friday, february 21 , 2020. the washington post eZ re a21
FRIDAY Opinion
S
ecretary of State Mike Pompeo just
completed his first tour of Africa,
promising U.S. support and warning
against Chinese influence. Back in
Washington, Defense Secretary Mark
T. Esper is preparing to recommend a
drastic scale-back of the U.S. military pres-
ence there. The problem is, the United
States can’t successfully compete in Africa
and withdraw at t he same time.
Concern in Congress and around the
government has grown in recent months
about Esper’s review of U.S. troop levels
worldwide, which fits into President
Trump’s campaign promise to bring
U.S. troops home from abroad and save
money by doing it. In the U.S. command in
Africa, the first theater to be examined,
Esper is reportedly p lanning t o recommend
a sweeping drawdown that could include
ending U.S. military support for French
forces fighting terrorism in Mali and clos-
ing down a new drone base in Niger.
There are 800 to 1,000 U.S. forces pro-
viding airlift, refueling and intelligence
support to French ground troops fighting
terrorists all over the Sahel region, accord-
ing to Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.).
French President Emmanuel Macron met
with him on the sidelines of the Munich
Security Conference last weekend and
requested the Americans stay.
“He said, please tell [President Trump]
that we are committed to fighting terror-
ism, we’ll do the on-the-ground work, we
just need your airlift and your intelligence.
It makes us effective. Without your help,
we can’t be effective,” Graham told me.
“The president of France is asking us to
continue a support mission that has them
deployed five to one and k eeps terrorists at
bay. T hat’s a good deal.”
Graham and other senators raised this
issue with Esper in a separate Munich
meeting. Graham denied an NBC report
that he had told the defense secretary that
he would “make his life hell” if Esper or-
dered the d rawdown. Graham s upports the
review process but told Esper that cost-
s avings c an’t b e the o nly consideration.
The Trump administration has demand-
ed European allies increase burden-
s haring, and France has stepped up. The
cost for the United States is low. We’ve
suffered no casualties. Pulling the rug out
from under the French after they deployed
forces at o ur r equest undermines t he entire
narrative.
“If w e want allies to respond in a positive
way to those kinds of encouragements,
you’ve set a rotten precedent if once they’ve
done so, you bail out on them,” said
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who also
pressed Esper on the issue. “Plus, it’s the
right t hing to do,” h e told me.
Asked about this in public in Munich,
Esper praised the French for leading in the
Sahel but d idn’t reveal his thinking about
the future of the U.S. support mission.
“They’ve been reaching out aggressively to
get more European partners on board,
with mixed success, and I fully support
that effort,” he said.
There’s also concern Esper will recom-
mend drastic drawdowns of U.S. troops in
East Africa. The U.S. base in Djibouti hosts
about 4,000 U.S. and allied forces s upport-
ing counterterrorism missions against
a l-Shabab, counterpiracy efforts and sev-
eral other missions. China has a huge base
nearby.
The review is meant to shift resources to
Asia to fulfill the National Defense Strate-
gy’s c all for increased f ocus on great-power
competition with China. But that same
strategy also promises to bolster partner-
ships in Africa to “address significant ter-
rorist threats that threaten U.S. interests... and limit the malign influence of non-
African powers.”
Inside the administration, there’s con-
cern Esper’s Pentagon-centered process
has resulted in n on-military considerations
being given short shrift. U.S. diplomats, aid
workers and spies in Africa depend on the
security U.S. forces provide. An emergency
rescue task force established after the 2012
Benghazi attacks is b eing looked at f or c uts.
Officials who support the review cau-
tion it is not final and is only a first step.
They say it’s past time to examine the
rationale and efficiency of a U.S. troop
footprint in Africa that has grown steadily
in recent years, bringing massive support
costs along with it.
As for the French support mission, offi-
cials disagree over whether the terrorists it
targets have the capability and intent to
threaten the U.S. homeland. They also dis-
agree over whether we should end our
support if they don’t.
We may not have the right forces in the
right p laces doing the right things i n Africa.
Perhaps some training missions could be
moved w ithout harm. I t’s true U. S. troops i n
the Sinai aren’t doing what they were sent
there to do in 1982. Mission creep is a real
thing. It’s a debate worth having.
But everyone also knows how the presi-
dent wants the review to turn out.
L awmakers will surely challenge Esper on
whether political considerations are influ-
encing national security concerns when he
testifies b efore Congress next week.
Trump wants to save money and cam-
paign on bringing troops home from
abroad. But Africa is the wrong place to
start. Pompeo can promise commitment,
but the region is watching as we threaten
to pack up and leave. If we do, Beijing will
not be able to believe its luck.
[email protected]
Josh roginKeep
U.S. troops
in Africa
P
resident Trump has done a lot of
crazy, scary things since being
a cquitted by the Senate on Feb. 5 —
from protecting his friends in legal
trouble to punishing witnesses who testified
against him. But quite possibly the craziest
and scariest thing he has done is to appoint
Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell as
acting director of national i ntelligence.
The 2004 law that created the Office of
the Director of National Intelligence speci-
fies that it must be headed by someone with
“extensive national security expertise.” Pre-
vious occupants of the post had decades of
relevant experience in fields such as intelli-
gence, diplomacy and the military. T he least
experienced was Trump’s first appointee,
Daniel Coats, but even he had spent a
quarter-century in Congress, including
three years on the Senate Intelligence Com-
mittee, followed by nearly four years as
ambassador to Germany. Compared with
Grenell, though, Coats looks like the second
coming of Allen Dulles and “Wild Bill”
Donovan combined.
“Ric” Grenell has no intelligence back-
ground. He spent the George W. Bush ad-
ministration as the spokesman for the
U.S. Mission to the United Nations, where
he developed a terrible reputation among
reporters. The veteran Reuters correspon-
dent Irwin Arieff told HuffPost that Grenell
was “the most dishonest and deceptive
press person I ever worked with. He often
lied.” That is a big problem, given that the
job of the DNI is to tell the truth — including
uncomfortable truths that the president
would rather not hear.
After leaving the Bush administration,
Grenell became a public relations consul-
tant, Fox News talking head and Twitter
troll. In 2 012, he was hired and quickly fired
by Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign as
its foreign policy spokesman after his abu-
sive tweets came to light, many of which
denigrated women in highly personal
terms. (Another factor in Grenell’s d ismissal
was that he is openly gay, which offended
the Christian right.)
Grenell became a noxious pro-Trump
troll in 2015-2016. He claimed that a Gold
Star father criticized Trump to enrich him-
self, called the Democratic convention an
“anti-police” rally and suggested that a fe-
male journalist had slept her way into her
job. He badgered and harassed journalists
online (including me). He w as such a Trump
toady that he even acquired “Gold” level
status at the Trump International Hotel in
Washington.
This flackery led to Grenell’s appoint-
ment as ambassador to Germany — a post he
finally took up in 2018 after a Senate confir-
mation battle. He offended his hosts from
Day One, issuing a Twitter diktat that “Ger-
man companies doing business in Iran
should wind down operations immediately.”
Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German am-
bassador to Washington, told him “never
tell the host country what to do, if you want
to stay out of trouble.” But Grenell contin-
ued to offend by announcing his intention to
“empower” right-wing populists through-
out Europe. Grenell was widely seen as
spreading Trumpism in Europe rather than
representing the U.S. government. His big-
gest achievement was in his recent role as a
special envoy to Serbia and Kosovo — he got
those countries to reopen rail links.
Given Grenell’s lack of intelligence quali-
fications, it’s doubtful that even a
R epublican-controlled Senate would con-
firm him as DNI. But while Senate opposi-
tion dissuaded Trump from nominating
Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Te x.) last year after
Coats’s departure, it won’t s top Grenell from
assuming the job in an “acting” capacity
even while he nominally remains ambassa-
dor to Germany.
Grenell’s appointment is Trump’s latest
move to take complete control of any insti-
tutions that might challenge his authoritari-
an designs. Coats incurred Trump’s w rath by
issuing unvarnished intelligence assess-
ments that confirmed that Russia had
a ttacked the 2016 election and that Iran was
in compliance with the nuclear accord. That
kind of truth-telling is the last thing Trump
wants.
Coats’s temporary replacement, Joseph
Maguire, also failed to protect Trump as he
expects to be protected. The New York
Times reported that Maguire’s ouster came
after one of his aides briefed the House
Intelligence Committee last week that Rus-
sia is attempting to intervene again in the
U.S. election, in an effort to reelect Trump.
The Post reported that Trump erupted at
Maguire over what the president views as
disloyalty. Think about that: Trump regards
efforts to protect the integrity of our elec-
tions as a firing offense. So now Maguire is
out as DNI, and Grenell is in.
By appointing a partisan propagandist to
a post that requires strict nonpartisanship,
Trump is ensuring that the acting DNI in
this election year will place his interests
above those of the country. Given that
Trump has consistently said he would ac-
cept foreign e lection help — indeed, he tried
to blackmail Ukraine into helping him —
that is a terrifying prospect for the future of
our democracy. There are, mercifully, insti-
tutional checks to limit a DNI’s ability to
weaponize the intelligence community on
behalf of the president’s personal interests.
With Grenell at t he helm, we are likely to see
those safeguards tested as never before.
Twitter: @MaxBootMaX BooTTrump taps
a propagandist
to run the intel
community
BY HOWARD FINEMANM
ike Bloomberg — super-rich,
former New York mayor, be-
spoke lord of the Upper East
Side — came to the Demo-
cratic debate armed with a sense of
noblesse oblige typical of all the best
billionaires in his neighborhood.
“I’m a New Yorker,” he said, as if that
ended the discussion. “I know how to
take on an arrogant con man like
Donald Trump that comes from New
York.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)
doesn’t have “any chance whatsoever”
against President Trump, he added.
Like Bruce Wayne, Bloomberg has
vast resources to spend to flush the
Joker in the White House from the
sewers of politics.
But instead of being welcomed like
Batman, Bloomberg was struck down
mid-launch. The wrecking crew: a
squadron led by Sanders, a Brooklyn-
bred democratic socialist, and
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), who
honed her sense of resentment into
jurisprudence as a student in Newark
at Rutgers Law.
The wrecking crew pummeled
Bloomberg so hard on so many topics
that he complained that he couldn’t
get a word in. “What am I, chicken
liver?” he said, in deli-menu exaspera-
tion.
The answer was “Yes, you ARE
chicken liver” — at least in the jealous
eyes of one viewer whose relentlessly
angry sense of life was formed in his
native Queens.
“Mini Mike B loomberg’s d ebate per-
formance tonight was perhaps the
worst in the history of debates,” T rump
tweeted. “He was stumbling, bumbling
and grossly incompetent. If this
doesn’t knock him out of the race,
nothing will.”
The race should belong to Bernie,
not B loomie, Trump a dded i n m ischief-
making, fake-sympathy tweets. “It is
happening again to Crazy Bernie,” he
said, “just like last time, only far more
obvious. They are taking the DemocratNomination away from him, and
there’s very little he can do. A Rigged
System!”
The presidential campaign at this
strange moment is a bonfire of the
boroughs: a nasty hate-throuple of
white, male, septuagenarian New York
politicians who have little use for tra-
ditional parties and regard themselves
as creators and leaders of their own
outsider movements. All three have
the go-the-distance wallets — either
their own or their online supporters’ —
that other contenders cannot match.
There is something inevitable about
the New Yorking of the race — besides
the fact that the president used to call
Fifth Avenue at 57th Street home. The
“I’m-walking-here” t alk dominates our
discourse. Trump didn’t create the
corrosion, but he has amplified it and
made the belittling, street-corner style
of the New York tabloids the official
language of politics.
Many voters are going to love this
stuff. T hey want one nasty New Yorker
to take on another. They w ant a Demo-
crat who can fearlessly — eagerly —
throw it back at Trump. Whether
Bloomberg can do that live and on a
debate stage is now, after Las Vegas, an
open question. But he is offering in any
case to do it prosthetically, through
billions in advertising and hired-gun,
prepaid social media hucksterism.
Until then, the silky billionaire is
Sanders’s best-ever focus and foil. “We
are a democracy, not an oligarchy!”
Sanders shouted at a rally in Ta coma,
Wash., on Monday. “ You’re not going to
buy this election!” At a Sanders rally I
attended in New Hampshire, Rep. Al-
exandria Ocasio-Cortez (from the
Bronx) introduced Sanders by calling
for a “political revolution” t hat would
end the role of Bloomberg-style money
in politics forever.
If a revolution is coming, New York
City is, arguably, the obvious place for
it to start: a place where everybody
seems to be either making a living
sitting in front of a computer (such as
the terminal Bloomberg invented) orbarely staying alive by delivering food
to people sitting in front of computers.
The Force of the Bern is strong in the
city, especially in Brooklyn.
Sanders has emerged as the front-
runner by consolidating the left
against a divided middle of the Demo-
cratic Party. But if his “revolution”
doesn’t secure the nomination,
Bloomberg might still have a punch-
er’s chance to get to Trump.
Hollywood couldn’t write a more
vivid New York social confrontation.
The two men landed in Manhattan
(Bloomberg, by way of Boston and
Harvard Business School) at roughly
the same time. But once in town, their
paths diverged. As Bloomberg began
to make serious money in finance and
information, he worked his way into
what passes for Manhattan “society”
by using his wealth and sense of seri-
ous intellectual purpose to become a
member of the most admired charita-
ble boards in the city — the university,
museum and hospital trustees who are
the meritocratic update of the old
Dutch hierarchy.
Trump, the needy Queens guy, by
way of military school and Fordham
University (he didn’t make it to the
University of Pennsylvania until his
junior year), remains the avatar of
end-of-the-subway line, outer-
b orough resentment of Manhattan,
even though he has lived there since
the 1970s — until he moved into the
White House. His dislike of elites is
complete; his instinct (the one that got
him elected, anyway) is to say, i n effect,
the country is better off without the
Upper East Side.
The civil way to settle this is to put
Trump, Sanders and Bloomberg on a
Broadway park bench and let them
argue politics while they feed the pi-
geons. It would be a New York tableau
to remember. But we aren’t going to
get that lucky.howard fineman is an nbC news analyst
and a realClearPolitics contributing
reporter.A New York back-alley brawl
rob Dob for the Washington Posttransmission from person to person
outside of China.
The Chinese reaction to the virus has
shown the weaknesses and advantages
of authoritarianism. The immediate re-
sponse of a system built on fear to a
problem like this one is denial and
deception. No one wants to carry bad
news. The incentives are all against
initiative. So local Chinese officials
spent the first weeks of the outbreak —
as the disease was spreading under the
radar — insisting that the transmission
of the virus was all animal-to-human.
But authoritarian states are good at
things that require mass regimentation
without public input. Only in a society
like China could you have the effective
lockdown of 50 million people, includ-
ing the entire city of Wuhan, to slow the
spread of the disease. Public-health offi-
cials in most places — who are required
to balance health needs with civil liber-
ties — would never consider such a
measure. Ye t it appears to be working.
The danger? “A ll that is needed is for
a few countries in the d eveloping world
that can’t contain the coronavirus,”
A nthony S. Fauci, the head of the
National Institute of Allergy and
I nfectious Diseases, told me. “This
could be the second wave of the out-
break that could t hen p rogress to a true
pandemic.”
Pandemic infections tend to attack
the weakest links — the most vulnerable
health systems — in the global chain. If
there is sustained transmission in those
places, says Fauci, “even countries with
best practices will suffer.” Countries in
Africa are particularly vulnerable.
There are more than 1 million ChineseM
eanwhile, on the other side of
the Earth, there have been
more than 75,000 cases of
coronavirus and more than
2,000 deaths. This leaves U.S. health
experts hoping that the number of
i nfections has been dramatically
u nderreported.
That is not a typo. If the current
numbers are close to accurate, it indi-
cates a coronavirus mortality rate up-
ward of 2 percent. The mortality rate for
the seasonal flu is generally 0.1 percent.
The mortality rate for pandemic flu is
0.3 to 0.5 percent. The particularly
deadly flu pandemic of 1918 — which
took the lives of 50 million people
around the world — had a mortality rate
of about 2 percent.
So, if 2,000 deaths is the numerator,
scientists hope that the denominator is
actually much larger. And that is proba-
ble, given the likelihood that there are
many more people who have the infec-
tion but don’t know it, or are not show-
ing symptoms.
The good news? The outbreak start-
ed in a single location and seems l argely
contained there. There have been more
than 1,000 cases in more than
2 5 countries outside of China. But the
o verwhelming majority have been
travel- r elated. The containment mea-
sures of South Korea, Singapore, Hong
Kong and Japan — which have the most
cases — seem to have been successful.
Of the 15 U. S. cases (before the evacua-
tion of American passengers from a
stricken Japanese cruise ship), 13 are
t ravel-related. The two others are
spouses of people in that group. We s till
have not seen widespread, sustainedpeople in Africa, and many Africans
study in China. Countries such as Ethio-
pia, Senegal and South Africa are capa-
ble of adequately testing random sam-
ples for coronavirus in key cities. But
Liberia? Guinea? Sierra Leone?
Seldom has there been a stronger
argument for U.S. global engagement to
strengthen African health systems,
which constitute part of our own line of
defense against pandemics. Seldom has
there been a better argument to aban-
don “A merica First” posturing and to
recognize that our own fate is closely
tied to the health and hopes of other
nations.
Much about the future course of the
disease depends on the answer to a
scientific question: Is someone who has
coronavirus but lacks symptoms — or
has symptoms so mild that he or she
hardly notices — capable of transmit-
ting the virus to others? “It looks like the
answer is yes,” s ays Fauci. Which would
make the virus far harder to control.
“We may find that the virus is highly
transmissible but less lethal than we
thought in the beginning,” Fauci told
me. In this case, the danger would be
similar to a particularly bad influenza.
And the outbreaks, as with the flu, could
be seasonal. Fauci says he “would not be
surprised if that happened.”
I imagine that most Americans would
be surprised and dismayed if that hap-
pened. But there is also hurried, promis-
ing work being done on a coronavirus
vaccine. And so the endless race contin-
ues between human ingenuity and the
pathogens that regularly emerge to
threaten us.
[email protected]Michael gersonA glimpse of victory against the coronavirus
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