Donald Trump advisers at odds over president’s foreign policy
The direction of President Donald Trump‘s foreign policy is at the center of a battle between two of his top aides. Conservative groups are targeting national security adviser H.R. McMaster. They argue that he’s insufficiently supportive of Israel and not tough enough on Iran. Those critics along with a website tied to Trump adviser Steve Bannon are pushing for McMaster to be ousted. McMaster is one of several powerful generals in Trump’s orbit who hail from the Republican foreign policy establishment. But Trump is equally sympathetic to the views of firebrands like Bannon, who are trying to push the party in a new, isolationist direction embodied by his “America First” doctrine. Administration officials and outside advisers tell The Associated Pres that McMaster and Bannon have clashed over Afghanistan war strategy. Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
What exactly is US Syria policy? Big questions for allies
Seeking support from abroad, the U.S. struggled Monday to explain a hazy Syria strategy that has yet to clarify key questions: whether President Bashar Assad must go, how displaced Syrians will be protected and when America might feel compelled to take further action. Successive attempts by top Trump administration officials to articulate a plan have only furthered the appearance of a policy still evolving, even after the U.S. broke with precedent last week by attacking Assad’s forces. In the absence of answers, other countries seem to be moving ahead on their own terms. British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, after a meeting in Italy with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, floated the possibility of new sanctions on both the Syrian and Russian militaries, an idea the U.S. has only briefly mentioned. In an unusual announcement for a foreign government, Johnson also said the U.S. could launch more cruise missiles into Syria like the ones President Donald Trump ordered last week in reaction to Assad’s use of chemical weapons. “Crucially, they could do so again,” Johnson said. Tillerson himself raised fresh expectations for aggressive U.S. action — and not only in Syria — as he visited Sant’Anna di Stazzema, a Tuscan village where the Nazis massacred more than 500 civilians during World War II. As he laid a wreath, he alluded to the Syria chemical attack. “We rededicate ourselves to holding to account any and all who commit crimes against the innocents anywhere in the world,” Tillerson said. Though such comments hint at a more activist U.S. foreign policy focused on preventing humanitarian atrocities, Trump has consistently suggested he prefers the opposite approach. His young administration has generally downplayed human rights concerns while promoting an “America First” strategy de-emphasizing the concerns of foreign nations. The uncertain view of U.S. objectives prevailed as Tillerson planned to attend a meeting Tuesday of the “likemindeds” — countries that share a similar approach to resolving Syria’s protracted civil war. The session on the sidelines of the Group of 7 summit in Italy was to include Middle East countries, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, that share a U.S. interest in resolving the conflict and resisting Iran’s influence in Syria. Tuesday night, Tillerson will fly to Moscow, the first official visit by a Trump Cabinet official to Russia, Assad’s strongest ally. The U.S. has said its Syria strategy centers on persuading President Vladimir Putin to stop supporting Assad. On Monday, the U.S. upped the stakes significantly by accusing Russia of knowing in advance of the chemical attack and using a Russian-operated drone to help cover it up. No component of Trump’s Syria policy has engendered more confusion than Assad’s future — an issue that similarly befuddled the Obama administration, whose once-adamant position that Assad must go softened substantially by the time President Barack Obama left office in January. Leading up to the U.S. missile attack, Trump’s administration had said Assad’s future was up to the Syrian people. Then Trump, the day after the assault, said his thinking about Assad had changed. Tillerson answered a question about effecting regime change by saying the U.S. was organizing a coalition to do just that. Yet after Trump’s retaliatory strike, the position became less clear. Some officials, like Tillerson, said the U.S. was confident Syrians would choose on their own to push Assad aside, while suggesting the U.S. wouldn’t mandate it. U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and others said ousting Assad was indeed a U.S. goal, but only one of several. Another unanswered question: Did Trump’s strike set a precedent that any chemical attack will trigger a U.S. response? At the White House, spokesman Sean Spicer insisted that Trump wouldn’t box himself in by disclosing his actions in advance. But he added further uncertainty to the equation by saying that even barrel bombs — which Assad has used with frequency — would necessitate U.S. action. “If you gas a baby, if you put a barrel bomb in to innocent people, I think you will see a response from this president,” Spicer said. Minutes later, the White House rushed to clarify that Spicer wasn’t announcing any new policy on barrel bombs. “Nothing has changed in our posture,” a White House official said in a written statement. On one point, the administration has been consistent: Defeating the Islamic State group in Syria is the first priority. There’s less certainty about what comes now. Tillerson and other officials have said the next priority is to create “zones of stability” in Syria where those displaced by civil war can live without fear of violence. They say that entails negotiating cease-fires between Assad’s government and rebels, who have been fighting both IS and Assad. With stability restored, they say, conditions will be ripe for a U.N.-brokered political transition. Yet it’s unclear why rebel groups would agree to cease-fires with Assad, who would protect the zones, and how. Assad’s willingness to clear the way for political talks predicated on him leaving power is deeply in question. Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
No American Covenant or New Frontier for this president. Donald Trump speaks of ‘American carnage.’
America is getting what it ordered on Election Day. If anyone was expecting an evolution from Donald Trump the candidate to Donald Trump the president, never mind. The new president delivered an inaugural address Friday that was straight from his campaign script — to the delight or dismay of different subsets of Americans. Trump gave nods to unity and began with kind words for Barack and Michelle Obama, but pivoted immediately to a searing indictment of the status quo and the Obama years. Presidents past have promised an American Covenant, a New Frontier, a Great Society. Trump sketched a vision of “American carnage.” Then he promised to end it with a nationalist “America First” approach to governing. It was a speech for Trump’s supporters, but maybe not those who voted for somebody else. When Trump told the crowd on the National Mall and watching from afar that “everyone is listening to you now” and spoke of a “historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before,” he seemed to harking back to his voters. “At some point, there has got to be a transference to being the leader of all the people,” said Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, though, heard “exactly the speech Trump needed to give to be the kind of president he wants to be.” “In a very workmanlike way, he was reasserting precisely the themes that had gotten him elected,” Gingrich said. “He is trying to communicate how he sees the next few years from his perspective: It will basically be pitched again and again as the people vs. the establishment, and it will be constant striving to reform the system.” In his 16-minute inaugural, Trump spoke in grim terms of families trapped in poverty, shuttered factories dotting the landscape like tombstones, of rampant crime, drugs and gangs. It was an echo of the bleak message he delivered at the Republican National Convention — and likewise short on specifics for how he will solve those problems. His pledge to make things better came wrapped as a nostalgic paean to better days long gone. “America will start winning again, winning like never before,” the new president said. “We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams.” Nostalgia works for some Americans, but not all. “If you’re an African-American, 50 years ago doesn’t seem so great to you,” said Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and a frequent Trump critic. “You need some kind of vision for a future America.” The new president “amplifies resentments” in the name of pursuing change, said Gerson. “It’s always us vs. them.” Trump did directly take on the nation’s modern security challenges by giving a blanket promise to “eradicate completely from the face of the earth” the scourge of “Radical Islamic Terrorism” — a capitalized phrase that the Obama administration refused even to utter. But he’s given few details about how he’ll do that. Granted, inaugurals aren’t meant to be wonky policy speeches. But they must be backed by a plan of action to have oomph. As the new president took office, whitehouse.gov was filling up with policy pages that were long on broad goals and light on specifics. And the question marks about his policies on taxes, trade, immigration, terrorism and more are magnified by the sometimes contradictory policy pronouncements coming from his Cabinet nominees. Going into Friday’s address, Trump already had a lot of work to do to rally the nation behind him. Just 40 percent of Americans have a favorable view of him, far lower than any other president-elect’s popularity since at least the 1970s, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll. And if he can’t deliver on the bold promises of his inaugural, he’ll lose those he does have in his corner. “The speech is notable for laying down very specific markers by which his presidency will be assessed,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications professor and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “The categorical nature of those markers is going to be problematic for him.” Gingrich put it more bluntly: “If he keeps us safe and creates jobs, he will almost certainly be re-elected. If he can’t do those things, he’s in deep trouble.” Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
On more than one issue, Republican Donald Trump sounds like a Democrat
As he tries to charm Republicans still skeptical of his presidential candidacy, Donald Trump has a challenge: On several key issues, he sounds an awful lot like a Democrat. And on some points of policy, such as trade and national defense, the billionaire businessman could even find himself running to the left of Hillary Clinton, his likely Democratic rival in the general election. Trump is a classic Republican in many ways. He rails against environmental and corporate regulations, proposes dramatically lower tax rates and holds firm on opposing abortion rights. But the presumptive GOP nominee doesn’t fit neatly into a traditional ideological box. “I think I’m running on common sense,” he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “I think I’m running on what’s right. I don’t think in terms of labels.” Perhaps Trump’s clearest break with Republican orthodoxy is on trade, which the party’s 2012 platform said was “crucial for our economy” and a path to “more American jobs, higher wages, and a better standard of living.” Trump says his views on trade are “not really different” from the rest of his party’s, yet he pledges to rip up existing deals negotiated by “stupid leaders” who failed to put American workers first. He regularly slams the North American Free Trade Agreement involving the U.S, Mexico and Canada, and opposes a pending Asia-Pacific pact, positions shared by Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders. “The problem is the ideologues, the very conservative group, would say everything has to be totally free trade,” Trump said. “But you can’t have free trade if the deals are going to be bad. And that’s what we have.” Trump long has maintained that he has no plans to scale back Social Security benefits or raise its qualifying retirement age. The position puts him in line with Clinton. She has said she would “defend and expand” Social Security, has ruled out a higher retirement age and opposes reductions in cost-of-living adjustments or other benefits. “There is tremendous waste, fraud and abuse, but I’m leaving it the way it is,” Trump recently told Fox Business Network. It’s a stance at odds with the country’s top-ranked elected Republican, House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who has advocated fundamental changes to Social Security and other entitlement programs. But it’s also one that Trump argues keeps him in line with the wishes of most voters. “Remember the wheelchair being pushed over the cliff when you had Ryan chosen as your vice president?” Trump told South Carolina voters this year, referring to then-vice presidential candidate Ryan’s budget plan. “That was the end of that campaign.” Ryan was Mitt Romney‘s running mate in 2012. Complicating the efforts to define Trump is his penchant for offering contradictory ideas about policy. He also has taken recently to saying that all of his plans are merely suggestions, open to later negotiation. Trump’s tax plan, for instance, released last fall, called for lowering the rate paid by the wealthiest people in the United States from 39.6 percent to 25 percent and slashing the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent. Trump described it as a massive boon for the middle class. Outside experts concluded it disproportionately benefited the rich and would balloon the federal deficit. Close to clinching the nomination, Trump now appears to be pulling away from his own proposal. While he still wants to lower taxes for the wealthy and businesses, he now says his plan was just a starting point for discussions and he would like to see the middle class benefit more from whatever changes he seeks in tax law. “We have to go to Congress, we have to go to the Senate, we have to go to our congressmen and women and we have to negotiate a deal,” Trump said recently. “So it really is a proposal, but it’s a very steep proposal.” Trump has a similar take on the minimum wage. Trump said at a GOP primary debate that wages are too high, and later made clear that he does not support a federal minimum wage. Yet when speaking about the issue, he says he recognizes the difficulty of surviving on the current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. “I am open to doing something with it,” he told CNN this month. On foreign policy, Trump already appears working to paint Clinton as a national security hawk who would too easily lead the country into conflict. “On foreign policy, Hillary is trigger happy,” Trump said at a recent rally, He listed the countries where the U.S. had intervened militarily during her tenure as secretary of state and pointed to her vote to authorize the Iraq war while she was in the Senate. Trump’s own “America First” approach appears to lean more toward isolationism. One of his foreign policy advisers, Walid Phares, recently described it as a “third way.” “This doesn’t fit any of the boxes,” Phares said. Clinton has advocated using “smart power,” a combination of diplomatic, legal, economic, political and cultural tools to expand American influence. She believes the U.S. has a unique ability to rally the world to defeat international threats. She argues the country must be an active participant on the world stage, particularly as part of international alliances such as NATO. Trump has criticized the military alliance, questioning a structure that sees the U.S. pay for most of its costs. “The best thing about Donald Trump today is he’s not Hillary Clinton, but he’s certainly not a conservative, either,” said GOP Rep. Tim Huelskamp, a member of the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus and a Ted Cruz supporter in the 2016 race, in an interview with “Fox News Sunday.” Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
