The Ed McMahon of American foreign policy
Trump’s National Security Yes Man Is In for a Bumpy Ride
America needed someone to check the president’s worst foreign-policy instincts. Instead, we got Robert O’Brien.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/opinion/robert-obrien-nsa.html?te=1&nl=david-leonhardt&emc=edit_ty_20190919?campaign_id=39&instance_id=12490&segment_id=17154&user_id=ca02b127fa17b8d676fde27e367a12bb®i_id=89651072
Setting aside the brief, disastrous tenure of Michael Flynn, two men have held the role of national security adviser under Donald Trump, and they could not be more different. H.R. McMaster was a pragmatic stickler who valued the customary interagency deliberations that shaped decision making at the National Security Council, and which President Trump found tedious and distracting.
The president let him go in favor of his diametric opposite, John Bolton, a notoriously hawkish and obstreperous ideologue who was happy to let the council’s customs wither — the better to speak his truth to the president directly. His ideological maneuvering eventually got him fired, though he lasted an improbable 17 months.
In Robert O’Brien, chosen Wednesday as Mr. Bolton’s replacement, the president seems to have found a compliant, behind-the-scenes worker bee better suited to Mr. Trump’s domineering temperament. His appointment may signal the death knell of any hope to check the president’s worst foreign-policy impulses.
Mr. O’Brien, who most recently served as the government’s chief hostage negotiator, wrote a book in 2016 titled “While America Slept: Restoring American Leadership to a World in Crisis.” In it, he lays out a hawkish worldview not all that dissimilar from Mr. Bolton’s. But he has also lavished praise on his boss, declaring that Mr. Trump’s muscular foreign policy had produced “unparalleled success” in freeing American hostages.
Not every national security adviser needs to shout; some of the most effective have been quiet masters at pulling bureaucratic levers. The problem is, Mr. O’Brien doesn’t seem like much of a lever puller — and in any case there are far fewer levers to pull. The National Security Council has atrophied under Mr. Trump, and especially during Mr. Bolton’s tenure.
Instead, Mr. O’Brien’s appointment is likely to mean that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will continue to be the president’s chief foreign policy adviser, a role he usurped from Mr. Bolton. Unfortunately, Secretary Pompeo has succeeded precisely because he seems to have few if any principles that he won’t suppress for the sake of holding and wielding executive power. The Ed McMahon of American foreign policy, he is smart enough to be in on the Trump joke, doesn’t care that it’s not funny and laughs anyway.
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