Flattery works in Trump's foreign policy
By Susan B. Glasser
February 22, 2019
When the commander of U.S. forces in Europe, General Curtis Scaparrotti, met privately with members of Congress at the Munich Security Conference, last weekend, Senator Lindsey Graham finished the meeting with a blunt question. Graham asked Scaparrotti what impact President Trump’s order to withdraw all U.S. forces from Syria by April would have on America’s allies there. A participant in the meeting told me, “Lindsey asked him, ‘Is it fair to say if this is carried out to the end, we will not have any allies? Would it be fair to say it would lead to a disaster?’ ” The answer was equally blunt: “ ‘Yes, sir.’ ” After I expressed surprise at the stark reply from a uniformed commander, the participant reminded me that military officials are obliged to advise members of Congress appropriately, under a provision in the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. “Lindsey said, ‘Would it be fair to say this would be a disaster?’ Not a problem, but a disaster. Answer: ‘Yes, sir.’ ”
The striking exchange, not previously disclosed, between one of America’s most senior military officers and one of the Republican Party’s most senior political figures, captured the growing alarm among members of the G.O.P. establishment and leading national-security officials about key aspects of Trump’s foreign policy. Their shared assessment of impending disaster was all the more striking because it came during a congressional trip to Europe meant to reassure worried allies about Washington’s commitment to global leadership. It failed to do so. “Europeans are sick to death of this Administration,” another senior Republican, who has advised Trump in the past, told me. “They’re frustrated and pissed off” ...
If Graham was exasperated with Trump, however, it wasn’t evident in public the next day, when he appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” from Munich. On the show, Graham was once again the over-the-top Trump loyalist, the faithful Presidential golf partner who has reinvented himself in recent months as a high-profile public defender of a man he formerly called “the most flawed nominee in the history of the Republican Party.” In this particular appearance, Graham, in fact, presented himself as especially in synch with Trump. Commenting on the news, from the former acting F.B.I. chief Andrew McCabe, that some officials had worried so much about Trump’s fitness for office that they considered invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment to remove him, Graham told CBS’s Margaret Brennan that Trump was the victim of a contemplated “administrative coup” by the F.B.I. The senator vowed to investigate the President’s investigators from his perch as the new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Graham also supported Trump’s controversial declaration of a national emergency to get funding to build his wall at the southern border, despite objections, from many Republicans and Democrats, that it usurps Congress’s spending authority. Graham even concluded the interview with praise for Trump on Syria and pressed for some U.S. troops to remain, even though the closed-door meetings had made it clear that that was not the Pentagon’s current marching order. “Congratulations, Mr. President,” he said. “The job is not yet done, but we’ve done a hell of a job destroying the caliphate.”
Slavishly praising Trump in public, of course, is a signature tactic of his advisers and others who seek his favor. This week, though, Presidential flattery as a tool of foreign policy seemed particularly prominent. In Japan, a mini political uproar broke out when a newspaper reported that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had secretly nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, at Trump’s request. (Abe, who eagerly flew to New York for a Trump Tower session only days after the 2016 election, did not deny the reports.) Among Trump’s men in Munich, the performance of Vice-President Mike Pence, who has always been an especially avid practitioner of public boss-praising, stood out. He admiringly mentioned President Trump at least thirty times in his Saturday address to the conference (far more attention, tweeters quickly pointed out, than the vice-chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, who spoke later, gave to his boss). In a separate appearance meant to honor McCain, Pence paused for applause after he uttered his usual boilerplate line, “I bring greetings from the President of the United States.” Even in a room that included a couple dozen Republican members of Congress, Graham among them, no one clapped. Not surprisingly, the video of the moment, which the Pence and Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio described to me as “self-emasculating,” went viral on Twitter, a perfect metaphor at an annual forum that has, for decades, both celebrated and ratified America’s leadership in the West ...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/audience-of-one-why-flattery-works-in-trumps-foreign-policy
