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Trump Has Made His Cabinet Pointless

Trump Has Made His Cabinet Pointless

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- In Washington, high-level government meetings now start with the National Security Advisor passing around printed copies of President Trump’s tweets, the better for cabinet officials to determine how to bring policy into line with the president’s views. Departmental heads and senior officials responsible for coordinating their activity don’t shape policy or influence the president: Their function appears limited to figuring out the direction in which Trump has veered and getting themselves into his slipstream.

If his cabinet struggles to keep up with the president’s frequent changes of direction, imagine how much harder it is for America’s friends to align common policies.

A demonstration of this played out at the recent Munich Security Conference, where differences between the U.S. and its European allies were overshadowed by what seems to be yet another Trump u-turn. 

The U.S. team took an uncompromising position on Huawei Technologies Co., and pressure the Europeans to exclude the Chinese company from their information-technology networks. This, despite the announcement of waivers for U.S. firms to keep doing business with Huawei.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned that “Huawei and other Chinese state-backed tech companies are Trojan horses for Chinese intelligence,” while Secretary of Defense Mark Esper suggested that Europeans who disregarded American warnings would “jeopardize our alliances.” Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany and acting Director of National Intelligence, weighed in for good measure, tweeting that Trump “just called me from [Air Force One] and instructed me to make clear that any nation who chooses to use an untrustworthy 5G vendor will jeopardise our ability to share intelligence and information at the highest level.” 

Yet within a day, the President had contradicted his cabinet, tweeting that the U.S. would not ban technology sales or let “the always used National Security excuse” prevent commerce with China. (Trump has used that “excuse” against Canada on steel imports and is threatening to use it against Germany on cars.)

Barely had the Europeans finished scratching their heads over the president’s new position when, Mick Mulvaney, his Chief of Staff and director of the Office of Management and Budget Director, tacked back to the previous policy, warning the UK that, if it went ahead with plans to include Huawei in the British 5G network, there would be “a direct and dramatic impact on our ability to share information with you. Period, end of story.”

The Trump administration seems to regard its unpredictability a negotiating asset, but the Europeans can be forgiven if they’re still not clear on what U.S. policy is—and suffering from whiplash. But this is just one example of the difficulty confronting U.S. allies. There are no guiding principles they can use to anticipate decisions emanating from The White House.

The message from Munich is that allies need not respond to demands from senior cabinet figures like the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, or National Security Advisor: the only person who represents the president is the president himself. The pattern was established early on: Pompeo persuaded Britain, France, and Germany to agree on modifications to the Iran nuclear agreement, but Trump abrogated it anyway; former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis had just persuaded allies in the anti-Islamic State fight to commit to remaining in Syria and Iraq for two more years when Trump decided to withdraw U.S. troops; Special Representative (and now also Deputy Secretary of State) Steve Biegun has been unable to make conditions established for North Korean denuclearization stick because the president prematurely declared, “we have peace.”  

The reason predictability is a virtue for a strong state is that it allows friends to make their efforts additive to our own. Countries that would not send troops to fight under other auspices or flags will join a U.S.-led effort, or will enforce commonly agreed sanctions, or work in unison to a common diplomatic purpose—if they support what we’re doing. But they resent being left on the battlefield, as France and other countries fighting with the U.S. against ISIS would have been if Trump’s abrupt and unexpected withdrawal had been implemented. And it makes those countries less likely to join a common effort the next time we want help. 

The President doesn’t have time to conduct the entirety of U.S. foreign and defense policy. If allies can’t rely on the policy guidance from the president’s cabinet, and he keeps changing direction in unexpected ways, our friends will be unable or unwilling to help.

Centralized systems like the one now operating in the White House are much more prone to single-point failure than an interagency process that vets potential decisions, mitigates negative consequences, maximizes benefits of opportunities, and effectively coordinates the means available. In the Trump administration, the President is policy. Nobody—and nothing—else matters.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Bobby Ghosh at aghosh73@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Kori Schake leads the foreign and defense policy team at the American Enterprise Institute.

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