Wretched inheritance

The Biden administration must work assiduously to regain the trust of the American people and the international community. Trump went to the Central Intelligence Agency on his first full day in office, and made a fool of himself in front of the agency’s memorial wall. Biden could go to the Department of State (DoS) on his first full day to pronounce that the United States is coming back, which would provide encouragement to our diplomats and our friends in Europe and Asia. Moreover, the world’s authoritarian leaders must know that the free ride they have enjoyed from Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, and Steven Miller is over.

The DoS is a serious reclamation project. Secretaries of State Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo did their best to hollow out the department. As a result, for the first time in history, every assistant-secretary position is filled by an acting chief or a political appointee. When Donald Trump, who referred to the department as the “Department of Deep State,” called out the lack of loyalists at Foggy Bottom, Pompeo responded “When we identify them, we move them out of the way.” And when Pompeo complained to the president about the Inspector General’s investigation of the secretary’s malfeasance, Trump removed the inspector general from the department. The IGs at four other departments of the government, including the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, were similarly removed without cause, a violation of federal law. The congressional guardrails against such actions were trampled.

Trump and Pompeo have combined to leave U.S. foreign policy in shambles. The United States is on a mindless collision course with China, and lacks an effective policy for dealing with Russia. Moscow and Beijing have taken advantage of Washington’s ineptitude to forge their closest state-to-state relationship since the 1950s. Trump’s unrequited love affair with Kim Jong-un has ignored a revived North Korean nuclear weapons program that has produced a new intercontinental ballistic missile. Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran has angered our European allies and allowed Tehran to revive its nuclear industry. The transatlantic situation is in its worst shape since the end of World War II, and our West European allies would give Biden and an experienced foreign policy team a warm embrace.

Trump’s international legacy is a disaster. For the first time since the end of World War II, we’ve had a president without interest in or understanding of the importance of arms control and disarmament.

Excerpted: ‘Biden’s Wretched Inheritance’

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