This is a breezy overview of the greatest hits and multiple failures of Donald Trump’s foreign policy. It’s full of gossip, much of it old, like Rex Tillerson calling the president a “fucking moron”, and some of it new, like Trump’s sudden command to evacuate all American civilians from Seoul after noticing how close the South Korean capital was to the border with North Korea.
As with many of the president’s more outrageous requests, his aides simply ignored that one until he forgot all about it.
Author Peter Bergen is a former CNN producer – Osama Bin Laden was his big “get” – now a vice-president at a Washington thinktank, a sometime professor and a full-time Washington operator.
He has a nice origin story for one of the crucial relationships underpinning the president’s Middle East policy: the tender bromance between presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman, better known as MBS, who are famous for messaging each other on WhatsApp. Kushner, Bergen writes, confided to an administration colleague that the young prince “rushed me in ways that no woman” ever had.
Not even the CIA’s verdict that MBS probably ordered the assassination of a US-resident journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, has diminished the warmth between the Kushner-Trumps and the Saudi royals. Bergen reports that Trump interrogated both the Saudi king and his heir about the murder of the Washington Post columnist but there was really only one detail that gave the president any pause: the sound of the saw used to cut up the victim’s body, picked up by a Turkish recording device.
“Was there a bone saw?” the president asked MBS. “Because if there was a bone saw, that changes everything. I mean, I’ve been in some pretty tough negotiations, I’ve never had to take a bone saw with me.”
The prince’s only response: he didn’t know whether a saw had been used, because the victim’s body “was given to a Syrian”.
“Just a random Syrian walking around in Turkey?” Trump asked.
Trump spurned an offer from his CIA director to listen to the audio, because “it’s a suffering tape”. Eventually the White House let MBS off the hook, blaming his “Rasputin” advisor, Saud al-Qajhtani, instead.
There are plenty of details here to reinforce an impression of terrifying incompetence throughout the administration. During Michael Flynn’s extremely brief tenure as national security adviser, a staffer asked: “What does an ‘America First’ foreign policy look like?”
Flynn had no idea, so he asked his deputy, KT McFarland, to answer.
“Wow! Look at all these people,” McFarland replied. “I didn’t know there were so many people on the NSC staff …”
A former Fox talking head, McFarland explained what she really needed: “I am a TV person. Give me the script and tell me what to say.”
Confidence in the National Security Council isn’t enhanced by Bergen’s quotes from a memo by Rich Higgins, an early director of strategic planning. It explained that “deep state” Marxists were embedded in the American government, allied to Islamists in a conspiracy including the European Union and the United Nations.
“This is a form of population control,” the memo said, “by certain business cartels in league with cultural Marxists/corporatists/Islamists who will leverage Islamic terrorism threats to justify the creation of a police state.”
That was too much even for the America Firsters. Higgins lasted less than a year.
Trump’s one real foreign policy success in his first two years in office was the freeing of 20 hostages held around the world. But there were many, many more failures, from his fruitless efforts to convince North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un to give up his nukes (even after Trump confessed he had “fallen in love with” him) , to his disastrous decision to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, destroying the last, faint hopes of peace with the Palestinians.
Reliable judgement is the most important thing a nonfiction author can offer, and there isn’t always a lot of that here. Former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is described as a “heavy hitter”, rather than one of America’s most notorious union busters, while the neocon Elliott Abrams, an unsuccessful candidate to be deputy secretary of state, is a “sharp observer of the Middle East” instead of an “actual American war criminal”, as Eric Alterman has described him more convincingly in the Nation.
Then there’s the famous mercenary Eric Prince, whose detailed plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan Bergen says seemed just “a little self-serving”, since Prince was one of the largest players “in the war contracting industry”.
Despite the ample evidence of catastrophe, Bergen is shy about making any final judgements. After all, “Harry Truman was initially derided as a onetime haberdasher and Reagan was similarly dinged as a former actor” before both of their reputations, especially Truman’s, soared when they left the White House.
“Could the blowhard billionaire from Queens also enjoy a similar reputational shift?” Bergen asks.
With Trump becoming the third American president to be impeached, because of one of his most outrageous foreign adventures, the answer is surely a resounding: “No!”
