The stakes are high

U.S. military and foreign policy are going haywire

It is difficult this week to get beyond the unaddressed death-by-opioids epidemic at home and the world setting a new record for number of refugees — 65 million — to focus instead on U.S. external policies, but it is necessary, given what is happening.

President Donald Trump is turning over decisions on deployments of U.S. military forces to Secretary of Defense James Mattis. There was stirring earlier among Americans who believe that military deployments should be decided by civilians when three military leaders were named to the top national security posts: Mr. Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general, at defense; John F. Kelly, also a retired Marine general, as homeland security secretary; and Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as national security adviser (he remains on active duty with the Army).

It’s not that they don’t know their stuff, but, first, there needs to be buy-in by Americans into decisions to take us to war if the wars are to have popular, national support. It also needs not to be forgotten that taxpayers’ money pays for these wars. When government spends money on wars, there almost inevitably is less money to tackle domestic problems, such as education, health care and infrastructure. Deployment decisions, thus, should be in the hands of civilians, not generals.

It will be interesting to see what Mr. Mattis and the Pentagon do with their newly granted authority to deploy troops and employ particular armaments in particular situations. Already we have shot down a Syrian military aircraft in Syria, for the first time, and it appears we are going to add another 4,000 troops to the 8,500 now in Afghanistan, America’s longest war, with no end in sight.

I will be waiting to see whether the Pentagon uses its newfound authority to reduce or withdraw troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria or Yemen, where they are deployed in bottomless-pit wars. Or will it seek only to increase U.S. military presence and expenditures around the world?

In foreign policy, Mr. Trump last week made another mistake by stepping back from President Barack Obama’s efforts to normalize relations with Cuba. An easy-to-miss point is that Mr. Obama’s easing toward Cuba, in addition to scrapping a policy of isolation that has failed for 58 years, also improved relations with all of Latin America. Virtually all of our neighbors in the Americas, including Canada, found our policy toward Cubaab horrent and stupid.

The other problem with Mr. Trump’s backward motion on Cuba was the reason for it, as it clearly involved his personal business interests, including his resort, Mar-a-Lago in south Florida, the stronghold of America’s Cuban exiles. They have money and they vote. It was a case of Mr. Trump once more advancing his commercial brand through government policy.

Yet another mistake is Mr. Trump’s ignorant support of the verbal and economic attack on Qatar by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and some Persian Gulf emirates. Apart from Qatar’s relatively reasonable positions ona free media, on maintaining a wide variety of contacts andon trying to heal wounds between warring elements in the Middle East and South Asia, such as Hamas, the Muslim Brother hood and Afghanistan’ s Taliban, Qatar had also stepped forward and stationed peacekeeping forces between the Red Sea nations of Djibouti and Eritrea. The Qataris helped those two states, both tiny, poor and yet belligerent, avoid pointless fighting.

Now, the Qataris are withdrawing their forces, feeling they need them at home to help fend off the Saudis and Saudi clients, instead of leaving them to stand between the Djiboutians and the Eritreans. As a result, those two sharp-toothed chihuahuas might resume combat, with Mr. Trump having allowed the Saudis to go after theQataris.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has been given the job of trying to bring the Saudi-Qatari quarrel to an end. He will have the privilege of doing so with the threat of immoderate, thoughtless, ignorant, middle-of-the-night, tweeted statements from the White House undercutting his peacemaking efforts.

What is Mr. Tillerson to do? He can tell both the Saudi and Qatari leaders to ignore what Mr. Trump says and mend their ties. But it is probably a street without joy for a secretary of state to tell foreign leaders not to listen to his president. People such as Saudi King Salman and Qatar Emir Tamim are not only going to think that America’s word, at least from the top, is worthless, a very dangerous assumption, or that Mr. Tillerson, reasonable person that he is, may be only a few days away from walking out the door, making his word also close to useless.

This is not the kind of mess in which an American government should find itself, particularly in the everperilous Middle East.

So far, we can stagger on. The Qataris have shown imagination in evading Saudi measures to punish them. But the combination of U.S. military decisions being put in the hands of ex-generals and foreign policy being determined by some sort of loony combination of a reasonable exoil man and a sword-dancing insomniac, especially in the explosive Middle East, is hazardous for all. Lives are at stake.

Dan Simpson, a former U.S. ambassador, is a PostGazette associate editor (dsimpson@post-gazette. 412-263-1976).