The New York Times - USA (2020-11-15)

THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2020 SR 3

T

RANSITIONS? I’ve seen a few.

Since 2000, I have partici-

pated in three presidential transi-

tions, from the vantage points of

both the departing and the incoming ad-

ministration. This year, although I serve

on the Biden-Harris transition advisory

board, I am not a member of the transition

team and, as always, these views are my

own.

Each transition I experienced was dif-

ferent, but what they shared was a recog-

nition that our country’s national security

is best served when both sides endeavor

to have a responsible handoff of power.

Conversely, it is undermined when either

side refuses to engage the other seriously.

In the week since Joe Biden’s victory

became clear, President Trump and his

administration have taken no steps to-

ward starting the process of transition.

The risks to our national security are

mounting.

My first transition began in December

2000, soon after a Supreme Court ruling

made George W. Bush the winner of the

disputed election. As the assistant secre-

tary of state for African affairs, I was the

first bureau chief to meet with the incom-

ing secretary of state, Gen. Colin Powell.

President-elect Bush and his senior na-

tional security team had begun receiving

the president’s daily intelligence briefing

and had access to critical information. But

the normal process that follows after a

president-elect has been chosen — the in-

coming administration sends teams to

each department to receive detailed infor-

mation on policy, budget, personnel and

other matters — had awaited the Supreme

Court’s Dec. 12 Bush v. Gore decision.

I was struck immediately by Secretary-

designate Powell’s unique style. He came

alone to the State Department — cool, con-

fident, casually dressed and without staff

members, bag carriers or pretense of any

sort. He asked to meet with me and the Af-

rica bureau first, presumably to send the

message that he would treat this some-

times-underappreciated region of the

world with the seriousness it deserves.

Mr. Powell asked thoughtful, probing

questions and brought his signature dig-

nity and professionalism to every encoun-

ter with the departing administration. De-

spite the abbreviated transition timetable

and the controversy surrounding the elec-

tion, we on the exiting Clinton team did

our utmost to provide Mr. Powell with ev-

erything that he might want in terms of in-

formation and support.

In 2008, I was a co-leader of President-

elect Barack Obama’s national security

transition team and was named United

Nations ambassador-designate. I had

started working with the General Serv-

ices Administration before the election to

ensure that the office space allotted to the

president-elect’s team would be suitable

for all of our needs, including the handling

of classified information.

Swiftly granted a top-secret security

clearance, I received access to the presi-

dent’s intelligence briefing in order to help

facilitate the smooth transfer of sensitive

security information from one team to the

next. Later, I was provided full support by

my predecessor at the U.S. Mission to the

United Nations, Ambassador Zalmay

Khalilzad, and his team, as I sought to pre-

pare for confirmation and quickly get up

to speed.

Mr. Obama often speaks of how much he

valued the stellar efforts of Mr. Bush and

his administration to conduct a thorough

and seamless transition. At each agency

and in almost every respect, the 2008 tran-

sition was a model for its thoroughness,

collegiality and efficacy.

Finally, I was national security adviser

in 2016 during the handoff from Mr.

Obama to President-elect Trump. Under

strict instructions from Mr. Obama to pro-

vide his successor, whoever it may be,

with a quality start that matched or ex-

ceeded that which he had received from

Mr. Bush, the National Security Council

staff worked for months in advance of the

election to prepare more than 100 briefing

papers.

I personally reviewed every memo on

subjects that ranged from staffing, budget

and the most complicated policy issues, to

numerous potentially dire national securi-

ty contingencies that might arise early in

a new administration, along with recom-

mended steps for how to deal with them.

Shortly after my successor, retired Lt.

Gen. Michael Flynn, was named, I called

to congratulate him and pledged to give

him as much of my time until the Trump

inauguration as he wanted. It took a cou-

ple weeks for General Flynn to take me up

on my repeated offers to meet, but, ulti-

mately, we met on four occasions, spend-

ing more than 12 hours together.

I answered all of his questions on how to

approach the job of national security ad-

viser and laid out in depth the numerous

challenges he would confront immedi-

ately — from the campaign to defeat the

Islamic State to threats posed by Russia,

China, Iran and North Korea. I also

stressed the need to be prepared for less

obvious threats, like the potentially cata-

strophic collapse of the Mosul Dam in Iraq

and pandemic disease.

At the conclusion of our last meeting, I

wished General Flynn well and offered to

be of assistance, if needed, after he took

office. Following our goodbyes, but before

he left my office, General Flynn surprised

me by asking for a hug. It was a collegial

and respectful, if slightly awkward, re-

quest, and I obliged.

As it turns out, my hours with General

Flynn and those of other White House offi-

cials with their incoming counterparts,

plus President Obama’s two-hour meeting

with President-elect Trump, proved to be

the sum total of the 2016 national security

transition at the highest levels. That’s be-

cause the incoming Trump cabinet was

apparently told not to meet with their

Obama counterparts in their respective

departments and most did not do so. The

exception was one three-hour tabletop ex-

ercise in January, which is mandated by

law, during which cabinet officials on both

teams sat together to review mock threat

scenarios relating to terrorism, cyber-

security and pandemic disease.

It was far from the optimal transition

that Mr. Obama had wanted.

In 2020, as the days tick by and Mr.

Trump shows no signs of starting a transi-

tion, the risks increase.

Mr. Biden and his top national security

team have not been provided the daily in-

telligence briefings to which they are enti-

tled. Mr. Biden’s team is not receiving clas-

sified information. The Biden-Harris

agency review teams are constituted but

have been denied access to every element

of the executive branch. Vital exchanges

of information and expertise that would

help combat Covid-19 and jump-start the

economy remain stalled.

While we are extremely fortunate that

Mr. Biden may be the most experienced

president-elect ever to take office and

brings with him a deep bench of highly

qualified, knowledgeable experts, the

Trump administration’s continued refusal

to execute a responsible transition puts

our national security at risk. Without ac-

cess to critical threat information, no in-

coming team can counter what it can’t see

coming.

If, today, the Trump administration is

tracking potential or actual threats — for

instance, Russian bounties on American

soldiers, a planned terrorist attack on an

embassy, a dangerously mutated corona-

virus, or Iranian and North Korean provo-

cations — but fails to share this informa-

tion in a timely fashion with the Biden-

Harris team, it could cost us dearly in

terms of American lives.

Indeed, the 9/11 Commission, which in-

vestigated the 2001 Qaeda terrorist at-

tacks on U.S. soil that killed some 3,000

Americans, found that the truncated 2000

transition slowed the installation of key

national security officials and stressed the

importance of complete and thorough

presidential transitions to U.S. national

security.

Instead of acting in the national interest

to orchestrate a responsible, democratic

transition, Mr. Trump and many Republi-

cans are spending time sowing false

doubts about the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s

election.

Tragically, but not surprisingly, Mr.

Trump appears determined to take a final

wrecking ball to our democracy and na-

tional security on his inevitable way out

the door.

Trump’s Stalling Risks Our Security

DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

I’ve seen my share

of presidential transitions.

Delays can be dangerous.

OPINION

BY SUSAN E.
RICE
A former national
security adviser
and a contributing
opinion writer. She
is the author of the
memoir “Tough
Love: My Story of
the Things Worth
Fighting For.”

Members of

President-elect

Barack Obama’s

new

administration

in January

2009.

W

HEN I was a younger man,

a quarter-century ago, I

clambered into the armored

Land Rover provided by this

newspaper to cover the Bosnian war. It

was, at the best of times, an unbalanced

vehicle. At the worst, it would shudder as

if possessed. I was headed from Sarajevo

back to Paris to see my third child born.

There was no other way home. The air-

port, under fire from Serbian artillery, was

closed.

Over Mount Igman, out of range of

those Serbian guns, on the paved highway

to Split, I exhaled. The blast from a shell as

I walked through the old town had blown

me off my feet a few days earlier. Now I

was out of suffocating Sarajevo, home

free. Until the steering wheel, spinning in

my hands, lost all connection to the

wheels. I was helpless. The car slalomed

across the oncoming lane, tumbled down

an embankment, flipped over and over, to

settle at last on its side.

If, unlike several dear colleagues, I

walked away from the war, it was to say

something. Otherwise life was wasted

breath. Something about crazed national-

ism, how it giddies people with myth, gets

their blood up building walls, how it births

loony ideas like turning the east-west

crossroads of Sarajevo into an ethnically

pure Serbian preserve, with 100,000 dead

or more in the rubble at the end.

To say something to my four children,

whose lives I was lucky to see unfold,

about engagement in the great causes, the

pursuit of justice, about what Oliver Wen-

dell Holmes called “the bitter cup of hero-

ism,” and about his advice to wear the

“heart out after the unattainable.”

This, dear readers, is goodbye, my last

column for The New York Times. I have

tried to defend the causes I believe in —

freedom, decency, pluralism, the impor-

tance of dissent in an open society, above

all. Uniformity of thought is the death of

thought. It paves the road to hell.

I can say, after a dozen years, that the

best columns come all of a piece, fully

formed, a gift from some deep place. They

enfold the subject just so, like a halter on a

horse’s face.

Such inspiration is rare. Most columns

resemble exquisite torture. The battle be-

tween form and subject is ferocious. Eight

hundred words set a rigid carapace resist-

ant to descriptive writing and narrative.

Lincoln did all right with 272 words at

Gettysburg. When the cutting began, I

consoled myself with that. But shed no

tears for the columnist’s lot. I wanted to

witness what I wrote about. Armchair

pontification can turn to bloviation. Travel

the world, see desperation in the eye of a

raped Yazidi girl or a refugee dumped by

Australia in Papua New Guinea, and ren-

der the unimaginable in a few words.

Brevity is a bitter stimulant to pithiness.

It is hard to go at this moment. I did not

expect the lessons of Bosnia to come home

to the United States of Donald Trump’s

“America First” nationalism. Because

each vote still counts, because no state has

seceded yet, because a “gunned-up” popu-

lation has not taken up those guns, the

country I love appears to be emerging

from the Trump nightmare. It is not yet

free of the tentacles of his derangement.

To beat back the defeated president’s on-

going assault on truth, the rule of law, and

the institutions of democracy has been the

absolute moral imperative of our times.

The American idea freed me, a British

Jew from the land of “trembling Israel-

ites,” as it has freed countless others in

various ways. The fight to defend Ameri-

ca’s openness, renewal and unity against

Trump’s walls, retrogression and fracture

is inseparable from the struggle to save

the world from the creeping autocracy of

the 21st century. On lies is tyranny built.

But to everything there is a season. I

have tried not only to say what I think but

also to reveal who I am. Wisdom is also

knowing when to go. Persist too long and,

like all those armies bent on reaching

Moscow, you may face the Russian winter.

Nobody ever told me what subject to

choose or what to say about it. “You write

and you are free,” a Saudi friend once said

in Jeddah. He could scarcely imagine to

what degree. Free and solitary, like a run-

ner on the beach in the early morning at

low tide. Such freedom is rare.

The thing is to use it. To listen through

the silences for a clue. To see the intersec-

tion of personal and national psyches, the

richest point of journalistic inquiry. To

marry the head and the heart. To make a

difference. To know, and it’s enough, that a

column saved a life. To suggest, in the

name of a child’s innocent gaze, that

putting food on the table beats an eye for

an eye, for then soon enough everyone is

blind. To hold power to account.

Having spent my infancy in South Afri-

ca, grown up and been educated in Eng-

land, and then, after a peripatetic life as a

foreign correspondent, found my home in

New York (the place that took me in), I

have been concerned with belonging.

It could scarcely be otherwise. From

Lithuania to Johannesburg, from South

Africa to Israel and Britain, from London

to New York, my family has been on the

move since the 1890s. Trees have roots.

Jews have legs. Displacement is hard. A

new land is also the loss of the old. The

mental toll, as on my intermittently suicid-

al late mother, may be severe.

Exclusion precludes belonging. I

learned that young. White people filled the

beach at Muizenberg, near Cape Town.

The surf leapt. Bathers frolicked. Blacks

waded into the filthy harbor at Kalk Bay.

They slept in outbuildings with little win-

dows like baleful eyes. Or in distant town-

ships of dust and drudgery, where the

stench of urine filled the alleys.

But I stray into descriptive writing. Suf-

fice to say Bosnia redoubled the lessons of

South Africa. Racism is a close cousin to

nationalism, as America has been re-

minded. They both depend on scapegoat-

ing “the other”; on the idea, as Kipling put

it, that, “All nice people, like us, are We,

and everyone else is They.”

There is no place, on this small, inter-

connected, vulnerable, depleted planet,

for the ideologies that took tens of millions

of lives in the 20th century. So, dear read-

ers, fight on for an American democracy

freed at last of racism, for a borderless fed-

eral Europe, and for a sustainable world.

I am off to head our bureau in Paris, the

city I miraculously reached after that

Land Rover somersaulted, the city where

I started in journalism more than 40 years

ago. I may indulge in some narrative writ-

ing, a good meal, a decent glass of wine. I

will set opinion aside, as I did in Bosnia,

where everyone knew what I thought, for

we are human after all.

I hope this is au revoir, not adieu. And

muchibus thankibus, as Joyce put it in

Ulysses, for bearing with me down the

years. It’s the voyage that counts, they

say, but so does the ever-flickering desti-

nation, that promised land where the un-

quenchable quest of every human being to

be free and live with dignity is honored

and safeguarded in perpetuity.

ROGER COHEN

Au Revoir but Not Adieu

ANJA NIEDRINGHAUS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

For 12 years as a columnist I wore my

‘heart out after the unattainable.’

A Bosnian

Muslim and his

son in Gorazde

in 1995.