Foreign policy may not be the top issue for most voters, but it is at the top of the presidential campaign agenda this week.
A new behind-the-scenes account of Donald Trump’s White House has raised serious questions about his past approach to the role of commander in chief, the latest criticism in a long series of warnings from former generals who served under Trump.
Trump, meanwhile, has sharpened his own criticism of the Biden administration — and Vice President Kamala Harris in particular — for its chaotic end to the U.S.’s decades-long war in Afghanistan, even though that plan was initially conceived during the Trump administration.
‘Competitive flattery’
The new account of Trump’s time as commander in chief comes from Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who served as Trump’s national security adviser. McMaster, unlike other generals who served under Trump, had previously avoided sharing direct criticism of his former boss after leaving the White House.
Peter Bergen, from CNN writes about McMaster’s new memoir, “At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House”:
“In his scathing and insightful account of his time in the Trump White House, McMaster describes the Oval Office meetings as “exercises in competitive flattery” during which Trump’s advisers would flatter the president by saying things like, “Your instincts are always right,” or, “Nobody has ever been so badly treated by the press.” Meanwhile, Trump would say “strange” things like, “Why don’t we bomb the drugs?” in Mexico or “Why don’t we wipe out the entire North Korean army during one of their parades?”
A Long Line of Generals Warning About Trump
Add this account to the well-documented warnings of other generals who have described their time inside the Trump White House, including retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, who was Trump’s chief of staff; retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, who served as Trump’s defense secretary; and Gen. Mark Milley, Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
And adding to the pile on Monday, more than 200 Republicans who previously worked for former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — former Senators John McCain or Mitt Romney signed a letter urging their party colleagues to support Harris for president.
Among those who signed the letter are former Bush chief of staff Jean Becker; former McCain chiefs of staff Mark Salter and Christopher Koch; and Olivia Troye, former homeland security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence.
But Trump points to a failure in the Biden administration in making the case for another term in the White House.
Afghanistan haunts Biden and Harris
The policy was not overtly mentioned at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia on Monday, as Trump marked the three-year anniversary of the deaths of 13 U.S. service members in Afghanistan, but those deaths are frequently cited on the campaign trail.
Family members of some of the dead service members appeared on stage at the Republican National Convention in July and condemned Biden.
Speaking to CNN On Monday from Fort Liberty, North Carolina, Paula Knauss Selph, the mother of Army Sgt. Ryan Christian Knauss, who was killed in the attack, delivered a strong criticism of Biden.
“This administration has tried to sweep this under the rug and that is absolutely not going to work for this nation,” she said, adding that Harris has “the same responsibility as President Biden.”
The service members, along with more than 100 Afghans, died in a 2021 suicide bombing outside the abbey at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, at the end of two decades of direct American military involvement in Afghanistan.
The Taliban now controls Afghanistan.
The final withdrawal of U.S. troops was Biden’s decision, and it happened on his watch. Republicans, including Trump, have turned the chaotic and deadly withdrawal into a domestic political argument against Biden and, by extension, Harris, who took over from Biden to run against Trump in November.
At a stop in Virginia after his appearance at the cemetery, Trump said people “were killed, in the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, Afghanistan, because we had an incompetent president with incompetent people leading him, and every single one of those people should have been fired.”
Another purge
Speaking later at a National Guard conference in Detroit, Trump repeated his promise to purge the Pentagon of all senior military officials involved in the withdrawal.
Meanwhile, in a statement commemorating the 13 American deaths, Harris said: “I mourn and honor them.” She also praised Biden for making “the courageous and right decision to end America’s longest war.”
The truth is a little more complicated.
In fact, Trump promised to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan during his presidency. His administration initiated the final withdrawal by negotiating and signing an agreement with the Taliban in 2020 that stipulated the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.
After Trump lost the presidential election, he fired his then-defense secretary, Mark Esper, purged many top Pentagon officials and tried to further accelerate US withdrawals from both Afghanistan and Europe.
Biden reversed the troop drawdown in Europe but delayed Trump’s plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by just a few months, despite deteriorating conditions on the ground and rapid gains by the Taliban.
Promising to end wars
While Trump has criticized Harris and Biden for pulling out of Afghanistan, he has also promised to be the president who ends all wars.
At the National Guard conference, Trump said Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, want “endless wars.”
He also received an endorsement from Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who deployed to Iraq as a member of the Army National Guard and who ran for president as a Democrat in 2020. Gabbard, who is now a political independent, says she chose to support Trump because he has not started any new wars during his term — language that echoes a 2023 endorsement of the former president in The Wall Street Journal by Sen. J.D. Vance, who argued that Trump’s foreign policy was his crowning achievement.
Vance is now Trump’s running mate, and the choice signaled a shift by Republicans in general away from helping promote democracy in other countries.
There is no doubt that the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a failure. An official report from the State Department’s After Action Review identified problems in both the Biden and Trump administrations that contributed to it.
Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee have launched their own review, which will undoubtedly cast a harsher light on the Biden administration — though an investigator recently resigned from that effort, claiming that Republicans on the committee were unwilling to assign any blame to the U.S. military, including Milley.
This content was originally published in Analysis: diplomacy haunts Kamala Harris’ and Donald Trump’s campaigns on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
Bruce Belcher is a seasoned author with over 5 years of experience in world news. He writes for online news websites and provides in-depth analysis on the world stock market. Bruce is known for his insightful perspectives and commitment to keeping the public informed.
