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As deputy assistant to the president for national security strategy, Nadia Schadlow is on the cutting edge of Trump’s foreign policy agenda. As such, Dr. Schadlow, who previously was with the Smith Richardson Foundation, interacts with world leaders and diplomats, listening to their concerns and explaining Trump’s worldview.
As with the economy, Trump is changing the rules of the game in the world arena. And that has many offended, upset, or enraged, she says.
“Donald Trump challenges the traditional view of world order,” Schadlow says. “He was elected on a platform that put American sovereignty first. The concept of sovereignty upsets many in Washington. They interpret it as America alone. But sovereignty does not mean America alone.”
The United Nations is composed of sovereign states—defined territories with independent, centralized governments.
“Sovereignty is the foundation of democracy,” Schadlow says. “You can’t have democracy without sovereignty. Because then you end up in these amorphous global governance-type institutions that are often, over time, undemocratic. So I think it’s almost fun to challenge this prevailing viewpoint.”
America first means America forward.
“It’s thinking about how you protect American interests more effectively,” Schadlow says. “How you advance American values more effectively. It’s not about isolating ourselves. It’s about just being a more effective and confident advocate for the United States.”
While Trump wants to reassert America’s power, “He wants to cooperate, but to cooperate with reciprocity,” Schadlow notes. “If we’re going to help give you aid, we want you to come to the table with something as well. Even if you’re a poor developing country, come to the table with a commitment to reform, or to reduce corruption. That is reciprocity.”
The goal is to advance American influence. “The government should enable and not block prosperity or the growth of American businesses abroad,” Schadlow says.
Under Trump, the National Security Council staff has been cut in half to about two hundred. Instead of trying to micromanage agencies, Trump wants to “devolve authority back to the departments, which is consistent with his effort to decentralize government and cut regulations,” Schadlow says.
Thus, instead of approval from the NSC or the president himself, field commanders now have authority to initiate strikes. Under Obama, by the time approval was given, at least half the time the target had disappeared. At the same time, by withdrawing from Iraq and undermining combat efforts in Afghanistan by repeatedly announcing when U.S. troops would be withdrawn, Obama allowed ISIS to form and the Taliban to gain power.
Having written Dereliction of Duty, a book about the failures of leadership during the Vietnam War, U.S. Army lieutenant general H. R. McMaster had the perfect background to become Trump’s national security adviser. He replaced Michael Flynn, whom Trump had fired after he was not truthful about his conversation with the Russian ambassador.
Born in Philadelphia, McMaster graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1984, and later earned a PhD in American history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His PhD thesis was critical of American strategy and military leadership during the Vietnam War and served as the basis for his book.
In his book, McMaster cited historical evidence to show how military leaders failed their troops and their country by remaining silent during the escalation of the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia. But it was ultimately President Johnson who stubbornly pursued a course leading to defeat. In a June 11, 1964, memo to McGeorge Bundy, Johnson’s national security adviser, John McCone, the director of Central Intelligence, debunked the “domino theory,” Johnson’s rationale for prosecuting the war. “We do not believe that the loss of South Vietnam and Laos would be followed by the rapid, successive communization of the other states of the Far East,” McCone wrote.
In April 1965, McCone hand-carried a memo to Johnson. “I think we are…starting on a track which involves ground force operations [that will mean] an ever-increasing commitment of U.S. personnel without materially improving the chances of victory,” McCone wrote. “In effect, we will find ourselves mired in combat in the jungle in a military effort that we cannot win, and from which we will have difficulty extracting ourselves.”
As tens of thousands of Americans lost their lives fighting a fruitless war, Johnson ignored the CIA’s conclusions.
McMaster twirls his class ring from West Point on the ring finger of his left hand. He has big hands and wears a proportionately big watch and the big ring. He may wear a suit to meetings now instead of his three-star-general uniform, but he still sports the big ring, symbol of the military academy’s perpetual bond of “the long gray line.”
Like most generals you can think of, McMaster is not fooling anybody with the suit. His military bearing gives him away. His bald head fairly gleams with authority. As he speaks, he constantly looks around. His pale eyes, deep set under a determined ridge of brow line, scan the faces of his listeners. He’s an energetic speaker, his command of the facts instantaneous.
Under McMaster’s and Schadlow’s direction, the Trump administration rolled out a fifty-six-page national security strategy that upends Obama’s passive, lead-from-behind approach. Mandated by Congress, the document identifies China and Russia by name as “revisionist powers” that seek to dominate their regions and “challenge American power, influence, and interests.” It names Iran and North Korea as rogue states that “are determined to destabilize regions.” Finally, it spotlights “transnational” threats like jihadists and criminal syndicates that pose cyber and terror risks.
“Previous national security strategies you could say were aspirational in nature,” McMaster told me. “The president views the world as it is and recognizes that America has to compete. He is a competitor. He’s advocating for American security and interests and prosperity every day, and I think that’s an important overarching point.” In sum, Trump is “looking at the world as it is” and “has helped us regain our strategic confidence,” McMaster notes.
As one example of the more aggressive, far-reaching approach to protecting national security, Trump blocked a China-backed investor from buying Lattice Semiconductor, an American semiconductor maker, over national security concerns. The White House said the U.S. government relies on the company’s products, and the integrity of the semiconductor industry is vital.
Another big change is allowing commanders in the field to trigger strikes against the enemy rather than waiting for approval from the Pentagon and White House.
“Allowing the military to fight the way they need to fight, improving the agility of our armed forces and the speed of action, allow us to seize and retain the initiative over enemies—whether it’s ISIS in Syria and Iraq or the Taliban, ISIS, and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan,” McMaster says. That has contributed to the almost total defeat of ISIS and almost total removal of the ISIS caliphate from Iraq and Syria, McMaster says.
Contributing to the American success is the fact that Trump “ended that practice of announcing our plans and timelines,” McMaster says. “We are no longer going to announce our plans to the enemy. We no longer are going to adhere to artificial timelines.”
By demanding that North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members pay their agreed upon share of the organization’s costs and by cutting funding to the anti-Israel, anti-U.S. United Nations, Trump demonstrated that America would not be pushed around in the international arena. And Trump suspended security assistance to Pakistan over its failure to combat terrorist networks within its borders.
Nowhere is the contrast between Obama’s approach to foreign policy and Trump’s more evident than on Iran. Intent on achieving a nuclear deal with Iran even if its provisions would expire ten to fifteen years after it was signed in 2015 and even if the United States handed over to Iran a hundred billion dollars in assets that had been frozen by America, Obama remained mute during the 2009 Green Movement protests. If the protests had grown, they could conceivably have led to the overthrow of the regime, as happened with other protest movements in the Middle East. When similar protests broke out in Iran in January 2018, Trump spurred on the demonstrators, denouncing the regime as “brutal and corrupt.”
Contrary to Bannon’s claim that McMaster wanted to increase the number of troops in Afghanistan to fifty thousand or ninety thousand, McMaster, along with Defense Secretary James Mattis, recommended adding four thousand troops to the eighty-four hundred troops already there. He believed the influx would help the Afghan army stabilize a fast-deteriorating security situation.
Despite what McMaster brought to the table, Trump complained about him, as he did with almost everyone else in his orbit with the exception of Melania. Trump told other aides that McMaster was too regimented. He imitated McMaster saying “no, sir”; “yes, sir.”
Bannon recruited two businessmen—Erik D. Prince, a founder of the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, and Stephen A. Feinberg, cofounder of Cerberus Capital Management—who wanted to propose plans to substitute private military contractors for American troops in Afghanistan. Both men owned companies that supply contractors and potentially would have profited from such a policy.
“Afghanistan and the Afghan people are not worth one American kid’s life,” Bannon told me.
Aside from the fact that private paramilitary forces are also Americans, if the United States were to withdraw from Afghanistan, wouldn’t that lead to the creation of new terrorists, as happened when President Obama decided to withdraw from Iraq and ISIS took hold?
“Well, we’d have to go back and kill them,” Bannon replied. “But I’m not into American troops staying there a long time, long term.”
In keeping with his general aversion to American military entanglements, Trump had long opposed the war. As a private citizen, he repeatedly called on Obama to withdraw the troops.
“It is time to get out of Afghanistan,” Trump wrote on Twitter on February 27, 2012, when he was beginning to think about running for president. “We are building roads and schools for people that hate us. It is not in our national interests.” That summer, he ratcheted up his calls after a series of attacks by Afghan soldiers on American troops. “Why are we continuing to train these Afghans who then shoot our soldiers in the back?” he wrote on August 21, 2012. “Afghanistan is a complete waste. Time to come home!”
But once he became president, Trump created a national security team with long histories in Afghanistan. Mattis, his defense secretary, is a retired Marine Corps general who lost troops in fierce combat there early in the war. McMaster ran an anticorruption task force that worked with the Afghan government. Still, Trump’s top national security officials were taken aback at a meeting in the Situation Room when an angry Trump began ripping apart their latest proposal to send thousands of additional American troops to the country.
“We’re losing,” the president declared. He complained that the plan was vague and open-ended, with no definition of victory. “What does success look like?” he asked.
Trump never forgot mistakes the United States made in Iraq. He rightly criticized George W. Bush for mishandling the aftermath of the invasion. But when it came to the decision to invade Iraq, what Trump did not realize was that during seven months of secret debriefings before his execution, Saddam Hussein admitted to FBI agent George Piro that to impress Iran, he purposely created the impression that he had weapons of mass destruction. He would refuse to allow inspectors into his palaces, for example. And as reported in my book The Secrets of the FBI, Saddam admitted to Piro that he had planned on developing a nuclear weapon within a year when he expected U.N. sanctions to be lifted, in part because he was paying off U.N. inspectors.
An Arabic speaker, Piro found that Saddam had a fondness for baby wipes, the disposable moist cloths used when changing a baby’s diaper. If Saddam had enough baby wipes, he would use them to clean food like apples before he ate them. Piro realized that, as a way of manipulating him, he could control how many baby wipes Saddam received.
Ironically, while he disagreed with its policies, Saddam admired America, and he especially liked Americans. He disliked President Bush and his father but was not fixated on them. He liked President Clinton and thought Ronald Reagan was a good president.
When it was time to say good-bye before Saddam’s execution, Piro bought two Cuban Cohiba cigars, Saddam’s favorite brand, the FBI agent told me. They said good-bye in the traditional Arab manner: a handshake and then a kiss to the right cheek, a kiss to the left, and a kiss to the right again. Saddam appeared shaken and became teary-eyed.
Today Iraq is a democracy and no longer could be a nuclear threat under the control of a dictator who murdered three hundred thousand of his own people. In defending his decision to invade Iraq, for unknown reasons Bush never cited Saddam’s admission to the FBI that he had planned on developing a nuclear weapon within a year.
The day before the meeting on Afghanistan troop levels, Trump invited four soldiers who had served there to the White House for lunch. His exchanges with these enlisted men impressed upon him how deliberative he had to be about sending more soldiers into combat and confronting the prospects for turning around a war that had dragged on for some sixteen years.
Illustrating his ability to change course based on the advice he is given, Trump asked tough questions the next day. He finally announced a broader strategy for Afghanistan, one that would require 4,000 more American troops but place more conditions on the Afghan government. In the end, Trump accepted the logic that a big military approach was needed to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a launch pad for terrorism against the United States.
At a meeting of the National Security Council’s principals committee, Bannon clashed with General McMaster, who had taken the lead in developing the Afghanistan policy. Their relationship deteriorated as Bannon and others on the far right waged war within the White House and outside it against Trump’s national security adviser.
“It turned into an ugly campaign to smear McMaster’s character,” says Victoria Coates, a former national security adviser to Senator Ted Cruz who is special assistant to the president and senior director for international negotiations for the National Security Council. “This guy is an American hero. I don’t care what you think of General Mattis, General Kelly, or McMaster in terms of their policies. These are people whose lives have been spent in the service of the country.”
McMaster took it all with a sense of humor. Coates was moderating a roundtable discussion with McMaster when she had to cut it short.
“I’m sorry, General. I’m going to have to give you the hook,” she said. “This has to be the last question.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m sorry, guys,” McMaster said. “I got to go meet George Soros.” The room broke up.
When it came to North Korea, Trump and McMaster knew to be bogus the constant refrain of pundits that there are no good options for taking out the regime to stop its nuclear program. The pundits claimed that Kim Jong-un would obliterate South Korea if the United States took military action against North Korea. But the United States has an array of capabilities to neutralize the regime—from cyberwarfare to robots the size of insects.
The U.S. Air Force has developed missiles that zap electronics with high-power microwaves (HPM). That capability has been advancing secretly ever since the Air Force successfully tested a missile equipped with HPM in 2012.
The missile is called the Counter-Electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP). Built by Boeing’s Phantom Works for the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Boeing missile emits high-power microwaves (HPM) that disable computer chips. As a result, any electronic device targeted by the thirty-eight-million-dollar missile is rendered inoperable.
The test of the CHAMP missile took place in October 2012. The missile flew over a two-story building on the Utah Test and Firing Range and zapped the compound’s entire spectrum of electronic systems, including video cameras set up to film the test, without damaging anything else.
That is the beauty of the HPM missile. Its microwave beam can penetrate bunkers where facilities are hidden without harming the humans inside. Even if a bunker is buried in a mountain, HPM penetrates the facility through its connections to power cables, communication lines, and antennas. HPM can zap any underground military facility and fry its electronics. When targeted at command and control centers, the missile could render any country’s military inoperable. And one missile can hit multiple targets in succession. North Korea could attempt to shield its equipment, but U.S. officials doubt that would be effective against CHAMP.
Besides underground bunkers and command centers, HPM can disable fighter planes, tanks, ships, and missile systems. And it can wipe out facilities for developing and testing nuclear weapons.
Even more amazing, the missile renders inoperable any radar that might detect it as it flies to and from a target. Thus, a country cannot take out CHAMP before it strikes. Nor does an adversary have any way of knowing why its facilities have suddenly gone dead.
Until the announcement of the successful test, the project had been classified top secret. When it was announced, only a few trade publications picked up the story. Beyond a few mentions since then, the media have ignored the story. Instead, they have focused on how impossible it is to deal with the North Korea threat.
Unlike an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) created by detonating a nuclear weapon in the atmosphere, because it is targeted HPM leaves intact civilian facilities needed to sustain life. Unlike any other existing countermeasure like a cyberattack, CHAMP permanently destroys electronic equipment.
America’s national laboratories operated by the Department of Energy have been working on these capabilities for decades. Equally impressive, one of those laboratories, Sandia National Laboratories, has been developing robots the size of insects that could assassinate the North Korean leader with deadly toxins. These robotic weapons using nanotechnology employed in surgical operations in hospitals are being developed secretly with funding by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
To be sure, back in 1976, President Ford banned political assassinations with an executive order. But given the threats we face today, that order is obsolete. It was predicated on the assumption that other world leaders are rational and would refrain from attempting an assassination of the U.S. president unless the United States tried to assassinate them. But we are dealing today with terrorist organizations and world leaders like the North Korean dictator who are not rational and do not care if they are killed.
With the stroke of a pen, President Trump could reverse Ford’s executive order. Armed with robotlike weapons using nanotechnology, the CIA could wipe out Kim Jong-un without risking American lives.
While President Obama preached “strategic patience” in dealing with North Korea, Trump made it clear he would not stand by while the North Korean leader threatens the survival of America. As Trump constantly reminded the public, his predecessors should have taken care of the threat long ago. When handing over the reins of government to Trump, Obama told him that North Korea was the biggest challenge the new president would face. By that time, the threat was much greater than it had been under Bush.
Because of sequestration budget cuts, the CHAMP missiles did not become operational under the Obama administration. But after I emailed McMaster my op-ed about CHAMP, he thanked me for letting him know about the capability and ordered a briefing. As a result, the Pentagon is now funding the program. According to Mary Lou Robinson, the chief of the High Power Microwave Division of the Air Force Research Lab at Kirtland Air Force Base, the missiles will be operational and ready to take out any target by the time this book comes out.
Despite Trump’s false claim that “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory,” Trump is tough on maintaining surveillance capabilities. Trump pushed aggressively for permanent reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), including Section 702, which allows a federal court to approve and supervise the collection of information on foreign persons in foreign countries who happen to use American communications services and Internet technology. As one example of its effectiveness, intelligence collected under Section 702 helped prevent al-Qaeda’s Najibullah Zazi from conducting a suicide bombing in the New York City subway system in 2009.
Trump’s national security team launched a full-bore sales pitch to lawmakers and reporters about the value of the Section 702 surveillance powers. Top officials held an all-Senate briefing with lawmakers on the topic, following up on a field trip NSA had hosted for House members. Senior lawyers and intelligence officials from five national security agencies gathered to brief reporters on the privacy-enhancing tweaks the government has made to Section 702 surveillance efforts over the years.
The administration also pushed companies like Apple to enable the FBI with court orders to obtain access to encrypted mobile devices. The FBI confiscated the phone of the gunman who opened fire at a Texas church, killing twenty-six people and shooting crying babies at point-blank range. But the Bureau announced that it could not access the phone’s inner workings as part of the ongoing investigation.
FBI director Wray said the Bureau was unable to gain access to the content of 7,775 devices in fiscal 2017—more than half of all the smartphones it tried to crack in that time period—despite having a warrant from a judge.
Wray called it a major public safety issue. The consequences could be “deadly,” Attorney General Sessions noted.
For all the claims from the extreme left and the extreme right that the government is “spying on innocent Americans,” a breathless term used freely by the media and critics to imply improper intent, no one has been able to credibly cite a case of the government actually engaging in an abuse of surveillance powers. Instead, critics have pointed to the potential for abuse. In the same way, a police officer or FBI agent could potentially abuse his position by using his or her weapon unlawfully. Is that a reason to disarm all police officers and FBI agents?
The NSA surveillance program is layered with oversight conducted by Congress, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court, the Justice Department, and the NSA inspector general. If an abuse were to occur, the proper course would be to prosecute those responsible—not dismantle a program that provides the FBI with leads that have allowed the Bureau to keep us safe from a foreign terrorist attack since 9/11.
As if they had discovered another Watergate scandal, the same media critics who pounced on the intelligence community after 9/11 for failing to connect the dots are the ones exposing and denouncing as an invasion of privacy the program that connects those intelligence dots. Instead of demonizing those who are trying to make us safe, raising hypothetical concerns, and endlessly criticizing programs that work, critics in the media and Congress should be hailing the efforts of the intelligence community to prevent another attack.
At national holidays, we recognize the military for preserving our freedoms. Yet no one mentions the equally important efforts of FBI agents, CIA officers, and NSA employees who work around the clock, sometimes at risk to their lives, to detect and roll up plots.
That’s an American success story.