The sudden resignation this week of Michael Flynn, who was appointed National Security Adviser by U.S. President Donald Trump, has come after a mere 24 days in office of the new administration and it has exposed, once again, the dark shadow of the Kremlin that has fallen over the White House.
Given the broader climate of policy stumbles, institutional resistance, and that never-ending stream of leaks undermining the reputation of Mr. Trump’s office, ‘Flynn-gate’ raises existential question for his term in office.
First, Moscow’s disconcerting influence on the business-minded administration of Mr. Trump can hardly be overstated, especially when last November’s bitter election came with sordid revelations about hackers with links to Russian intelligence services carrying out a veritable assault on the process by stealing emails from the servers of the Democratic National Committee and handing them over to anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.
Second, a series of backward steps in the span of three weeks suggest the President is clearly being poorly advised on the foreign policy and military fronts.
The first ever covert operation under President Trump, a strike by U.S. Navy SEALs against al-Qaeda in Yemen, was assessed as “botched” after resulting in the deaths of at least 23 Yemeni civilians, including an eight-year-old girl who was a U.S. citizen.
In Iran, years of protracted negotiations under the Obama White House that led to a ground-breaking agreement that tied Tehran’s hands and pushed the risk of nuclear weapons development by that country into the realm of implausibility have started fraying already.
The Iran test
It took only two weeks since Mr. Trump’s inauguration for the Iranians to test his administration with a ballistic missile launch and for Washington to respond with expansive sanctions.
While it is unsurprising that North Korea followed suit with provocative missile tests, Mr. Trump did show restraint in its aftermath, hopefully more due to strategic calculation rather than the distraction of playing golf with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
It is true that restraint may be the optimal strategy to deal with a nuclear-armed belligerent, but in this case it may actually reflect the lack of options for Mr. Trump to bring Pyongyang to heel given the lukewarm state of his relationship with China, North Korea’s only ally.
However, it is not only adversaries but allies and partners of the U.S. who may be worrying about what comes next.
Certainly India would be hit hard if rumours of an impending H-1B crackdown came true; Australia would be dismayed if Mr. Trump escalated matters after a reportedly jarring conversation with its Prime Minister and reneged on a deal to welcome refugees from that country to its shores; and the threat of sending in U.S. troops to Mexico to deal with the “bad hombres” there must have left Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto feeling very nervous indeed after his phone call with the U.S. President.
Judicial pushback
Discouraging though these rocky episodes in foreign policy may be, the judicial pushback that Mr. Trump faced for his crackdown on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, and of refugees from all countries, is bound to sting him the most.
While he will probably continue dismissing as “paid protesters” the millions of liberal Americans fighting this and other policies aimed at uprooting the paradigm built up by President Barack Obama for the past eight years, Mr. Trump may find it impossible to simply wish away the cracks in his agenda that are slowly widening under the enormous pressure of multiple crises.
