Horowitz: Wheels Are Off at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

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Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Rob Horowitz, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

People who truly believed or at least comforted themselves with the thought that while President Trump’s communications style was often off-putting and decidedly un-presidential, his actions were either mainly positive or at least not all that harmful, by now should be disabused of that mistaken formulation.

The president’s impulsive, uninformed and nakedly self-interested decision-making, now unbounded as the last adults have left the room, is beginning to have disastrous consequences. The wheels are off at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

President Trump’s decision, made on the fly in a phone call with President Erdogan of Turkey, to abandon our Kurdish allies and leave them to the predictable slaughter that is now ongoing, is not only shameful; it is counter to our national interest. The Kurdish forces took the brunt of the casualties in our successful joint fight to roll back ISIS and take back the territory it had occupied in Iraq and Syria. Kurdish forces now guard about 11,000 captured ISIS fighters, some of whom are already escaping as the Kurds turn all their attention to attempting to fend off the Turkish invasion and no longer promise to continue to serve as prison guards.  A reconstituted ISIS-- ready and able to launch terrorist attacks on the West-- is one of the likely outcomes of Trump’s decision.

Additionally, President Trump has sent a loud and clear message to “friends and foes alike” that the United States is not a reliable ally--that our word is worth little or nothing.  And he is doing all this for little gain in terms of troop withdrawal.  With only about 1,000 highly skilled troops, comprised heavily of special forces, working with the Kurds, the United States military’s operation in Syria was highly effective and manifestly serving our strategic objectives. The president’s varied defenses of this ill-advised decision serve to underscore its foolishness: priceless chestnuts, such as the Kurds didn’t fight with us on D-Day and that the ISIS fighters will just flee to Europe.

The president’s reckless decision to withhold nearly $400 million of military aid to Ukraine in order to use it as leverage to get President Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden sends the harmful message that American foreign policy is now unmoored from principle, it’s an unofficial arm of the re-election campaign.  President Trump ignored the advice of career professionals who know Ukraine, empowering Rudy Giuliani to run his own keystone cops’ operation in Ukraine, where he relied on corrupt former officials telling him what he wanted to hear  and employed a motley crew of associates, two of whom have just been arrested by Trump’s own Justice Department.  Whether these actions rise to the level of an impeachable offense can be debated, but that they are adverse to our national security and hurt our reputation around the world is evident to all but the most craven Trump defenders.

It was good to see so many Republican Senators speak out against President Trump’s decision to abandon the Kurds and there have been a few politically courageous ones willing to criticize the President’s actions in Ukraine. But given the danger of leaving this president to make foreign policy decisions based on his own instincts, more is required.  The Republican Senate may be the last possible guardrail against more disastrous Trump decisions.  While it is too late to undo the damage from Trump’s decision on the Kurds,  specific legislation that condemns the president’s actions may serve as a deterrent against future foolishness. 

 

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.

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