Trump’s Underappreciated Foreign Policy

Observations from my time with National-Security Adviser Robert O’Brien.

Washington — Ambassador Robert C. O’Brien just completed his first year as what official documents cryptically call “APNSA”: Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. Better known as President Donald J. Trump’s national-security adviser, O’Brien operates from a spacious corner office in the West Wing; since the Nixon administration, its other corner offices have belonged to the press secretary, the chief of staff, and the president of the United States. Beneath dramatically high ceilings, the framed words of Winston Churchill compete for a visitor’s eyes, as do a scale model of Marine One and a digital clock that reports the times of day in key capitals.

When not fielding calls from foreign counterparts and reviewing sensitive papers, O’Brien travels in secure vehicles within Secret Service–shielded motorcades, as he did on a recent diplomatic mission to France.

I was honored to spend time exclusively in both venues with O’Brien, whom I first met in college in the early 1980s, when we both won scholarships from the Washington Cross Foundation.

O’Brien detailed several of President Trump’s important, but underappreciated, international victories.

• The first and most important of these is Trump’s total and holistic annihilation of the ISIS caliphate and, with it, the nearly complete extermination of ISIS as a threat to America and her allies.

The Obama-Biden administration allowed the ISIS mini-state to metastasize into a bloodthirsty tumor twice the size of New Jersey. Headlines and breaking-news bulletins chronicled ISIS-controlled or ISIS-inspired carnage, from Syria to Brussels to Paris to San Bernardino, Calif. Even two years ago, that frightful acronym set neck-hairs standing.

“I saw the terrible fruits of ISIS’s terrorism when I was the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs. I got to know the families of a number of Americans who were killed — were beheaded — by ISIS,” O’Brien told me. “They beheaded and killed many of their opponents and adversaries, took sex slaves among the Yazidi population, killed Christians, killed anyone who did not agree with their twisted version of Islam, and they developed a caliphate the size of Great Britain spreading across Syria and Iraq.”

President Trump changed Obama-Biden’s trigger-shy rules of engagement. Instead, O’Brien explained, Trump “gave the order that the ISIS caliphate, the physical caliphate, the ISIS state, be destroyed. And, it was: One hundred percent of the ISIS caliphate has now been destroyed.”

President Trump then put a bull’s-eye on the back of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS’s founder and Islamo-fascist spiritual leader.

“Al-Baghdadi was personally responsible for the murders of Americans, including Kayla Mueller, a fantastic, idealistic young woman who was terribly treated and then murdered by Baghdadi and his cronies,” O’Brien lamented. “Our Special Forces, in a daring operation deep into enemy territory, carried out a raid that brought justice to al-Baghdadi. . . . You do not hear as much about ISIS now because of the strong action of President Trump.”

Ironically, America’s wholesale obliteration of ISIS has removed this victory and this worry from voters’ minds. Still, O’Brien urges eternal vigilance.

“Our brave sailors, soldiers, airmen, and Marines who are operating in the Middle East, in Iraq and Syria, are carrying out missions every day to make sure that ISIS does not come back,” O’Brien says. “We are working with our intelligence professionals and our allies in the region to make sure that they can live their lives without being under the scourge of the black flag of ISIS.”

• President Trump also has brought home some 50 Americans who had been kidnapped or otherwise improperly detained in 22 foreign nations. Many of these Americans were liberated through O’Brien’s hard work in his previous post: SPEHA.

The day after Iran released four American captives in January 2016, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs, and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane,” courtesy of the Obama-Biden administration. In contrast, President Trump has gained the freedom of his countrymen “without paying concessions, without paying ransom,” O’Brien observed. “He has done it through force of will. He has done it through military rescues. He has done it through close work with our allies, some of whom have employed military force to rescue our hostages.”

While in France last July, O’Brien thanked his French colleagues for a mission that unshackled a U.S. detainee in Africa.

“Our hostage was ultimately freed by a daring French operation in Burkina Faso, an operation which we supported with intelligence, and the French provided the special operators, to go in and retrieve two French hostages, a South Korean hostage, and an American hostage.”

The Trump administration has deployed an array of tools to reconnect Americans with their families and loved ones.

“Through a variety of means — diplomatic, military, back-channel negotiations — the president has had tremendous success in bringing Americans home,” O’Brien said. “Whether it was Pastor Brunson from Turkey, or Danny Burch from Yemen, or a number of Americans who were held in North Korea, or Americans who have been held in Egypt, or Luis Andrade, who came home from Colombia; or Josh Holt and his wife, who came home from Venezuela. Tim Weeks and Kevin King came home from Afghanistan. There are just many, many Americans whom the president has brought home. And, again, he has done so with honor and integrity and reunited them with their families.”

This humanitarian portfolio now rests with West Point graduate Roger Carstens, a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Special Forces. Ambassador Carstens is rescuing even more Americans unjustly trapped abroad.

“Roger, like I did, is working closely with the Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell at the FBI and with our Counter Terrorism Directorate at the NSC,” O’Brien noted. “He is doing a great job, and we are hoping to bring some more people home to their families and friends in the near future.”

• President Trump has pushed foreign nations to decriminalize homosexuality. Obama-Biden neglected this problem, even as Iran hanged men for being gay, and ISIS gleefully hurled gay men from tall buildings within its medieval pop-up state. On this matter, Obama-Biden failed to pressure the largely Islamic nations that consider homosexuality a sin at best and a capital offense at worst.

“No one should be put in jail or, worse yet, executed because of the way they were born and the way they live their life,” O’Brien said. “And, that issue is something that mattered very much to Ambassador Ric Grenell, who was our ambassador to Germany and then became the acting director of National Intelligence. Ric worked very closely with me when we were both ambassadors and during the three months that he was the DNI.”

“Ric was the first openly gay member of a president’s cabinet, so this issue was very personal to him,” O’Brien elaborated. “‘Decrim.’ is important to the president and others in the administration, and we have worked hard on the issue at the NSC. I have spoken with our allies, and we are making tremendous progress. I believe you will see additional progress in this front in the coming months. Images of men and women being hung from cranes in Iran simply because of how they live their lives and the way they were born is abhorrent. Whether it is Iran or anywhere else, that just should not happen . . . even though Ambassador Grenell is no longer with the administration, the ‘Decrim.’ effort will continue in his absence.”

• President Trump has pursued limited government in one of the few areas where liberals and conservatives expect federal leadership: national security. As Trump instructed, O’Brien put the National Security Council on a zero-carb diet.

“When I came on board, there were approximately 180 policy professionals at the NSC, and it got up to 240 under the prior administration,” O’Brien said. “To compare that to other presidents, when John F. Kennedy was facing the Cuban Missile Crisis, he had twelve policy professionals at the NSC. President Carter had 35. President Reagan had just a few more. And during President George W. Bush’s first term, when Condoleezza Rice was in my position, we were fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with 105 policy professionals. We thought that Bush-Rice level was a good number to strive for.”

O’Brien has trimmed his staff to some 115 and aims for 105 by late 2020. Shedding Obama-Biden’s flab has not just saved taxpayers money. “We have had a lot of foreign policy successes over the last year,” O’Brien said, “which shows that a streamlined NSC is more efficient and can achieve better results than a bloated bureaucracy.”

O’Brien also described a personnel element that the anti-Trump media have kept secret better than many classified documents.

“For the first time in NSC history, twelve of our 24 senior directors are female,” O’Brien commented. “As public companies struggle to find women board members, we are very proud of the fact that President Trump has a senior national-security team, half made up of women.”

• While traversing a two-lane rural French road en route to the Aisne-Marnes American Cemetery for a wreath-laying ceremony, O’Brien shared the biggest surprise of his tenure.

“One of the really nice things that I have seen is the manner in which the president gets along with foreign leaders. He really is our No. 1 diplomat,” O’Brien said. “Mike Pompeo is a great secretary of state, and we have a lot of other great diplomats, but our No. 1 diplomat is the president of the United States.”

“I have sat in on scores of calls and meetings with him and other heads of state or heads of government, and those meeting are always cordial, even when they are frank,” O’Brien recalled. “It should not have surprised me, but he has a very good way with his colleagues, and that results in tremendous advantages for the American people as we conduct our foreign policy.”