Daily Times

As 2019 looms, for the United States, can the new year be any worse than the final weeks of 2018? Donald Trump promised to drain the Washington swamp. Instead, he has turned his administration and the White House into the mother of all swamps where incompetence has become the common denominator and chaos the dominant descriptor.

The president’s base believes the president can do no wrong. The decisions to depart Syria and Afghanistan without a plan or answering the what next question are as flawed as depending on Saudi Arabia to fund reconstruction in Syria and Turkey to demolish the Islamic State. Worse, Bashar al Assad, Russia and Iran can run wild. And as the US did in 1973 and 1991, the Kurds once again prove Jack Kennedy’s aphorism that the only thing worse than being an enemy of the United States is being an ally and friend.

The stock markets have crashed. The dismissal of Defence Secretary Jim Mattis has deprived the president of whatever national security credibility he had left. The government shutdown over a mythical wall that can never be built on America’s southern border and paid for by Mexico further destroys the legitimacy of the White House to govern. And the number of empty senior vacancies in the Executive Branch including an acting Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defence is a stunning example of the petulance at the western end of Pennsylvania Avenue keeping good people from serving.

In three days, Democrats will control the House of Representatives. A flurry of investigations will follow, many justified and many long overdue after House Republicans prevaricated to protect the president. Senate Republicans should be worried about the stability of the president given his withdrawals from two war zone; a jihad against his former defence secretary; a twitter pronouncement of Tariff man that precipitated the Wall Street sell-off; a government shutdown he originally embraced; and his threat to fire the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. This was not helped by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s ill-advised comment that the big US banks were not at any credit risk causing markets to assume the opposite.

Meanwhile, the embattled president, as he told the Washington Post, trusts his “gut” instincts far more than expert advice assuming he is listening to any of it. That instinct, embracing President Xi Jinping of China; Vladimir Putin of Russia; and Kim Jong Un of North Korea, now seems far from infallible. North Korea is reversing course on denuclearization — hardly a surprise given its past track record — and no one wins a trade war with China or anyone else.

The stock markets have crashed. The dismissal of Defence Secretary Jim Mattis has deprived the president of whatever national security credibility he had left. The government shutdown over a mythical wall that can never be built on America’s southern border and paid for by Mexico further destroys the legitimacy of the White House to govern

An economic recession certainly seems more plausible. Brexit likewise threatens not only the UK but the special relationship with the US. Both main British political parties are profoundly divided on how or whether to leave the EU. Options range from bad to worse. The tariff war with China is still in free fall. And Special Counsel Robert Mueller is a dagger or a derringer pointed at the presidency.

The US has been in grave danger before. The Civil War; two world wars and a cold one; a great depression; the Cuban Missile and the October 1973 crises that raised the spectre of nuclear war; defeat in Vietnam; the stock market crashes of 1987 and 2008; September 11th; and other catastrophes were overcome. Yet an impending sense of doom seems eerily relevant today as the least experienced and most unthoughtful president to hold that office in modern times remains in charge. What more damage can he do?

Or by some miracle is a self-correcting and invisible force in play? Perhaps the president in his self-imposed Christmas exile at the White House could have a massive conversion in which logic, facts, analysis and objectivity matter again. Arguments for example to withdraw from Syria and Afghanistan could be fashioned provided none are based on gut instincts. Markets can be reassured. Threats to fire the Chairman of the Fed are not the best reassurances. Reconciliation with Democrats is not out of the question. Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill made that happen more than three decades ago.

Having lived through fifty years of these crises including the Vietnam debacle, I hope America will endure this president’s disastrous actions. Hope, however, is a weak reed for basing policy and favourable outcomes. Yet, how is a president convinced who, by all accounts, refuses to listen, read and takes advice from Fox News, to lead in a positive, constructive and reasoned way? The answer to that question may well determine if the swamp will be drained or whether it will become an even more treacherous, consuming and dangerous quagmire.

The writer is UPI’s Arnaud deBorchgrave Distinguished Columnist. His latest book is Anatomy of Failure: Why America Has Lost Every War It Starts. The writer can be reached on Twitter @harlankullman

Published in Daily Times, December 30^th 2018.