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      in US Politics

      Trump vetoes huge US defense spending bill but Congress set to override

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      Donald Trump vetoed a $740bn bill setting policy for the Department of Defense on Wednesday, despite its strong support in Congress, raising the possibility that the measure will fail to become law for the first time in 60 years.Although Trump’s previous eight vetoes were all upheld thanks to support from Republicans in Congress, advisers said this one looked likely to be overridden, just weeks before Trump leaves office on 20 January.Trump said he vetoed the annual National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, because it “fails to include critical national security measures, includes provisions that fail to respect our veterans and our military’s history, and contradicts efforts by my administration to put America first in our national security and foreign policy actions”.A key measure in the NDAA to which Trump objects is the move to rename US military bases currently named for leaders of the Confederacy, which seceded from the union over slavery, leading to the civil war of 1861 to 1865.Pressure to rename the bases grew this year amid nationwide protests over the killing by Minneapolis police of George Floyd, an African American man on whose neck an officer knelt for almost nine minutes.Trump also threatened a veto if the bill did not repeal part of a 1996 telecoms law which prevents online companies from being sued in relation to third-party content.If Section 230 is not “completely terminated”, Trump tweeted earlier this month, “I will be forced to unequivocally VETO the Bill when sent to the very beautiful Resolute desk.”In a message to the House of Representatives, on Wednesday, Trump also called the bill “a ‘gift’ to China and Russia”.Both the Republican Senate and Democratic House passed the 2021 NDAA with margins larger than the two-thirds majorities needed to override a veto. That means that Trump would have to persuade dozens of Republicans to throw out nearly a year’s work on the 4,500-page bill and start over.Top advisers urged Trump not to carry out his veto threat, citing the slim chance of stopping the bill. Many of Trump’s staunchest supporters, including Senate armed services committee chairman Jim Inhofe, said they would vote to override.“It’s simple, what this bill does,” Inhofe said when the measure passed the Senate. “It makes our country more secure, and it supports our troops who defend it.”Advisers said Trump had little to gain from a veto and it could hurt his party’s ability to hang on to two US Senate seats in Georgia in 5 January runoff votes.The Senate backed the bill 84-13, with the no votes coming from some of the most conservative Republicans and most liberal Democrats. The Democratic-led House backed the NDAA by 335-78, with some “no” votes also coming from liberal Democrats less likely to back a Trump veto.The NDAA determines everything from how many ships are bought to soldiers’ pay to how to address geopolitical threats. The measure vetoed by Trump was a compromise, combining separate measures already passed in the House and Senate.Lawmakers take pride in the bill having become law every year since 1961, saying it reflects their support for the military. Trump’s veto, if upheld, would delay a 3% pay raise for active-duty troops. More

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      in US Politics

      Lloyd Austin: retired army general nominated as Biden defense secretary

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      [embedded content]
      Joe Biden on Wednesday formally nominated Lloyd Austin, a retired four-star army general and the former commander of the American military effort in Iraq, to be his defense secretary, casting him as uniquely qualified to lead a diverse military at a particularly challenging moment for the nation and the world.
      If confirmed by the US Senate, Austin, 67, would make history as the first African American to lead the Pentagon, overseeing the 1.3 million active duty men and women who make up the nation’s military.
      But his nomination has put some Democrats in a bind, as they weigh their commitment to civilian control of the military against a desire to elevate a history-making nominee to the role.
      “In my judgment, there is no question that he is the right person for this job at the right moment, leading the department of defense at this moment in our nation’s history,” Biden said at an event in Wilmington, Delaware, on Wednesday afternoon. He called Austin the “definition of duty, honor and country” and a leader “feared by our adversaries, known and respected by our allies”.
      Biden said Austin would help renew America’s relationship with allies, frayed by the Trump administration, and orient the defense department to confront threats ranging from pandemics to the climate emergency to refugee crises.
      Yet Austin faces resistance on Capitol Hill, where members of Congress have long warned against nominating a former commander to lead the Pentagon in a nation that prides itself on civilian control of the military. Federal law requires a seven-year waiting period between active duty military service and serving as the secretary of defense.
      Austin retired in 2016, after a decorated 41-year military career. As such, Congress would have to grant a waiver for him to serve as defense secretary. In his remarks, Biden said he respected the need to draw a clear line between the military and civilian leadership, but urged Congress to grant Austin a waiver, as it did for retired marine general Jim Mattis to become Donald Trump’s defense secretary in 2017.
      “I would not be asking for this exception if I did not believe this moment in our history didn’t call for it.” he said. “It does call for it.”
      Speaking after Biden, Austin sought to allay concerns over his recent service, vowing to approach the role as a “civilian leader” with “deep appreciation and reverence for the prevailing wisdom of civilian control of our military”.
      “I recognize that being a member of the president’s cabinet requires a different perspective and unique responsibilities from a career in uniform,” Austin said. “And I intend to keep this at the forefront of my mind.” More

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      in US Politics

      Fears of foreign policy chaos in Trump's final days fueled by Iran bombing report

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      Fears that Donald Trump might try to wreak havoc on the world stage in his final, desperate, weeks in office appear to have been well-founded, after he reportedly asked for options on bombing Iran.
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      A report in the New York Times said Trump was advised against strikes on Iranian nuclear sites by senior officials warning of the risk of triggering a major conflict. But it added that the president may not have entirely given up on the idea of staging attacks on Iran or its allies and proxies in the region.
      On the same day, Trump’s newly installed defence secretary, Christopher Miller, confirmed that the US would draw down its military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq to 2,500 troops in each country, shrugging off concerns that an abrupt withdrawal in Afghanistan could derail peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban by convincing the rebels they could win without a deal.
      A defence department inspector general report on Tuesday said it was “unclear” whether the Taliban were violating a separate deal it made with the US in February.
      The developments come days after Trump removed Mark Esper, who as defence secretary had argued against a rapid departure from Afghanistan, and installed loyalists in the Pentagon and National Security Agency, with a record of backing aggressive action against Iran, or supporting a rapid extrication from Afghanistan.
      Miller issued a message to Pentagon staff on Tuesday, with a warning not to try to resist new orders from the top. “Do your job,” Miller said. “Focus on your assignment.”
      He stated his first goal was: “Bring the current war to an end in a responsible manner that guarantees the security of our citizens.”
      Miller did not define the “current war” but it was widely seen as a reference to the military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq.
      The new acting under secretary of defence for intelligence and security, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, installed in the Pentagon at the same time as Miller, has reportedly pushed for regime change in Iran, and for aggressive action against Iranian-backed militias in Syria and Iraq.
      The turmoil in foreign and defence policy comes at a time when Trump is refusing to accept election defeat and is preventing Joe Biden’s incoming team from receiving intelligence or policy briefings.
      Former officials have suggested that Trump is aware he will eventually have to leave office and is considering another run at the presidency in 2024. To that end, he is looking at last-minute options for fulfilling campaign promises he can point to, to build a narrative that he ran a successful administration that was removed by a rigged election.
      “This will be his version of the Lost Cause,” a former official from the Trump White House said, referring to attempts after the civil war to romanticise the Confederacy. “He can go out in a blaze of glory, and the stab in the back theory gets strengthened because he can point to all the things that he did.” More

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      in US Politics

      Mark Esper fired as Pentagon chief after contradicting Trump

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      [embedded content]
      Donald Trump has fired his defence secretary, Mark Esper, in the latest sign that the transition to a new Biden administration in January is going to be turbulent on both domestic and foreign fronts.
      Esper was fired by tweet on Monday afternoon, with the president declaring he was “pleased to announce that Christopher C Miller, the highly respected director of the National Counterterrorism Center (unanimously confirmed by the Senate), will be acting secretary of defense, effective immediately.
      “Chris will do a GREAT job! Mark Esper has been terminated. I would like to thank him for his service.”
      Esper had been at odds with Trump on a number of issues, most importantly his insistence at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer that there were no legal grounds to deploy active-service troops on the streets of US cities.
      He was also working with Congress on legislation to rename US army bases named after Confederate generals. In a final interview Esper predicted that he would be followed by a “yes man”, adding “And then God help us.”
      Miller arrived at the Pentagon on Monday amid questions about the legality of his appointment. By law, the deputy secretary of defence, currently David Norquist, would become acting secretary in the event of a sudden departure at the top. Furthermore, the law requires that a secretary of defence to have been out of active duty military service for seven years. Miller, a former Green Beret, only left the military in 2014.
      The law can be sidestepped by a vote in Congress, as was done for Esper’s predecessor James Mattis, a retired marine.
      In the face of Trump’s widely reported fury of his intransigence, Esper stopped giving press briefings in the Pentagon in July. He is reported to have written his resignation letter before the election, and Trump may have moved abruptly to prevent his defence secretary from taking the initiative.
      The president insisted he fired Mattis in December 2018, even though Mattis’s critical resignation letter had been widely circulated.
      “The abrupt firing of Secretary Esper is disturbing evidence that President Trump is intent on using his final days in office to sow chaos in our American democracy and around the world,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said.
      In an interview with Military Times given the day after the election and published on Monday, Esper said he was proud of the occasions he stood up to Trump, angrily rejecting the nickname of Yesper, used by critics who saw him as too subservient to Trump.
      “My frustration is I sit here and say, ‘Hm, 18 cabinet members. Who’s pushed back more than anybody?’ Name another cabinet secretary that’s pushed back,” Esper said. “Have you seen me on a stage saying, ‘Under the exceptional leadership of blah-blah-blah, we have blah-blah-blah-blah?”
      He claimed success in “protecting the institution, which is really important to me” and “preserving my integrity in the process”.
      “At the end of the day, it’s as I said – you’ve got to pick your fights,” he added. “I could have a fight over anything, and I could make it a big fight, and I could live with that – why? Who’s going to come in behind me? It’s going to be a real ‘yes man.’ And then God help us.”
      “This is purely an act of retaliation by a president thinking more about his petty grievances than about the good of the country,” said Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defence and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “It will make the transition to a new administration even more difficult. The message it sends around the world is that Trump is going to continue his disruptive policies for the rest of his time in office.”
      Esper may not be the last head to fall in the national security leadership. CNN cited an unnamed senior official that Esper feared the directors of the FBI and CIA, Christopher Wray and Gina Haspel, would be next to go.
      Though Trump has not conceded defeat in the presidential election, Miller will only have a little more than two months in the role before Joe Biden enters the White House.
      Esper was Trump’s second permanent secretary of defence, after Mattis, a retired US Marine Corps general who resigned in late 2018. Mattis was succeeded by Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive who spent months in the role but was not formally confirmed by the Senate.
      Trump came close to firing Esper on 3 June when the former Raytheon arms executive publicly contradicted the president over the potential use of the 1807 Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty military units against protests in Washington and other cities.
      Esper said the circumstances did not justify the use of the act, which can empower a president to send troops into states against the wishes of local authorities. Trump had threatened to invoke the law two days earlier. Following Esper’s remarks, the White House noted it was a decision for the president alone.
      Esper had also given orders for a battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division and military police units to return to base after they had been flown to the Washington area. He reversed the withdrawal order after visiting the White House, but the troops were withdrawn a few days later.
      According to reports quoting administration sources at the time, Trump’s aides advised him against firing his second defence secretary, and Esper was urged not to offer his resignation by his own advisers. According to the Wall Street Journal, he had already begun to draft a resignation letter.
      Esper and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Mark Milley, were heavily criticised by former senior defence officials and military leaders, for appearing alongside Trump on 1 June, at a photo op outside a church near the White House, after the surrounding area had been cleared by police and other federal security forces using teargas, mounted police and baton charges.
      Milley later apologised for his appearance, saying he should not have been there.
      In a third source of friction, Esper said he was open to discussion about the renaming of military bases named after Confederate army officers. The White House had ruled out any change to the names.
      Esper became defence secretary in July 2019, succeeding acting secretary Shanahan. Shanahan had taken over following Mattis’s resignation, who left the administration over Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from northern Syria, abandoning Kurdish allies who had led the fight against the Islamic State.
      After a long silence, Mattis accused Trump of abuse of executive office and making a “mockery of the constitution” in the administration’s response to the George Floyd protests. More

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      in Elections

      Why the US military would welcome a decisive 2020 election win

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      Federal laws and longstanding custom generally leave the US military out of the election process.
      But Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated warnings about widespread voting irregularities and exhortations to his supporters to become an “army for Trump” as uncertified poll watchers have raised questions about a possible military role next week.
      If any element of the military were to get involved, it would probably be the national guard under state control.
      These citizen soldiers could help state or local law enforcement with any major election-related violence, especially in the event of a contested result.
      But the guard’s more likely roles will be less visible – filling in as poll workers, out of uniform, and providing cybersecurity expertise in monitoring potential intrusions into election systems.
      Unlike regular active-duty military, the national guard answers to its state’s governor, not the president.
      Under limited circumstances, Trump could federalize them, but in that case, they would generally be barred from doing law enforcement.
      A contested vote could stir the kind of wild speculation that forced America’s top general to assure lawmakers the military would have no role in settling any election dispute between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
      A decisive result could allay such concerns by lowering the risk of a prolonged political crisis and the protests it could generate, say current and former officials as well as experts.
      “The best thing for us [the military] would be a landslide one way or another,” a US defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters, voicing a sentiment shared by multiple officials.
      A week before the election, a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll showed Biden leading Trump nationally by 10 percentage points, but the numbers are tighter in battleground states that will decide the election and gave Trump his surprise 2016 win.
      The coronavirus pandemic has added an element of uncertainty this year, changing how and when Americans vote.
      The president, who boasts about his broad support within military ranks, has declined to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he believes that results coming in on election day next Tuesday or, more likely with postal ballots still being counted, a day or days thereafter, are fraudulent.
      He has even proposed mobilizing federal troops under the 200-year-old Insurrection Act to put down unrest, and his tendency to be provocative on Twitter adds an extra element of tension, which caused discomfort among some military top brass.
      “Look, it’s called insurrection. We just send them in and we do it very easy,” Trump told Fox News in September.
      For his part, Biden has suggested the military would ensure a peaceful transfer of power if Trump loses and refuses to leave office after the election.
      US army general Mark Milley, selected last year by Trump as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, has been adamant about the military staying out of the way if there is a contested ballot.
      “If there is, it’ll be handled appropriately by the courts and by the US Congress,” he told National Public Radio this month.
      “There’s no role for the US military in determining the outcome of a US election. Zero. There is no role there,” he added.
      Peter Fever, a national security expert at Duke University, cautioned that America’s willingness to look to the military when there is a crisis could create a public expectation, however misguided, that it could also help resolve an electoral crisis.
      “If things go poorly and it’s November 30 and we still have no idea who the president is … that’s when the pressure on the military will grow,” Fever said, imagining a scenario where street protests escalate as faith in the democratic process erodes.
      Steve Abbot, a retired navy admiral who has endorsed Biden, said the danger that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act “undoubtedly concerns those who are in uniform and in the Pentagon”. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump's Afghanistan withdrawal announcement takes US officials by surprise

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      Donald Trump has announced on Twitter that he wants to bring all US troops home from Afghanistan by Christmas – a plan that came as a surprise to administration officials and which puts complicated peace negotiations in jeopardy.Multiple officials told the Associated Press they had not been informed of any such deadline and military experts said it would be impossible to withdraw all 5,000 US troops in Afghanistan and dismantle the US military headquarters by the end of the year.They suggested the president’s claim was aimed at shifting the news cycle away from coronavirus coverage and that the Pentagon would not act on the order before the 3 November US election.The announcement was, however, greeted enthusiastically by the Taliban on Thursday. If Trump follows through, the militant group would almost certainly claim it as a victory, after decades of couching their fight as a war against foreign aggression.“It’s no surprise that the Taliban have welcomed Trump’s announcement that he’d have the troops home by Christmas. They spent 19 years fighting for this,” said Ashley Jackson, the director of the ODI’s Centre for the Study of Armed Groups.“This is the last leverage the US had left in talks with the Taliban, and Trump is proposing to give it away for free.”Without the prospect of US military pressure, the Taliban would have little incentive to stay at the negotiating table with representatives of the Kabul government.From a practical point of view, disentangling a 19-year military presence would take considerably longer than two months.“It’s October, so no – it’s ridiculous. It’s simply can’t happen,” said Jason Dempsey, a former infantry officer who served in Afghanistan. “We could make some superficial show of pulling out uniformed troops, but obviously we still have a very massive contractor presence, and we would need a uniformed headquarters to oversee the shutdown and withdrawal of everything we have in country.”Trump has made impulsive policy announcements about Afghanistan on Twitter before, including calling off a US-Taliban summit last year, shortly before a withdrawal agreement was first expected to be signed.He also has a record of ordering abrupt and total troop withdrawals from foreign deployments. In most cases the Pentagon has sought to mitigate and slow the speed of the pullout but in some case the president has prevailed in bringing soldiers back home.The Afghan government and Taliban negotiators are currently attempting to hammer out a new political settlement for the country in the Qatari capital. The peace talks were set up under a withdrawal agreement signed earlier this year between the Taliban and Trump’s administration.The US-Taliban deal laid out a full departure of American forces by May 2021 but only if conditions on counter-terrorism were met, including severing ties with al-Qaida. Some critics of the Doha talks argue that the militants are merely marking time until the departure of US troops.Trump’s plans were announced in a tweet late on Wednesday night. The White House doubled down on the message on Thursday morning: “our troops in Afghanistan are coming home by the end of the year”, the official Twitter account for the administration said.It was the latest in a long line of ad hoc policy announcements from Trump that have caught his own advisers and military by surprise. His national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, had said shortly before Trump tweeted that troop numbers would be brought down to 2,500 early next year.About 4,500 troops are currently on the ground in Afghanistan, reduced from over 12,000 when the deal was signed in February.The Pentagon referred all requests for comment on Afghanistan drawdown plans to the White House.The Taliban welcomed Trump’s remarks as “a positive step towards the implementation of [the] Doha agreement”, a spokesman for the Islamist group, Mohammad Naeem, said in a statement, referring to the US withdrawal deal.Peace talks have been progressing slowly, with negotiators still trying to lay out the ground rules for their discussion. They are currently stalled on which school of Islam should be used when settling disputes.Trump has made a promise to “end” America’s wars overseas part of his bid for re-election this year, promising to bring troops home from a constellation of conflict zones including Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.But past pledges to bring back troops have often been abandoned, reversed or only partially completed.After ordering a total withdrawal of US troops from Syria in October 2019, Trump was persuaded to let some stay on the grounds that they would protect oil installations there. A US military presence has remained, but it is about half the size of the thousand-strong force that was supporting Kurdish forces in northern Syria.In July, the Pentagon announced it was pulling nearly 12,000 troops out of Germany, after Trump called for a total withdrawal to punish the Berlin government over policy disagreements.Senior military officials made clear it would take years to redeploy that number of troops, and Congress is scrutinising the order. The drawdown of foreign deployed forces was dwarfed by the dispatch of 10,000 US troops to the Gulf following the killing of the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani in January. Dempsey, now adjunct senior fellow of the military, veterans and society program at the Center for a New American Security, said the Pentagon would wait to see the outcome of the presidential election before carrying out major troop movements. “I think the lesson we all should have learned after four years is the president’s conception of his powers doesn’t go anywhere beyond his enjoyment of having an expanded Twitter presence,” he said. “We’ve become so inured to these kind of kneejerk attempts to win the news cycle that nobody will be talking about this 48 hours from now.” More