Let nobody claim they see future of US Mid East policy
THIS IS, more or less, where we are. Donald Trump, the populist president-elect of the most powerful nation in the world, has, even before taking office, fallen out with his intelligence service chiefs.
This fall-out is so spectacular that he has accused the 17 agencies on which the security of the country he is about to lead — and on whose Condemned the leaks: intelligence chief Clapper analysis he is supposed to depend to make crucial decisions which will have massive consequences for hundreds of millions of people — of leaking information against him and thus behaving in a way that recalls “Nazi Germany”. The immediate cause of this animosity was twofold. There was the release of a dossier containing unsubstantiated, salacious allegations of sex acts in Moscow. Then there were the public conclusions of US intelligence chiefs that it was indeed Russian hackers who obtained details from Democratic Party servers that were damaging to Hillary Clinton during the presidential campaign, and that this effort, possibly, was part of a bid to facilitate Mr Trump’s election.
The Director of National Intelligence James Clapper condemned the release of the sex dossier; nonetheless, these two factors have reinforced Mr Trump’s long-term suspicion of such US intelligence services and their output. He has dismissed the daily presidential briefing — the distillation of the thinking of 17 entire agencies on any given day — as unlikely to teach him anything he does not already know, and repeatedly implied that intelligence officials are part of a broader “elite” plot against him and ordinary people.
This thinking is in line both with the suspicion of intellectuals and experts that characterises populism every-
What all experts agree on is that the alienation of a president-elect from the intelligence establishment is unprecedented. This breakdown comes at a critical moment. The Syrian war is at a turning point, Daesh is ebbing, but sectarian violence and competition, among actors big and small, is intensifying. Serious people talk of chaos from Yemen to the Maghreb, with Israel in the middle of it all.
Mr Trump has given little indication of what policies he intends to adopt.
where, in the UK or Europe as in the US. But it also plays to a particular strand of conspiratorial right-wing US thinking that sees such security agencies as the arm of a repressive, invasive, expansionist predatory state which, in the imagination of some of the wilder exponents of this view, is run by liberals, financers, big business and, inevitably, Jews. Mr Trump may not share these views, but many of his supporters do, and his rhetoric resonates with this constituency.