Former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice’s New York Times article is both mad, because it is so divorced from foreign policy reality, and maddening, because many of its criticisms against President Trump would fit President Barack Obama far better.
Rice writes that the GOP has “largely abdicated its responsibilities” to ensure that Trump keeps America safe. The implication: Republicans are sort-of traitors. Yet, Rice’s ire is saved most particularly for Trump’s base, or what she describes as the “voters in every state who applaud Mr. Trump’s efforts to rid the country of brown and black people.” Rice offers no evidence that Trump voters want an ethnic cleansing of their fellow citizens. And Trump doesn’t seem to have a very good strategy for his evil plan: His economy is producing record opportunity for minorities.
Beyond that gratuitous smear, Rice’s foreign policy arguments are similarly ludicrous. She attacks Trump’s support for Israel but includes not one word for his constraint of revolutionary Iran. Rice decries Trump’s Venezuela policy, but only, it seems, because that policy involves sanctioning Cuba.
Helpfully, however, Rice reminds us of the Obama glory days of American leadership. Rather than trying to address the root cause of Venezuelan suffering, Nicolás Maduro, Rice suggests that “The U.S. should grant [Venezuelans in the U.S.] temporary protected status, allowing them to remain here safely until conditions improve in Venezuela.” No explanation of how we will see “conditions improve.”
But on Venezuela, Rice doubles down on Obama’s greatest foreign policy failing: his overtly broadcast weakness. Whatever you think of using force to remove Maduro (I think it would be a mistake outside of very specific circumstances), Rice must know she is lying when she says “there is no practical military option for deposing Mr. Maduro. Bombing Caracas would kill countless innocents and a ground invasion would meet determined resistance from the Venezuelan military.”
She must know, because she was the national security adviser and will have been briefed on military plans that say just the opposite.
More amusing is Rice’s derision of Trump for presenting “the bogus threat of Venezuelan-style socialism invading America through the Democratic Party.” Rice must have missed the 2020 Democratic memo. The party’s presidential candidates are lining up to demand a government takeover over healthcare, the annihilation of our energy sector, the destruction of our most successful companies, and unconstitutional gun confiscation — or, put another way, socialism. One of the leading candidates has openly described himself as a socialist for years, and just a few years ago held up Venezuela’s regime as a better example of the “American Dream” than the U.S.
Still, it is Rice’s contention of Trump’s motivation that is her most ridiculous. The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations claims that Trump’s foreign policy is only shaped by “what would help him get re-elected. Our previous commanders-in-chief,” she asserts “conducted policy to advance their vision of the national interest.”
Oh, really? So, what vision of national interest did Obama have when he pretended al Qaeda was no longer a threat? When he called ISIS the “jayvee team?” Or when he abandoned our French allies and U.S. credibility in face of Assad’s nerve agent attacks? Or when he appeased Putin after the KGB man destroyed a passenger airliner and damaged our democracy? Or when he allowed China to steal U.S. intellectual property and a vast sea in return for a personal pledge to maybe do something about climate change starting in 2030?
On that point, it’s also worth noting that Rice mentions China just once and only in passing. That omission encapsulates the foreign policy that Rice proffered: arrogant delusion matched to overt weakness.
