Stevenson’s army, August 31
In an extraordinary story, WaPo reports that John Bolton has repeatedly been excluded from invitations to presidential policy meetings on Afghanistan and even denied access to the Taliban negotiations documents. Bolton’s only denial of the story was that he and his staff did not leak. It’s unclear whether this story was prompted by Bolton supporters who want him to resign in protest of Administration policies or opponents who want to further marginalize him by making this known to the world. [It is not unusual for senior officials to fall in and out of favor with a president. Nor is it unusual for one faction to try to exclude opponents from policy meetings. People in the Clinton and Obama administrations, for example, told me of deliberately excluding Richard Holbrooke from meetings because he was deemed disruptive. But to sideline the person in charge of the interagency process from a key policy matter is not a good sign.]
Another puzzling development Friday was a presidential tweet with what appears to be a classified intelligence photo of an Iranian missile site along with a Trump statement that the US was not responsible for the failed launch. NYT has background on both matters, including a discussion of the law on covert actions.
WaPo had a piece discussing Gen. Mattis’ refusal to criticize President Trump, linking it to broader issues of civil-military relations and whether retired senior officers can adjust to political roles like SecDef. Civ-mil scholars like Professors Karlin and Peter Feaver are quoted.
CBO’s latest economic report has details on the impact of the trade wars on the US economy. See box 2.2 in the full report.
NYT tells the sad story of the rise and fall of the president’s personal assistant and how she built large groups of supporters and opponents by how she controlled access to the Oval Office.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. If you want to get it directly, To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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