Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice published an op-ed Sunday in the New York Times in which she declares that President Donald Trump “does more to undermine American national security than any foreign adversary.”
More dangerous than the Islamic terrorists who carried out the Benghazi attack, about which she lied to the world, blaming a YouTube video; more dangerous than the so-called “Islamic state,” which she let take root after her boss, President Barack Obama, called them the “J.V. team”; more dangerous than Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which took over Crimea on her watch; more dangerous than Iran, with which she and her boss concluded a failed nuclear deal.
Rice wrote that Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria — a conflict that the Obama administration allowed to drag on even after dictator Bashar al-Assad crossed Obama’s “red line” and gassed his own people — represented “[c]utting and running,” and she said that the departure of Secretary of Defense left the administration unstable (emphasis added):
The president couldn’t care less about facts, intelligence, military analysis or the national interest. He refuses to take seriously the views of his advisers, announces decisions on impulse and disregards the consequences of his actions. In abandoning the role of a responsible commander in chief, Mr. Trump today does more to undermine American national security than any foreign adversary. Yet no Republican in Congress is willing to do more than bleat or tweet concerns.
Against this backdrop, Mr. Mattis’s resignation is even more worrisome. Even though his record was mixed, he provided desperately needed reassurance to our allies, an unabashed if private counterweight to the president’s worse instincts, and experience and stature too great for Mr. Bolton to ignore. His departure will leave the administration all but devoid of wise, principled leadership and the guts to check a president who consistently places politics and self-interest above national security.
Ironically, President Obama was described by his own former defense secretary, Robert Gates, as making national security decisions with “a total focus on politics”; being erratic and disorganized; and abusing his advisers.
Last year, she admitted “unmasking” the names of members of President Trump’s transition team in surveillance reports after previously denying it. The “unmasked” name of Michael Flynn was illegally leaked to the media.
Read Susan Rice’s full op-ed here.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.