All presidents are entitled to assemble the team they believe best fits their administration. Having been elected to the job by the people, the commander in chief comes into office with a set of domestic and national security priorities he or she hopes to accomplish by the time the term is over.
By contrast, the men and women fortunate enough to serve as cabinet members or advisers are merely appointed. The modus vivendi is quite simple to understand — the president works for the people, and the staffers work for the president.
There have been many times in U.S. history when a staffer strongly disagreed with a president’s policy and could no longer in good conscience discharge the duties of the office. Think of Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and counter-Islamic State envoy Brett McGurk, both of whom resigned in 2018 in opposition to President Trump’s Syria withdrawal announcement.
One can agree or disagree with the position Mattis and McGurk took on the policy, but both men did the honorable thing by leaving the administration rather than trying to bend the policy to their will.
Now, compare Mattis and McGurk’s behavior with that of Jim Jeffrey, a decadeslong career diplomat who apparently believed it was perfectly logical and appropriate to deceive the president and the country outright about U.S. military troop strength in Syria.
Jeffrey, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Iraq, is one of the more hawkish advisers on the Trump administration’s foreign policy team. Where Trump looks at Syria and sees “sand and death,” Jeffrey sees an opportunity to contain Russian and Iranian influence in the country, a stupendously stupid objective given the close ties both nations have developed with the Assad government over the last 40 years.
In Jeffrey’s mind, a U.S. troop presence in Syria was as much about blocking Iran’s reach and cutting off its supply lines as it was about destroying ISIS’s territorial caliphate. The name of the game was perpetual stalemate. If the United States couldn’t achieve much in Syria, then at least Tehran wouldn’t be able to, either. “Stalemate and blocking advances and containing is not a bad thing,” Jeffrey told Defense One last week in what was billed as his exit interview. “That’s what powerful countries — France, Britain, the United States — failed to do in the 1930s.”
Leaving aside the patently absurd description of Iran as a modern-day Nazi Germany or imperial Japan, Jeffrey’s remarks are almost proudly (and callously) defiant of the chain of command. He admitted that the president was being deliberately kept from an accurate U.S. troop count in Syria, perhaps because they were intimately aware that Trump would have responded negatively to the real number. Why give the president the truth on the most basic information available to any policymaker when you can instead fudge it in pursuit of your own agenda?
This, of course, is a rhetorical question. It goes without saying that playing shell games with U.S. troop numbers in any war zone is a serious offense, and a fireable one at that. It also happens to be extremely disrespectful to the people and their elected members of Congress, who are entitled to this information. More than that, it is an infringement on how the U.S. system of government is supposed to function. The big decisions about when and where the U.S. military fights are at the sole discretion of officials who are actually elected to the job. Jeffrey, however, wasn’t elected to anything.
The career ambassador should count his lucky stars that he’s retiring rather than being escorted out of the building for dishonesty.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
