Robert Gates, who has served under eight Presidents and been Defense Secretary under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, is a strange guy. He has gored many of his Presidential employers with nasty reviews, and most recently added Hillary Clinton to the hit list in a serious way, by calling her out as the driving force behind the Libya debacle. Combined with Gates’ role as co-architect not only of the disastrous foreign policy of the Bush years but its lingering continuance and bleeding into Syria and Libya under Obama, one might imagine that this bleak track record would diminish his reputation as an advisor.
Ah, clearly one is unfamiliar with the ways of the Beltway. “He’ll be remembered for making us aware of the danger of over-reliance on military intervention as an instrument of American foreign policy,” gurgled former Senator David L. Boren, and a Washington Post book review opined that Gates is “widely considered the best defense secretary of the post-World War II era.” Corporate America has declined to join the chorus, it seems: since leaving the Obama Administration, Gates became President of the Boy Scouts of America. The task of transforming the Boy Scouts into the newly LGBTQ-friendly Girls-Identifying-As-Boy Scouts is a daunting one, but at least the new job has gotten him out of foreign policy.
Unfortunately not all the way. Gates took a moment from his awarding of Beaver Badges to write a piece for the Wall Street Journal comparing Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump from a foreign policy viewpoint. He did so with evident disdain: both are barbarians, from Gates’ lofty professional’s perspective, though only Trump really smells. Looking down his nose, he details Hillary’s record of foreign policy incompetence, dismal as his own, but then, inevitably, saves the serious evisceration for Trump. Not for Trump’s actual record, mind you — Trump has none, after all, by contrast with Gates and his associate Mrs. Clinton — but with the usual stream of personal insult. Trump is “willfully ignorant,” he “disdains expertise and experience,” “He has no clue,” he is “a man who believes he, and he alone, has all the answers and has no need to listen to anyone.” He is “thin-skinned, temperamental, shoot-from-the-hip and lip, uninformed… ”
To be sure, this deft and detailed analysis of Trump’s policy papers is compelling; but the views of the former Secretary would have more heft had it not come in the wake of “88 retired U.S. generals and admirals, including four 4-star and fourteen 3-star flag officers” signing an open letter endorsing Trump for president. Not to mention the Military Times reporting that military personnel across the board support Trump over Clinton by a more than two to one margin.
Mind you, I don’t mean to fault Mr. Gates’ piece with, well, facts. I looked forward to his piece. Coverage of the 2016 election has been so void of balanced argumentation that I was positively seduced by my initial impression that Gates was not only planning to dispassionately go over at the pros and cons of one candidate and then the other, but was likely to share an equally balanced conclusion. Had he done so, conceding that Hillary had such and such specific pluses and minuses, while noting that Trump had a shade less pluses here and a dab more minuses there, I’d have applauded.
But of course the next to last paragraph lets Mrs. Clinton know that she can still get Gates’ vote if she gets her act together and provides “assurance,” by which I think Gates means Clinton should make some stentorian pronouncements to the masses which simply drip Presidential gravitas, and her track record be hanged. Trump? No hope there. No way. Unthinkable. “Mr. Trump is beyond repair,” concludes Gates. “He is unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief.” No if, ands, buts, or qualifications. Are we surprised? Will we be if the 88 Generals and Admirals cited above get equal time to express their contrary views? I certainly will be.
Yet Gate’s critique isn’t pure vituperation. The core of his argument, such as it is, is that Trump is not merely incompetent, but incapable of listening to the competent — to architects of disaster like himself, one assumes.
Is this so? One may point out that creating a billion-dollar business empire spanning spanning over 500 corporate entities and the globe argues an ability to delegate and to spot competent talent. And while business is not government, in the course of Trump’s campaign, he’s selected Mike Pence to general approval, and has shown himself ready to discard and replace advisors from Corey Lewandowski to Paul Manafort to Stephen Bannon, adjusting as needed and doing so (judging by the polls) with apparent success. How has Clinton handled things? When a Debbie Wasserman Schultz is forced to resign for corrupt manipulation of the primary process, Hillary immediately re-hires her as Campaign Chair… as the campaign slowly tanks.
But it’s on the subject of Russia that Gates’ comments border on the genuinely irresponsible. “Mr. Putin will continue to behave aggressively until confronted and stopped,” states Gates. “No one in the West wants a return to the Cold War, so the challenge is to confront and stop Mr. Putin’s aggressions while pursuing cooperation on international challenges that can only be addressed successfully if Russia is at the table—from terrorism to climate change, from the Syrian conflict to nuclear nonproliferation and arms control. Again, neither Mrs. Clinton nor Mr. Trump has expressed any views on how they would deal with Mr. Putin (although Mr. Trump’s expressions of admiration for the man and his authoritarian regime are naive and irresponsible).”
Now one might suggest that such mutual expressions of admiration are precisely the way to bring Russia to the table, and that Trump is showing considerable Presidential acumen already by preparing the way even before assuming office. But when Gates says with a straight face that Mrs. Clinton hasn’t expressed any views on how to deal with Russia is, he’s flatly distorting the truth.
Clinton’s outright hostility to Putin is a matter of record. Her rhetorical assault has stretched from quirky attempts to associate Putin with the white nationalist movement to blaming him for feeding DNC email to Wikileaks to accusing him of manipulating American voting machines on behalf of Trump. It is the sort of thing that would get Trump accusing of conspiracy-theory-mongering if not outright pathology.
Yet Gates gives Mrs. Clinton a free pass on this score, completely ignoring her explicit — and chilling — statements. Addressing supposedly Kremlin-inspired hacking of the DNC, Clinton stated, “As President, I will make it clear that the United States will treat cyberattacks just like any other attack. We will be ready with serious political, economic, and military responses… We need a military that is ready and agile so it can meet the full range of threats and operate on short notice across every domain – not just land, sea, air and space but also cyberspace.”
Do we really need to make a “military response” to a nation with military forces comparable and in some respects arguably superior to our own? A nation that has 1,790 nuclear missiles on active alert? Over email? All because Russian hackers, who may not be involved at all (according to Julian Assange), whom we have no evidence are connected to Putin, have accessed the private servers of an independent political party? Is it responsible even to suggest a military response? Might the whole mess not have been avoided if Mrs. Clinton and the RNC had been responsible enough to secure the servers in the first place? If this is the fruit of Clinton’s experience, what sort of bitter future experiences should we expect?
This isn’t the first time Gates has seriously distorted matters involving Russia. Notes Wikipedia,
As deputy director and director of America’s leading intelligence agency for many years, Gates and his CIA staff have been faulted for failing to accurately gauge the decline and disintegration of the Soviet Union. More particularly, Gates has been criticized for allegedly concocting evidence to show that the Soviet Union was stronger than it actually was. George Shultz said that, while Secretary of State, he felt the CIA under Gates was trying to “manipulate” him, that the agency was “a big powerful machine not under good control. I distrust what comes out of it.” Schultz also told Gates at the time that his CIA was “usually wrong” about Moscow, having dismissed Gorbachev’s policies as “just another Soviet attempt to deceive us.” In 1991, Stansfield Turner, former Director of Central Intelligence, described the “enormity of this failure to forecast the magnitude of the Soviet crisis. … I never heard a suggestion from the CIA … that numerous Soviets recognized a growing systemic economic problem.” Turner said this failure was a consequence of deliberate distortion by those in the upper echelon of the CIA who were helping to sell the Reagan administration’s defense buildup, a view backed by former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman at Gates’ 1991 confirmation hearings: “[William] Casey seized on every opportunity to exaggerate the Soviet threat … [while] Gates’ role in this activity was to corrupt the process and the ethics of intelligence.” Reviewing the third installment of Gates’ memoirs in 2016, Goodman said, “In my 24 years at the CIA, there was never the kind of toxic atmosphere that existed when Gates served as deputy director for intelligence, deputy director of CIA, and finally director of CIA.”
The simple fact of the case is that Trump has no foreign policy record, and Hillary has a disastrous one. We don’t know how Trump will do. We do know what Hillary has done, and not only is it bad, but through sheer carelessness she’s left an email trail of the details for every blogger and every enemy America has to probe. Is she more qualified? Certainly. Jimmy Carter, a sitting President, was far more qualified than Ronald Reagan, star of Bedtime For Bonzo, who took office with as little experience as Trump. Carter’s foreign policy record was bleak. Reagan’s led to the end of the Cold War.
True, all things considered, a track record of experience is better than a track record lacking experience. But not when the track record is one of repeated failure. The WSJ, which published Gates’ piece, also published a rather concise summary of Hillary’s foreign policy experience, or perhaps I should say “misadventures,” that are well worth a review. (Should one imagine the WSJ is coming at Mrs. Clinton from too conservative an angle, Counterpunch, “The Fearless Voice Of The American Left Since 1993,” has an equally grisly assessment,
Left or right, the picture painted isn’t encouraging.
The problem with Hillary Clinton is that, as a candidate and as a political leader, she hits too hard. Muammar Qaddafi posed no serious threat to the United States; there was no reason to murder the man. It wasn’t necessary for the DNC to rig the primaries against Bernie; Hillary could have won the nomination fairly. There’s no need to threaten Russia with military action because DNC emails went public. Where is the hard evidence? First find some, please. For all her cold exterior and reputation as a consummate political calculator, time and again her actions give the impression of someone ready, nay, eager to smash up the house. Trump gives the same impression verbally, but his business game tells a story of exceptionally careful moves, and his stated policies — isolationist, ingathering and delimited — do the same.
The current election is a Pascal’s wager: possible success with Trump, or continuing disaster with Hillary. Gamblers prefer possible win to a fairly certain loss, and an election is nothing if not a gamble, hence I believe the electorate will support Trump — as the military apparently already do, by more than two to one. Will we see Putin come to the table at that point? I expect we will. I expect we will not see Robert Gates at the table, and that will be a positive thing too.