Trump’s tantrum gives America’s foes opportunity for mischief
Shifting power between outgoing and incoming American presidents is a delicate operation, like carrying a Ming vase across a busy road. Drop this particular bit of political crockery, though, and you do more than expensively embarrass yourself. You invite America’s foes to jostle for advantage and you make Washington, already exhausted by a bruising election campaign, look enfeebled and distracted.
With just over two months to go before Joe Biden’s inauguration, Donald Trump seems to be pursuing a scorched earth policy. He has sacked Mark Esper as defence secretary and a cluster of senior Pentagon officials because they oppose Trump’s plan to bring home thousands of US troops from Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia before the handover. That would honour an election pledge but, perhaps more importantly, hand Biden a foreign policy crisis in his first weeks in office. Accelerating the removal of most of the 4,500 troops in Afghanistan might just be possible by January but it would be physically impossible to extract the heavy military kit. And it would immediately become impossible to monitor a key part of Trump’s deal - to separate the Taliban from al-Qaeda.
Biden doesn’t want to be handed a Vietnam-style humiliation: the looting of abandoned American equipment and Taliban crowing over the fickleness of American power. But that’s the consequence of the menu being prepared for him in the twilight White House. So, too, is the proposal to list Yemen’s Houthi rebels as terrorists, putting paid to any swift peace deal there. New sanctions seem to be on the cards for the Iranian regime. Biden’s advisers interpret this as a Trump ploy to anger Tehran, harden its anti-American stance and thus kick into the long grass any chance of reviving the agreement that curbs Iran’s nuclear programme.
For sure, Trump is not making this easy. Part of his obstructionism, though, is an attempt to defend his legacy. It’s also in his power as the sitting president to determine the pace of the transition. And the General Services Administration, which manages the federal agencies, has yet to recognise a Biden victory because of various legal challenges.
A green light from the GSA is usually seen as the starting pistol of a formal transition. The most abbreviated transition in recent memory was in 2000 when the whole progress was gummed by the president-elect, George W Bush, and his national security team having to wait for a Supreme Court ruling in Bush v Gore on December 12. The 9/11 commission later concluded that the delay impeded the Bush administration’s ability to deal with al-Qaeda plots.
Despite that rushed handover, it was ultimately good-natured. This time around Trump isn’t even sharing the Presidential Daily Brief, the morning intelligence digest, with Biden. A modern convention is that outgoing and incoming officials play out different crises to identify the strengths and weaknesses of existing response plans. This isn’t happening. Denied access to secure government communications (and nervous about a Chinese hack) Biden’s people are having to meet on park benches with indiscreet but public-spirited Trump officials to work out what’s going on. They don’t even know what they don’t know. That goes as much for the planning of the Covid vaccine distribution as it does for Kim Jong-un’s state of mind.
America is temporarily befogged. The CIA should be one of the bridges between presidents, ensuring that Biden is up and running. Instead its director, Gina Haspel, finds herself under pressure to help in the declassification of documents that shed light on possible Russian interference in the 2016 election. She is reportedly reluctant to do so because the agency wants to protect sources. Trump, however, wants as much information as he can squeeze out of the intelligence machine before he quits so that he can whip up a Democratic Hoax narrative. Haspel may soon join Esper, the Pentagon officials, the Homeland Security and National Security experts who have had to walk the plank.
The danger lies not just in the Lear-like implosion of Trump but also in the possibility that America’s rivals spot an opportunity for mischief. US strategic analysts have been brooding for some time about a “fait accompli scenario” in which China could use the Washington interregnum to seize disputed terrain, such as the deserted Japanese Senkaku islands, or cut the undersea cables providing Taiwan with internet connections. If Vladimir Putin wanted to engineer a coup in Belarus he could be sure of an indifferent response from Trump and a delayed, ineffectual rebuke from Biden. Does Kim Jong-un want to test a new long-range missile? Feel free; we’re not watching.
These are the weeks when Beijing could put even more Hong Kong dissidents in the slammer or push its luck on the Himalayan Indo-Chinese border. Azerbaijan has just won a short war against Armenia. The Armenians have friends in Russia, France and in America but Baku seized the moment: a distracted Washington, with a Nato ally, Turkey, and Trumpian ally Israel supplying the battle-winning drones. It was over before anyone really noticed and stuck to the ground rules of war during an American interregnum: make it short and deny all massacres.
Trump is a lame duck, a commander-in-chief in name only. Biden policy is unformed. For an adventurist regime, the risk of punishment must seem small. America is out to lunch.
The Times
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