SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ M2 A
not only from Democrats but also
from some Republican lawmakers
who ordinarily defend the presi-
dent’s a ctions.
“I think it’s not a good thing to
have the appearance — you know,
in the law, t here’s a canon that says,
‘Avoid the appearance of impropri-
ety,’ ” said Rep. Francis Rooney
(R-Fla.). “I think that would be
better if he would not use his hotel
for this kind of stuff.”
Doral has been struggling in re-
cent years. The property s aw i ts net
operating income decline 69 per-
cent from 2 015 to 2017, according to
documents the Trump Organiza-
tion filed with Miami-Dade County.
Hosting the G-7 summit would
have been a major boon for the
company, filling the hotel in June,
a month when the resort is typical-
ly less than 40 percent full. Tour-
ism in South Florida generally is
not as high i n the summer as it is in
the winter, in part because of the
region’s h eat and humidity.
The White House had said
Trump’s resort would only present
an “at cost” c harge for the summit,
but never spelled out what that
cost would be. The questions were
still unanswered Saturday, when
Trump pulled the plug.
The White House had said that
11 other sites were examined as
possible locations but never gave
details about them. In his tweet,
Trump seemed to indicate he
might hold a summit at a site that
wasn’t on that list: Camp David,
the famous presidential retreat in
rural Maryland. President Barack
Obama held the G-7 meeting there
in 2012, the last time the leaders
gathered in the United States.
Trump’s s uggestion of Camp Da-
vid was especially o dd considering
Mulvaney dismissed the site at his
Thursday news briefing as a poor
summit location.
“I understand the folks who par-
ticipated in it hated it and thought
it was a miserable place to have the
G-7,” Mulvaney told reporters. “It
was way too small. It was way too
remote. My understanding is this
media didn’t like it because you
had to drive an hour o n a bus to get
there either way.”
[email protected]
[email protected]Mike DeBonis contributed to this
report.For months, Trump had touted
Doral as an ideal venue to host
visiting dignitaries, and acting
White House chief of staff Mick
Mulvaney made the choice official
at a news conference Thursday.
But in a rare reversal in the face
of public pressure for a president
who prides himself in rarely fold-
ing or admitting failure, Trump
said Saturday that he and his ad-
ministration would search for a
new location. He attributed the
concession to “Irrational Hostility”
from Democrats as well as the me-
dia, although the revolt among
some Republicans may well have
been the trigger.
In a trio of tweets late Saturday,
Trump wrote, “I thought I was
doing something very good for our
Country by using Trump National
Doral, in Miami, for hosting the
G-7 Leaders. It is big, grand, on
hundreds of acres, next to MIAMI
INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, has
tremendous ballrooms & meeting
rooms, and each delegation would
have... its own 50 to 70 unit
building. Would set up better than
other alternatives. I announced
that I would be willing to do it at
NO PROFIT or, if legally permissi-
ble, at Z ERO COST to the USA. But,
as usual, the Hostile Media & their
Democrat Partners went C RAZY!”
The president added: “There-
fore, based on both M edia & Demo-
crat C razed a nd Irrational Hostility,
we will no longer consider Trump
National Doral, Miami, as the Host
Site for the G-7 in 2020. We will
begin the search for another site,
including the possibility of Camp
David, immediately. Thank you!”
On Thursday, Mulvaney trum-
peted Doral as the best property i n
the country to host a gathering of
this nature. He said that after the
president first recommended that
the resort near Miami be consid-
ered, an advance team from the
White House scouted it along with
other sites.
“I was aware of the political, sort
of, criticism that we’d come under
for doing it at D oral, which is why I
was so surprised when the advance
team called back and said that this
is the perfect physical location to
do this,” Mulvaney told reporters.
Mulvaney’s announcement
sparked immediate criticism —
DORAL FROM A
BY MISSY RYANA cascade of criticism by cur-
rent and former military officials
of President Trump’s abrupt
withdrawal from Syria has thrust
into plain sight internal debates
over the military’s role in foreign
policy and whether uniformed
officials have a responsibility to
publicly appraise decisions af-
fecting American security.
Retired Gen. Joseph Votel,
who stepped down this year as
head of U.S. Central Command,
and other former top officers
have issued sharp warnings in
the days since Trump ordered a
sudden exit of nearly all U.S.
forces in Syria, leaving Syrian
Kurdish forces that have been an
important U.S. partner against
the Islamic State exposed to an
offensive by Turkey’s better-
armed military.
The “abandonment threatens
to undo five years’ worth of
fighting against ISIS and will
severely damage American credi-
bility and reliability,” Votel and
co-author Elizabeth Dent wrote
in the Atlantic.
The hurried drawdown also
triggered an unusual wave of
commentary, m ostly anonymous,
by current and former Special
Operations troops who predicted
that the unceremonious rupture
of their p artnership with Kurdish
forces would spark a militant
resurgence.
Those serving in Syria, accord-
ing to one senior official with
knowledge of the mission there,
view a cease-fire deal trumpeted
by the White House on Thursday
as “a total capitulation” to Tur-
key. “They are livid,” said the
official, who spoke on the condi-
tion of anonymity to speak can-
didly.
The discontent is straining an
axiom that had long guided mili-
tary officials’ conduct, including
decisions about publicly weigh-
ing in: While elected lead-
ers “have a right to be wrong,” t he
military’s role is to execute or-
ders, said Peter Feaver, a scholar
on civil-military relations at
Duke University
“This comes close to a limiting
test of that principle,” Feaver
said.
The episode follows more
than two years in which many
Pentagon leaders have chafed at
Trump’s testing of institutionaland foreign p olicy norms, includ-
ing questioning alliances and
injecting partisan rhetoric into
military events. Again and again,
uniformed and civilian officials
have struggled to publicly recon-
cile Trump’s statements with
long-held national security
views.
The concerns have prompted
some former military officials to
set aside what some within the
ranks see as a code of military
silence, culminating last week in
an opinion piece calling for the
president’s replacement that was
written by retired Adm. William
McRaven, who headed U.S. Spe-
cial Operations Command.
The United States is not pow-
erful because of its military or
economic might, McRaven
wrote, but because its “ideals of
universal freedom and equality
have been backed up by our b elief
that we were champions of jus-
tice, the protectors of the less
fortunate.” The president, he im-
plied, has betrayed that.
The comments form part of a
history of retired and active duty
officers occasionally taking pub-
lic positions on policy matters or,
more rarely, diving into politics.
That record includes Gen. Doug-
las MacArthur’s public challeng-
ing of President Harry S. Truman
in 1951 and the “revolt of the
generals” in 2006 against then-
Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld.
More recently, retired Lt. Gen.
Michael Flynn campaigned for
Trump before the 2016 election
and briefly served as his national
security adviser the following
year. Retired Gen. John Allen,
meanwhile, campaigned for Hil-
lary Clinton.
But the commentaries fromthose such as McRaven and Votel
remain the exception rather than
the norm within the Pentagon,
potentially indicating both sup-
port within the ranks for many
aspects of Trump’s presidency,
which has restored robust fund-
ing to the Pentagon, and a belief
among many that a general’s role
is not to make policy calls.
Among those who have voiced
that view is Gen. Joseph F. Dun-
ford Jr., who retired this year
after serving as Trump’s chair-
man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Dunford, who was first appoint-
ed by President Barack Obama
and oversaw several divisive
moves under Trump such as the
redirection of military funds to
pay for Trump’s border wall,
often said his job was to execute
any orders that were legal and
fell within the ability of U.S.
forces to carry out.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Es-
per — who took charge at the
Pentagon this summer six
months after his predecessor,
Jim Mattis, a retired Marine
general, resigned over Trump’s
handling of military alliances —
has said he intends to keep the
Pentagon out of politics.
Esper has publicly supported
the White House’s Syria decision,
suggesting the administration
had no choice but to pull out
nearly all 1 ,000 t roops a fter Turk-
ish President Recep Ta yyip Erdo-
gan began preparing to attack
Kurdish forces in Syria.
Mattis has repeatedly cited the
code of silence as he has side-
stepped questions about the
president’s policies during a flur-
ry of public appearances promot-
ing a new book, prompting disap-
proval from critics who say he
should speak directly about his
former boss or remain quiet.
Mattis has chided other former
military officials, including
Flynn and Allen, for their politi-
cal activism.
The former general made
headlines again last week when
he joked about Trump during a
formal charity dinner. Some
commentators interpreted the
remarks as a sign Mattis was
adopting a more critical stance.
But his ribbing did not address
the president’s handling of secu-
rity affairs.
Loren DeJonge Schulman, a
former Pentagon and White
House official, said militaryviews, which tend to be given
special credence in today’s polar-
ized society, also had the poten-
tial to be used for political ends.
Or, she said, “what if the military
begins using its own political
power in a more organized fash-
ion that only represents particu-
lar factions?’
Scholars and officers agree
that in a properly functioning
system, uniformed leaders are
supposed to privately share their
advice with civilian leaders and,
if necessary, their objections
about a particular course of ac-
tion. But some say those norms
on which that process was built
are now being strained.
“ The best way for a democracy
to work is not for bureaucracies
to slow-roll and second-guess”
decisions made by elected lead-
ers, said Jason Dempsey, a for-
mer infantry officer who writes
about civil-military relations at
the Center for a New American
Security. But the system is
also predicated on “good faith
among all the actors operating
within known bureaucratic
boundaries,” Dempsey said.
Derek Chollet, an assistant de-
fense secretary under Obama,
said the push-and-pull felt with-
in the military community prob-
ably would intensify as what is
sure to be a divisive presidential
election approaches. “The mili-
tary, whether it likes it or not, is
going to get caught up in this in
ways that are going to be very
uncomfortable, for it and for us,”
he said.
The discomfort appeared to be
captured last week by a photo
tweeted by Trump showing him
in a standoff with House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) during a
meeting of senior administration
and congressional officials at the
White House. The president
sought to draw attention to what
he characterized as a “meltdown”
by Pelosi, but the photo also
shows Trump’s new chairman of
the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark A.
Milley, sitting to his right.
While most of the officials are
looking on at the Trump-Pelosi
exchange, Milley, who took on
the military’s highest-ranking
role less than a month ago, is
staring down at his hands, his
face tight.
[email protected]Greg Jaffe contributed to this report.Camp David is an option Syria withdrawal tests military’s ‘code of silence’
for G-7 now, Tr ump says
ANDREW HARNIK/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Retired Gen. Joseph Votel
issued a sharp warning after
President Trump ordered the
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