Steve
Bannon's role in inner circle of Trump team raises fears of security
crisis
Donald
Trump’s chief strategist and ideologue will be party to all
discussions on the White House National Security Council unlike
military and intelligence chiefs
Julian Borger in
Washington and Spencer Ackerman in New York
Tuesday 31 January
2017 07.34 GMT
The formal inclusion
of Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s chief strategist and ideologue in
the small circle of top officials who decide US national security
policy, sparked alarm among former officials who described it as an
unprecedented politicisation of decisions that could mean the
difference between peace and war.
Bannon, a former
executive of the rightwing Breitbart news site, will be a permanent
fixture of the “principals committee” of the National Security
Council (NSC), the White House announced, but said that the director
of national intelligence and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff
would only attend if the “issues pertaining to their
responsibilities and expertise are to be discussed”.
“This is stone
cold crazy. After a week of crazy,” Susan Rice, the Obama
administration’s national security adviser, said in a tweet, asking
sarcastically: “Who needs military advice or intel to make policy
on ISIL, Syria, Afghanistan, DPRK [North Korea]?”
David Rothkopf,
author of a history of the NSC, said the turbulence of Trump’s
foreign policy, intricately connected to the deliberative processes
that led to it, was already creating a crisis with international
reverberations.
“We have an
escalation of chaos as a consequence of White House decision-making,
made without consultation with the federal bureaucracy, that has no
precedent in modern history and now has people taking to the streets
in numbers and ways that is evocative of the 1960s,” Rothkopf said.
“It is not an
overstatement to say we have a brewing crisis.”
Placing Bannon on
the NSC, with his lack of national security experience, was a
“radical” step, Rothkopf said, as the former Breitbart media
chairman had shown himself to hold “racist, misogynist and
Islamophobic” views. His seat on the NSC principals committee was
“essentially putting a thumb on the scale of deliberation in the
direction of that kind of thinking”.
Trump, Rothkopf
said, was building a security apparatus “with the wrong people at
the table and the wrong person at the head of the table” – Trump
himself.
Foreign governments,
seeing the diminished influence of the established pillars of
national security decision-making in the US, were likely to begin
dealing with Bannon and his cohort directly to secure their influence
with Trump, he continued.
The White House
spokesman, Sean Spicer, insisted that the composition of the National
Security Council’s principals committee under the Trump
administration was no different than it had been under Bush or Obama
and waved sheaves of paper to prove his point as television screens
showed highlighted text on either side of him.
He said the chairman
of the joint chiefs and the director of national intelligence were
welcome to attend, but did not have to if the issues under discussion
were not directly part of their brief.
The announcement of
Bannon’s national security role came at the end of the Trump
administration’s first week in office, during which Bannon was
increasingly seen as the most powerful figure in the White House
after the president himself, spurring on the issuance of a string of
executive orders culminating in the radical immigration ban on
travellers and refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries.
As more details
emerged about the chaotic launch of Trump’s flagship immigration
ban, it emerged the White House office of management and budget,
responsible for coordinating executive action with the rest of the
government, was told not to put the ban through the normal review
process with the justice, state, homeland security and defense
departments, so it was as surprised as everyone else about the
announcement.
The newly confirmed
homeland security secretary, John Kelly, was airborne when it took
effect on Friday and only discovered the president was signing the
order on Friday because an aide he was talking to by phone saw the
signature ceremony on television, according to the New York Times.
Although the defense
secretary, James Mattis, was standing at Trump’s shoulder at the
Pentagon when the order was signed, the defense department was also
not consulted on its contents beforehand.
Trump’s choice for
secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who is expected to be confirmed in
the Senate this week, was also not consulted, according to a source
he spoke to at the annual Alfalfa Club dinner in Washington, an event
which brings the country’s mega-rich together with top politicians.
Tillerson, as a former oil executive, is both.
Tillerson, who will
be America’s top diplomat, appeared unruffled by the executive
order and by a purge of top career officials at the state department,
the source said, but made it clear he had not been consulted on
either issue.
He will inherit a
department in turmoil, in the wake of the dismissals of top
administrative staff and a growing mutiny over the refugee ban among
diplomats, who were circulating a draft cable dissenting from the
executive order on Monday.
Steve Bannon: his
appointment to the NSC was ‘a radical departure from any National
Security Council in history’, according to Senator John McCain.
Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
The elevation of
Bannon, who ran a media organisation that offered itself as a
platform for the far right and promoted fake news during the
election, has alarmed European capitals as he is a fervent opponent
of the European Union. It has also provoked unease about how the new
administration will take decisions on intelligence and national
security issues, among former officials with experience of the way
the NSC functions at the heart of Washington.
“What is striking
about it is it is such an explicit rejection of the well-entrenched
principle that when it comes to matters of national security that
politics doesn’t have any place in the room,” said James
Steinberg, former deputy national security adviser in the Clinton
administration. “It is a flat rejection of what has been a shared
view of Republican and Democratic administrations.”
National security
professionals considered Bannon’s placement on the NSC an indicator
that the institutional disarray following Trump’s immigration halt
would be replicated in future policy decrees.
The leadership of
the influential Senate armed services committee appeared stunned and
appalled by the Trump White House elevating Bannon and diminishing
the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and the director of
national intelligence.
The Senate armed
services committee chairman, John McCain, who as recently as Thursday
lavished praise on Trump’s security team at a Republican retreat,
said Bannon’s appointment was “a radical departure from any
National Security Council in history”.
His Democratic
colleague, Jack Reed, called it “outrageous and potentially
dangerous” and said Trump was turning the NSC into “an entity
that is without a non-partisan military voice”.
With the senior,
non-partisan US military officer or the US intelligence chief absent
for critical deliberations, presidents are more likely to stumble
into unforced errors with significant global repercussions, said Kori
Schake, a defense analyst at the Hoover Institution who has advised
McCain and co-edited a book with the defense secretary, Mattis.
“Any president
should want their intel and military advisers in on the decisions for
the same reason you want a lawyer present: they keep you from making
mistakes,” Schake said.
“A president would
not, for example, want to find out after issuing an executive order
banning immigration from countries fighting alongside us that those
countries would reciprocally ban Americans, to great detriment for
the war effort.
“Evidently the
president’s political advisers lacked the judiciousness to see that
coming; the experience it takes to make it to the top of the
intelligence or military leadership would easily have been able to
call that in advance.”
Stephen Hadley,
national security adviser in the last Bush administration, argued
that the new administration’s guidelines for the new National
Security Council were “not very dissimilar from other orders that
other administrations have adopted”.
He said that George
W Bush had vetoed the participation of his own closest political
adviser to the NSC principals committee, but that the Obama
administration had not observed such a distinction between politics
and national security. “Karl Rove at one point wanted to
participate in the NSC meetings and I ran it by President Bush, who
said no. He did not want to suggest in any way that national security
decisions are made on domestic politics, which is something that I
respect,” Hadley told the Guardian.
“David Axelrod,
[who] was President Obama’s political person in the first term, I
am told attended a number of NSC meetings. This is something where
there is no rule written in stone. Presidents basically make the
decisions on who they want at their meetings. You can make a stronger
case for Bannon because he is not just political adviser ... So I can
see why the president would want him at the NSC meetings.”
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