Bannon contradicts Trump on North Korea.
Administration’s resident hawk takes role of dove in interview
WASHINGTON — For all his fire-breathing nationalism — the demands to ban Muslims, build a wall on the Mexican border and honor statues of Confederate heroes — Stephen Bannon has played another improbable role in the Trump White House: resident dove.
From Afghanistan and North Korea to Syria and Venezuela, Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, has argued against making military threats or deploying U.S. troops into foreign conflicts.
His views, delivered in a characteristically bomb-throwing style, have antagonized people across the administration, leaving Bannon isolated and in danger of losing his job. But they are thoroughly in keeping with his nationalist credo, and they have occasionally resonated with the person who matters most: President Donald Trump.
Bannon’s dovish tendencies spilled into view this week in unguarded comments he made about North Korea to a liberal publication, The American Prospect. Days after Trump threatened to rain “fire and fury” on the North Korean government if it did not curb its belligerent behavior, Bannon said, “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bannon said in a phone call with Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect’s co-editor.
Bannon was saying what virtually every military commander believes — that a strike on North Korea would prompt overwhelming retaliation with untenable casualties in one of the world’s largest cities. In this case, though, his comments undercut not only the president, but also decades of U.S. deterrence on the Korean Peninsula.
And that was not all: Bannon floated an unorthodox proposal for the United States to withdraw its troops from South Korea in return for China’s commitment to get the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, to agree to a verifiable freeze in his nuclear and missile programs.
Such a plan is not likely to gain traction, any more than Bannon’s proposal that the United States substitute mercenaries for soldiers in Afghanistan. But his ideas have shaken up White House debates that would otherwise be dominated by the retired and active-duty generals who lead Trump’s national security team.
Bannon’s hard questions about America’s future in Afghanistan stalled a policy debate that appeared on a fast track to a multiyear commitment of U.S. troops. They sowed doubts with Trump, who repeatedly called for the United States to withdraw from Afghanistan as a private citizen and said almost nothing about the war during his presidential campaign.
On Friday, Trump will convene his staff at Camp David to deliberate over the policy, which Defense Secretary Jim Mattis once promised would be finished by the middle of last month.
Bannon pressed Mattis to consider the use of private contractors in a one-on-one meeting at the Pentagon last month. He sharply challenged proposals drawn up by the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, for the United States to keep several thousand troops based in Afghanistan and to work closely with the Afghan central government.
To Bannon, all these ventures distract from his grand project of reviving American manufacturing. He has devoted much of his time to pushing protectionist trade policies against China and other countries. To the extent that Bannon cares about North Korea, administration officials said, it is because he views it as an impediment to that effort.
Trump has soft-pedaled his trade talk against China to enlist its support in curbing the North Korean government. Bannon has told colleagues that he believes China is manipulating the United States by stringing it along on North Korea.
Bannon said he was working to oust officials from the Pentagon and State Department whom he viewed as too soft on China. Bannon singled out Susan Thornton, a career diplomat serving as acting assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs. Thornton has won the confidence of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.