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By Lu Jiafei
For those serving in the U.S. President Donald Trump's administration, if the past six months have proved anything, it's that the reality-TV-star-turned-president brandishes his doctrine of unpredictability not only to foreign rivals but to his own men.
Trump, accompanied by Sonny Perdue, left, arrives for a roundtable with farmers in the Roosevelt Room on Tuesday.
Early this week, Trump grabbed the headlines by appearing to issue a major military transgender policy, yes, on twitter again.
It was soon found out that despite his claim of following “consultation with my Generals and military experts,” most of the top brass in the U.S. military were kept in the dark.
“… pleased be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S.
Military,” Trump tweeted, citing “tremendous medical costs and disruption” as reasons for his decision.
According to a 2016 RAND Corporation study commissioned by the Pentagon, there are some 11,000 transgender troops in U.S. reserves and active-duty military, and according to AP, as many as 250 U.S. transgender service members are currently serving openly in the military after Ash Carter, defense secretary under the administration of Barack Obama, ended the service ban on transgender people in June, 2016.
Besides ending the ban that had previously forced transgender service members into a life shrouded in secrecy to avoid being discharged, Carter also requested a year-long review until July 1 from military generals to develop new policies to accept new qualified transgender recruits into the military.
On the eve of the review deadline, though, Carter’s successor Jim Mattis announced that he would give military chiefs another six months to conduct the review.
And all of a sudden, Trump appeared to revoke the military’s current transgender policy entirely on his own via Twitter.
Citing people close to Defense Secretary Mattis, the New York Times reported that Mattis, who was on vacation when Trump made the announcement, was given only a day’s notice about the decision, and was “appalled” that Trump chose to make the decision known on Twitter.
Apart from Mattis, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including Chairman General Joseph Dunford, were equally blindsided by Trump’s announcement, CNN cited U.S. defense officials as saying.
The episode of upending U.S. military transgender policy was only the latest in a series of how the Trumpian unpredictability threw the upper echelons of the Trump administration off-balance.
Back in May when Trump failed to publicly reaffirm U.S. commitment to mutual defense of NATO during his debut official trip abroad, U.S. allies in Europe were said to be shocked and disappointed.
It was soon revealed that Trump’s National Security Team members, including National security adviser H.R. McMaster, Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, were also surprised by Trump not publicly endorsing the so called Article 5 provision in his crucial speech to NATO leaders.
Citing White House officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, the Politico reported at the time that in a “fully coordinated other speech everybody else had worked on,” Trump was supposed to publicly say that he supports the Article 5.
“They (National Security Team) didn’t know it (public endorsement of Article 5) had been removed,” a White House official reportedly told the Politico. “It was only upon delivery.”
On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly blasted the NATO as “obsolete” and till now has been relentlessly lecturing NATO allies on increasing spending on defense.
Trump again ambushed his top diplomat in June while Secretary of State Tillerson was scrambling to mediate privately in the Qatar-Gulf crisis.
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Egypt on June 5 severed ties with Qatar over its alleged support for terrorism. One day later, the four Arab countries imposed a partial land, sea and air embargo on Qatari-owned means of transport, including state-owned Qatar Airways.
The diplomatic crisis in Persian Gulf came at a crucial moment for the Trump administration to seek to cement a solid Sunni front against Shia Iran and extremist groups, such as the Islamic State in the region.
And it also places Washington in a serious dilemma. While Saudi Arabia is the closest U.S. ally in the region, Qatar hosts the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East.
Days after the Saudi Arabia-led bloc of Arab countries severed ties with Qatar, Tillerson formally called for an immediate easing of the blockade in a statement.
About two hours later that day, however, Trump emerged from his meeting with the visiting president of Romania and declared that the Saudi-led diplomatic punishment on Qatar was “hard but necessary.”
An official within the U.S. State Department told then that the State Department did not know ahead of time that Trump would take a harsher tone on Qatar because the White House did not follow the traditional interagency process of making foreign affairs statements.
During the presidential campaign, Trump embraced unpredictability as a pivotal element of his foreign policy strategy while critics sneered at his incoherent policies at best and seeming ignorance of major policies at worse.
During an interview with the New York Times back in March, 2016, Trump said that he did not want to say what he’d do because “we need unpredictability.”
“If I win, I don’t want to be in a position where I’ve said I would or I wouldn’t,” said Trump. “I don’t want them to know what I’m thinking.”
Back then, we all thought the word “they” would refer to foreign rivals of the United States. But now, with the friendly fires on Trump’s own men, I’m not so sure now.
After spending one year in Palestine covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict between 2013 and 2014, Jiafei Lu moved to Washington, D.C. in 2015 and started covering the U.S. presidential election till the very end of Donald Trump's upset victory early November, 2016. Since then, he has been working as a diplomatic correspondent for Xinhua.
(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)
