retreat-speech-a7548616.html)  the name 
of Britain’s 
Prime Minister  three times in its official schedule of her January visit. 
After it dropped the  “H” in Theresa May, several British papers noted that 
Teresa May is a soft-porn  actress best known for her films “Leather Lust” 
and “Whitehouse: The Sex Video.”  In a statement last month, the White House 
_called_ 
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/07/08/white-house-press-office-misidentifies-japanese-prime-minister-abe-as-president/)
  
Xi Jinping the President of the  “Republic of China”—which is the island of 
Taiwan—rather than the leader of the  People’s Republic, the Communist 
mainland. The two nations have been epic rivals  in Asia for more than half a 
century. The White House also misidentified Shinzo  Abe as the President of 
Japan—he’s the Prime Minister—and called the Prime  Minister of Canada “Joe”
 instead of Justin  Trudeau. 
Trump’s policy mistakes, large and small, are  taking a toll. “American 
leadership in the world—how do I  phrase this, it’s so obvious, but  
apparently not to him—is critical to our success, and it depends eighty  per 
cent on 
the credibility of  the President’s word,” John McLaughlin, who worked at 
the C.I.A. under seven Presidents, from Richard Nixon to  George W. Bush, 
and ended up as the intelligence agency’s acting director, told me.  “Trump 
thinks having a piece of chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago bought him a  
relationship with Xi Jinping. He  came in as the least prepared President we’ve 
had 
on foreign policy," McLaughlin  added. “Our leadership in the world is 
slipping away. It’s slipping through our  hands.” 
And a world in dramatic flux compounds the  stakes. Hayden cited the 
meltdown in the world order that has prevailed since the Second World War; the  
changing nature of the state and its power; China’s growing military and 
economic power; and rogue nations  seeking nuclear weapons, among others. “Yet 
the most disruptive force in the  world today is the United States of America,”
 the former C.I.A. director  said. 
The closest  similarity to the Trump era was the brief Warren G. Harding 
Administration, in  the nineteen-twenties, Philip Zelikow, who worked for the 
Reagan and two Bush  Administrations, and who was the executive director of 
the 9/11 Commission, told  me. Harding, who died, of a heart attack, after 
twenty-eight months in office,  was praised because he stood aside and let 
his Secretary of State, Charles Evans  Hughes, lead the way. Hughes had 
already been governor of New York, a Supreme  Court Justice, and the Republican 
Presidential nominee in 1916, losing narrowly  to Woodrow Wilson, who preceded 
Harding. 
Under Trump,  the White House has seized control of key foreign-policy 
issues. The  President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a real-estate developer, 
has 
been  charged with brokering Middle East peace, navigating U.S.-China 
relations, and  the Mexico portfolio. In April, Kushner travelled to Iraq to 
help 
chart policy  against isis. Washington scuttlebutt is consumed with tales 
of  how Trump has stymied his own Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, the 
former  C.E.O. of ExxonMobil. 
“The national-security  system of the United States has been tested over a 
period of seventy years,”  John Negroponte, the first director of national 
security and a former U.N.  Ambassador, told me. “President Trump disregards 
the system at his  peril.” 
Trump’s contempt for  the U.S. intelligence community has also sparked 
alarm. “I wish the President  would rely more on, and trust more, the 
intelligence agencies and the work that  is produced, sometimes at great risk 
to 
individuals around the world, to inform  the Commander-in-Chief,” Mitchell 
Reiss, 
who was chief of the State Department’s  policy-planning team under 
Secretary of State Colin Powell, told me. 
Republican critics are  divided on whether Trump can grow into the job. “
Trump is completely  irredeemable,” Eliot A. Cohen, who was counselor to 
Condoleezza Rice at the  State Department, told me. “He has a feral instinct 
for 
self-survival, but he’s  unteachable. The ban on Muslims coming into the 
country and building a wall, and  having the Mexicans pay for it, that was all 
you needed to know about this guy  on foreign affairs. This is a man who is 
idiotic and bigoted and ignorant of the  law.” Cohen was a ringleader of an 
open letter warning, during the campaign,  that Trump’s foreign policy was “
wildly inconsistent and unmoored.” 
But other Republicans  from earlier Administrations still hold out hope. “
Whenever Trump begins to  learn about an issue—the Middle East conflict or 
North Korea—he expresses such  surprise that it could be so complicated, after 
saying it wasn’t that  difficult,” Gordon, from the Bush Administration, 
said. “The good news, when he  says that, is it means he has a little bit of 
knowledge.” So far, however, the  learning curve has been pitifully—and  
dangerously—slow

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