Day: November 17, 2020
EUSR Lajcak at SAIS 10:30 am Thursday
The Conflict Management Program
is pleased to invite you to attend a guest lecture by
Miroslav Lajcak
EU Special Representative for the Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue
and other Western Balkan regional issues
Mr. Lajčák is a Slovak Diplomat who previously served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Slovakia (2009-2010 and 2012-2020), and as President of the United Nations General Assembly for its 72nd Session. He previously served as EU Special Envoy in charge of mediating the rules and procedures for 2006 Montenegro’s referendum on independence; he was also the EU Special Representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2007-2009; and EEAS Managing Director for Russia, Eastern Neighborhood and the Western Balkans 2010-2012.
Welcome remarks:
Dr. Daniel Serwer: Director of Conflict Management
The lecture and subsequent discussion will be moderated by:
Dr. Siniša Vuković: Associate Director of Conflict Management
Thursday, November 19, 2020 from 10:30am-11:45am EST
Registration link for the Webinar: https://jh.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_lhe4P7eDRfcZzeA5lNIFQ
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Premature withdrawal is not good foreign policy
President Trump is spending these first days of his “lame duck” presidency sulking out of public sight and playing golf. He fired the Defense Secretary on Twitter and has installed yes-men throughout the upper echelon of the Defense Department. His minions there are plotting a rash of US troops withdrawals from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, and perhaps from South Korea and more from Germany.
I’d be more than happy to see US troops come home, not least because I’ve got a beloved daughter-in-law slated for deployment, I know not where. She is a lieutenant colonel physician in the US Army and has already done three tours in Afghanistan in recent years as well as one in South Korea. It would be more than nice if she could stay home rather than leave a toddler behind in the care of her admittedly very capable husband.
But we know from bitter experience the trouble premature withdrawal of US troops can cause. We don’t have to harken back to Vietnam, graphic though the evacuation was. The Soviet-sponsored regime in Afghanistan lasted a few years after Moscow’s withdrawal, but the civil war and Taliban rule that followed weren’t good news for either the US or the Soviet Union, never mind the death and destruction they wrought in Afghanistan. President Obama’s premature withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 opened the door to sectarianism and the rise of the Islamic State.
There is little reason to believe the government in Kabul will survive if the preconditions for US withdrawal specified in Washington’s agreement with the Taliban are not met. The government in Mogadishu is even weaker than the one in Kabul. Baghdad’s government would be more likely to survive, but in a pro-Iranian form that won’t be to Washington’s liking.
The sad fact is that withdrawal requires at least as much diplomacy as military intervention. Zal Khalilzad has been doing the right thing by negotiating the US exit from Afghanistan with the Taliban and insisting also that the Taliban reach an agreement with Kabul. But that negotiation can’t be successful if President Trump pulls the carpet out from under it. There is no reason to believe that any withdrawal decided because it is time for the President to leave office will be done at the right time. Withdrawal, like intervention, should be decided based on conditions in the country concerned, not only in the US.
President-elect Biden should of course be informed if not consulted on any decisions for withdrawal, or military action, during this lame duck period. That won’t happen so long as Trump is disputing the election result. Even thereafter he may avoid Biden, but at least the Pentagon and State Department people should be allowed to talk with Biden’s transition teams. Some of Trump’s mistakes will be correctable. He is unlikely to get the troops out of Germany in an irreversible fashion. But once the troops are out of Iraq, it will be hard to get them back in.
You don’t have to think the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, or Somalia, were good ideas to appreciate that ending them abruptly on a timetable determined by American politics is a bad idea. Each will require careful diplomatic preparation to ensure that US interests are preserved as much as can be reasonably expected. Premature withdrawal just isn’t good any better for foreign policy than it is for birth control.
PS: For more on the mendacity of the troop withdrawal announcement, list to this from NPR:
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Stevenson’s army, November 17
NYT says Trump sought military options against Iran in a meeting last Thursday. His advisors counseled against the idea, but we’ll see. [Last summer I argued , citing US history, that Trump would not “wag the dog” by launching a major military operation before the election. Now, who knows? Even conservatives are warning about the inexperience of new appointees.]
Everybody says Trump will speed up US troop reductions from Afghanistan, Iraq & Somalia, so the administration must be giving briefings. NYT has the most comprehensive story.
WaPo also has details.
There are also dueling China stories. WaPo says Biden will likely follow many of Trump’s policies. Axios has administration officials bragging at how much they’ve done, calling it irreversible.
A former official warns of cuts in defense attache postings.
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. 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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It’s getting serious, even if it isn’t
President Trump’s refusal to begin the transition to President-elect Biden was at first an annoyance with relatively little practical impact. Now, however, it is blocking serious planning for distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, making intelligence briefings for Biden and his team impossible, and casting doubt on US troop commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Trump is, as usual, prioritizing his personal interests in maintaining control of the Republican Party and raising money under the guise of contesting a stolen election. He knows he has lost but won’t give up until someone either chucks him out or he gets something in return. It is up to Republicans in Congress to chuck him out, at least until December 14 when the Electoral College meets and confirms Biden’s election. I can’t think of anything anyone respectable would want to give him in exchange for allowing the transition planning to start, but no doubt he would like some guarantees from Biden not to pursue judicial investigations.
The claims about a stolen election are demonstrating once again how far from reality so many of Trump’s supporters have wandered. There weren’t many at his “million” MAGA march last weekend in DC, perhaps 5,000 but certainly not 10,000. Describing downtown DC as flooded with demonstrators, as NPR did, was ludicrous. Downtown DC requires at least ten times that number to be even remotely described as flooded. Last weekend wasn’t much more than a sprinkle.
But out in the country there are still lots of people–70% of Republicans–who believe there were serious election irregularities, despite the fact that no one has found any. Aware of the likelihood such charges would arouse, state election officials appear to have run the cleanest, most correct elections ever, despite the onslaught of early voting and mailed-in ballots. I hope that the recounts and certifications to come will convince some people, but there is little sign of openness among the Republican base to the notion that Trump lost. Period.
He lost big in the popular vote–by more than 5 million–but that doesn’t really count. The Electoral College looks to be divided precisely as it was in 2016 (306/232), a margin Trump has always described as a landslide. I would say decisive, not a landslide. People are still trying to figure out just what happened, but it appears Trump lost support in the suburbs. I guess they weren’t so interested in his saving them from lower-income people, partly because lots of lower-income people already live there.
Biden now faces the prospect of trying to govern without a full transition period, with a narrowed majority in the House, and with a Republican majority in the Senate, unless the Democrats manage to pull of the unlikely feat of winning the two run-off contests in Georgia January 5. But he faces that prospect with an unusually wide and deep talent pool, many with fairly recent experience in governing and four years in the wilderness to think about how to do it better. So the President-elect may be handicapped, but when you are choosing your Secretary of State from among Susan Rice, Bill Burns, Tony Blinken, Chris Murphy, and some other political stars you are still well off.
Trump may of course still have some tricks up his sleeve, though so far his lawyers have lost two dozen election-related cases in court and won just one that will not affect the election outcome. The only virtue of the agony he is putting the nation through is the possibility it will convert a few of his cultists to reality-based politics. But there is no sign of that yet. The lack of transition is getting serious, even if the people who are causing it are not.
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