Vietnam will enjoy the fastest economic growth in Southeast Asia in 2020, according to a new forecast from British multinational investment bank HSBC.
Vietnam has been a beneficiary of the China-U.S. trade war, enjoying a boost in services and exports that should drive economic growth to 7% this year, HSBC economist Yun Liu said last week. But she said the country remains vulnerable to economic risks including trade protection and inflation.
Inflation is increasing as swine flu forces up the price of pork, showing how a single product can weigh on the economic indicators of an entire nation of nearly 100 million people. Vietnam also fears rising inflation if simmering Middle East tensions continue to push up oil prices.
Nevertheless, Liu predicted the communist nation’s “impressive” economic performance will give it another “year in the 7% club,” outshining fast-growing Myanmar, the Philippines, and other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Nintendo, Apple
Liu noted that some of the biggest names in technology, ranging from Nintendo to Google, are relocating to Vietnam, probably because the trade war is making production in China more expensive.
FILE – A shop in Hanoi sells electronics, which are becoming a big export product for Vietnam.
“Likely due to the trade tensions that have accelerated multinational corporations’ relocation decisions, many tech giants, including Apple, Google, Nintendo and Kyocera, have now followed in Samsung’s footsteps and plan to move parts of their production to Vietnam,” Liu forecast
Samsung, the Korean smartphone giant, already accounts for close to one quarter of Vietnam’s exports, but others are following the same path. Total electronics exports to the United States rose 76% in the first 11 months of 2019, as U.S. tariffs made Chinese-made phones more expensive for Americans.
“Contrary to many Asian countries which have seen a contraction in industrial activity, Vietnam’s manufacturing sector remained resilient [in 2019], contributing 30% to headline GDP growth,” Liu said.
Also contributing to GDP growth are increases in tourism and private consumption among Vietnamese citizens themselves.
Risks
The solid growth has brought renewed risk of inflation, a problem Hanoi had mostly brought under control in recent years. Prices last month rose by 5.2% on an annualized basis — the highest monthly figure since January 2014. Economists attribute the unexpected jump in part to higher pork prices.
FILE – A butcher in Ho Chi Minh City sells pork, whose price increases are feeding fears of inflation in Vietnam.
“The economy faces two key risks over the coming year,” said Gareth Leather, a senior Asia economist, in an analysis for research company Capital Economics. Citing trade protectionism as one risk, he said the other “is the outbreak of African swine fever, which has led to a sharp rise in pork prices.”
Liu agrees. She said Vietnam faces “a confluence of factors including higher pork demand in the run-up to the Tet holidays [Lunar New Year] and likely competition with mainland China on pork imports as the latter has recently lowered pork tariffs.”
The regional minimum wage in Vietnam has also increased, while oil prices around the world spiked after a U.S. airstrike killed Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force. Leather said the most vulnerable Asian nations are Vietnam, India and China.
He also voiced a widely held sentiment regarding Vietnam’s trade imbalance with the United States. “Vietnam’s growing bilateral trade surplus with the U.S. could lead to retaliatory action,” Leather said.
A violent mob assault on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. The targeted killing of an Iranian general ordered by President Donald Trump. An accidental missile strike of a Ukrainian commercial airliner. A tightening of U.S. economic sanctions on Iran. The detention of the British ambassador in Tehran.
We are barely beyond the first week of a new year and a new decade, but already the alarming and chaotic news coming out of the Middle East makes it difficult not to feel a sense of foreboding for what’s to come. Historical forces seem to be moving on paths impossible to identify precisely, but lead in the general direction of danger, political analysts and historians say.
And all this takes place at a time when the world already had plenty to worry about.
Trump has been impeached and awaits a trial seeking his removal from office that could begin in the Senate later this week. North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un continues to threaten the U.S. and has declared that he will no longer observe a ban on nuclear tests. Overseas, Australia is on fire. Britain is edging ever closer to Brexit.
A Middle East on the edge
With the crisis in the Middle East one miscalculation away from spiraling out of control, and a suite of other international fires to put out, many key posts in the Trump administration’s national security apparatus are filled by unconfirmed officials or sit empty altogether.
It’s little wonder that newspapers across the country are running stories on the rise in the number of people seeking mental health care for anxiety.
At times like these, a little historical perspective can be helpful.
FILE – Iranians burn an Israeli and a U.S. flag during an anti-U.S. protest in the capital Tehran, Jan. 4, 2020, over the killings of Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi paramilitary chief Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.
Parallels to 1968
Robert Dallek, noted historian and author, points out that this is not the first time the United States has been beset by seemingly overwhelming problems.
“You know, we’ve been through many difficult moments,” Dallek said in an interview with VOA. “Like 1968, when the country was locked into the war in Vietnam and you had inner-city riots, and [Lyndon] Johnson announced he wasn’t going to run for president again.”
At the time, a travel agency in France was pitching vacations in the United States with the tagline, “See America while it lasts,” Dallek said.
“It was a time when people also thought that America was slowly coming to an end and might be heading into a new Civil War, and so there are echoes of that here,” he said. However, he stressed that there are reasons to be hopeful. The United States did not descend into war, the war in Vietnam eventually came to an end, and civil unrest abated.
None of this, however, is to suggest that the real anxiety Americans feel is misplaced or imagined. Perhaps the most stressful issue facing Americans right now is the crisis unfolding in the Middle East.
Attack on US Embassy in Baghdad
On New Year’s Eve, Americans woke up to the news that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone was under siege by a mob that had broken into a reception area and set part of the structure on fire. The protests followed a December 29 U.S strike against Iranian-backed Kataeb Hezbollah sites in Iraq and Syria in retaliation for the killing of a U.S. civilian contractor near the Iraqi city of Kirkuk two days earlier. The Pentagon announced that it was dispatching troops to the region, a number that quickly grew into the thousands.
FILE – Pro-Iranian militiamen and their supporters set a fire in front of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, Jan. 1, 2020.
Later on Twitter, Trump promised retribution if the attackers, reported to have connections to an Iran-backed militia group, harmed embassy personnel or damaged U.S. property. “This is not a Warning, it is a Threat. Happy New Year!” he wrote.
US drone strike on Soleimani
Two days later, shortly after landing at Baghdad International Airport, General Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s notorious Quds Force, was killed in a drone strike that had been personally ordered by Trump.
Soleimani, who directed operations that have led to the killing of hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq and untold thousands of civilian deaths across the Middle East, was generally considered the second-most-powerful figure in the Iranian government.
Iran, promising revenge, observed three days of mourning for Soleimani before launching missiles at two installations in Iraq housing American military personnel. There was reason to believe that the missile strikes were more symbolic than dangerous.
But any hope that the limited Iranian response might reduce the tension in the region was dashed just hours later, when a Ukrainian jetliner with 176 travelers on board crashed outside Tehran. By the weekend, it had become clear that nervous Iranian air defense forces, on alert for U.S. retaliation after the strikes in Iraq, shot down the plane by accident, a fact that Iran eventually admitted.
FILE – A picture of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, killed in a U.S. drone strike at Baghdad airport, is seen on a building which formerly housed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 7, 2020.
More sanctions for Iran
The United States announced Friday morning that it would impose new economic sanctions on Iran. These would come on top of existing penalties that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has described as the most punishing the U.S. has ever levied on another country. Many Democratic lawmakers and some Republicans complained that Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other senior administration officials have misled Congress and the public in arguing that Suleimani had posed an “imminent” threat.
In Tehran on Saturday, the ambassador of Britain was arrested and held for several hours after attending a vigil for the 176 people killed in the attack on the Ukrainian airliner. The highly unusual step by Iran was accompanied by accusations that the diplomat incited street protests against the Iranian regime, a charge the British government hotly denied.
Within the U.S., the collective response to the unfolding crisis in the Middle East has been unease about where all this will end. Social media has been rife with references — some joking, some not — to an imminent World War III. But experts point out the likelihood of all-out war between the United States and Iran is low.
At the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, professor of political science Michael Horowitz and senior fellow Elizabeth Saunders wrote Friday, “Blowback may be coming, and the U.S. strike against Soleimani may increase the risk of bad outcomes short of an all-out war. Those are reasons for concern. But it’s critical to distinguish such consequences from a general war.”
They added, “There will no doubt be consequences — but general war remains unlikely.”
FILE – Various rates and prices for currencies and gold coins are displayed at an exchange bureau, in Tehran, Iran, Aug. 21, 2019.
A desire for ‘normalcy’
Dallek, the presidential historian, said that in his view, the most likely outcome of a lengthy period of civic stress is an electorate primed for a return to perceived normalcy. This is something the Democrats are counting on as the 2020 presidential campaign heats up.
“I think the outcome of all this is going to be like in 1968, when the country wanted to get back to some kind of continuity,” Dallek said.
It was that election in 1968, of course, that gave the United States the Nixon presidency.
The White House is voicing strong support for Iranian protesters who took to the streets to decry the shoot down of a Ukrainian commercial jetliner outside Tehran last week. VOA’s Michael Bowman reports, the Trump administration faces continued bipartisan pressure from Congress to provide more details on the intelligence that prompted the U.S.’s targeted killing of an Iranian general, as Democrats seek to rein in the president’s ability to unilaterally order military action against Iran.
Hong Kong denied entry to the executive director of Human Rights Watch, the international watchdog said Sunday.
Kenneth Roth, who traveled to Hong Kong with plans to launch the organization’s “World Report 2020,” was told he could not enter when he landed at Hong Kong International Airport on Sunday. Human Rights Watch said that immigration agents gave no reason as to why the U.S. citizen was denied entry.
“I had hoped to spotlight Beijing’s deepening assault on international efforts to uphold human rights,” Roth said. “The refusal to let me enter Hong Kong vividly illustrates the problem.”
I flew to Hong Kong to release @HRW’s new World Report. This year it describes how the Chinese government is undermining the international human rights system. But the authorities just blocked my entrance to Hong Kong, illustrating the worsening problem. https://t.co/GRUaGh8QUbpic.twitter.com/iTHVEXdbwO
Human Rights Watch was scheduled to release the report on January 15th at a news conference. Roth’s introductory essay to the 652-page report warns that China’s government is “carrying out an intensive attack on the global system for enforcing human rights.”
The watchdog said Roth will now present the report Jan. 14 from New York City.
The Dec. 22 parliamentary elections in Uzbekistan highlighted the complex mix of change and inertia that characterizes this Central Asian country today.
In Almalyk, an industrial town in the Tashkent region, leading journalist Dilfuza Ruziyeva said corruption is still deeply rooted, even so close to the country’s capital.
“There is very little accountability and transparency despite reform efforts and bold statements from Tashkent,” said Ruziyeva, the chief editor of the local newspaper.
Yet modest changes abound. Uzbekistan’s politicians, however befuddled they sometimes seem by the new need to respond to voters, were compelled to acknowledge and then commit to address citizens’ growing demands.
Indeed, Uzbekistan’s political class, which has long had a sense of insulation and impunity, now seems to recognize, sometimes quite explicitly, that it owes the public real answers to real problems.
Take Senator Rahmatulla Nazarov, who is shifting jobs to manage a think tank. In an impromptu interview with VOA at his suburban Tashkent polling station, he acknowledged that “distrust in the system is the biggest problem.”
Such an acknowledgement — an admission that the system has simply not been responsive to citizen concerns — has become common here, and it is changing the political discourse.
Alisher Qodirov, who leads Milliy Tiklanish (National Revival Party), told VOA that “for the longest time, we punished those who wanted change and pushed for progress. We tortured them, we killed them … we kicked them out. We must learn to honor the human being, ideas and human rights. Only then can Uzbekistan move forward as a society and state.”
His party claims to be the most critical of the government among the five parties that were permitted to contest the election. In fact, none of the state-sanctioned parties really opposes the policies of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev; what has changed is that the lack of real opposition can now be openly discussed.
At a pre-election debate Dec. 19, VOA asked party leaders whether they should place a higher value on security or freedom. All five leaders replied that both were important and made sure to claim to be against torture and the abuse of human rights.
Yet they offered few, if any, specific policy proposals for achieving a more balanced system. Indeed, all five struggled to explain more specific policy positions, much less differences, perhaps because so little sets them apart, and because the president, not the parties or the legislature, sets the agenda for the country. Reforms happen when Mirziyoyev wants them.
Adolat (Justice Party) leader and former presidential candidate Narimon Umarov bluntly says the political elite “did what we had to do” during the rule of the late dictator Islam Karimov, and urges citizens to “focus on the present and future now.” He says Uzbek politicians should feel “challenged in every way” by public expectations, while adding that he is personally “hopeful and energized.”
Aktam Haitov, leader of Mirziyoyev’s own Liberal Democratic Party (O’zLiDep), argues that the party deserves credit for the progress so far. O’zLiDep says it is pushing for deeper reforms in agriculture and to empower the private sector, precisely reflecting Mirziyoyev’s stated policy goals.
Ulugbek Inoyatov is a teacher who became education minister and has been widely criticized for not being effective in that role. Now, he leads Uzbekistan’s People’s Democratic Party and acknowledges that “the election campaign was a learning process for me.”
Inoyatov’s party did not have prescriptions for every problem, and its program still lacks substance. But he stresses the benefits of the improved process: “This campaign and our engagement with the people around the country is helping us to strengthen our focus,” he said.
It is easy to dismiss the electoral process, as many international observers have. Uzbekistan is neither a constitutional democracy nor on the way to becoming one. But by creating an opening for social mobilization, for citizens to question authorities, and by forcing the politicians to respond to public expectations and demands, the process marked a step toward more diverse politics.
More questions on more issues were openly aired than at any time in recent memory, including by the media. At live debates, the press corps was aggressive. And not surprisingly, the party representatives on stage seemed nervous, confused and at times forgot why they were even there.
It was long forbidden to discuss the government’s refusal to allow visits to Uzbekistan by thousands of overseas Uzbek natives, citizens and non-citizens alike. Some fear they are on blacklists, while others are simply denied entry. But during the election debate, the leaders of all five parties felt compelled to say that the country is — or should be — open to these compatriots.
The next challenge will be to see whether the newly elected parliament can exercise more meaningful oversight of the administration.
Akmal Burhanov, a reelected MP, is calling for an end to the practice whereby legislators also operate businesses or even serve simultaneously as regional governors. Those who are elected today should work as lawmakers only if they are to provide an effective check on the government, he said.
That is why the biggest tests are yet to come. The parliament is more representative than ever before for instance, nearly one-third of its members are women, the most in its history. But as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe noted the day after the contest, “The elections showed that the ongoing reforms need to continue and be accompanied by more opportunities for grassroot civic initiatives.”
The morning of Dec. 22, dawned cold but bright in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, as a morning snowfall gave way to afternoon light. For the first time since the death in 2016 of the country’s longtime strongman, Islam Karimov, voters went to the polls to choose a parliament and local councils.
For the first time also, they projected the heightened expectations of a much more mobilized and aware citizenry, despite their low opinion of the current crop of candidates for the so-far toothless legislature.
“Members of parliament have no trust or respect [from] the citizens because citizens don’t feel their impact,” said Kamil Fakhrutdinov, a blogger in the region of Kashkadarya. His Yakkabog24 focuses on once-forbidden socio-political issues.
Meaningful change
Three weeks after the election, it is apparent that something meaningful has changed in this Central Asian republic, even though the electoral process itself was flawed and the country remains an authoritarian regime.
Even this highly circumscribed election gave citizens and the media space to ask questions that would have been unthinkable just three years ago.
“We are not the same passive society we were three years ago,” Fakhrutdinov told VOA. “So those who want to represent us must know that they will have been gifted [with] a trust and charged with working for the people.”
Shavkat Mirziyoyev
Since coming to power three years ago, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev has announced a spate of reforms and changed some elements of this once brutal dictatorship. He has openly acknowledged the country’s legacy of torture and human rights abuses, removed from power the feared leader of the Uzbek security services, and dismissed dozens of national and local officials, including from the country’s coercive apparatus, such as the prosecutor’s office.
But Mirziyoyev’s hopeful words and modest actions have raised expectations sky-high, not just among international observers but, more important, among Uzbek citizens themselves. Uzbekistan is no democracy, but its citizens approached their first post-Karimov opportunity to cast votes with very real expectations for change.
Across the country, from Tashkent to regional cities like Namangan in the Fergana Valley, the process raised hopes that in the future Mirziyoyev might undertake bolder reforms and adopt enduring systemic changes. But the management of the Dec. 22 election also served to demonstrate the limits to the president’s reform agenda.
The central problem for Mirziyoyev is that he aims to preserve the core elements of Uzbekistan’s political and economic system, and his own power, even as he opens greater space for rulers and ruled to interact. His government permitted five parties to contest seats, but all five were pro-presidential parties, chartered by the state and with proposed policies that varied not at all from Mirziyoyev’s and very little from one another’s.
No opposition parties, or opposition politicians in exile, were permitted to participate.
The Uzbek parliament itself has been historically weak. In interviews with members of the Mirziyoyev administration, as well as with the private sector, the most common criticism of parliamentarians was their lack of professionalism. Many fail to grasp even the basics of lawmaking and oversight.
That has been much on the minds of those who showed up at polling stations on voting day.
Namangan-based human rights defender Zohidjon Zakirov told VOA that voters in his region knew very little about parliamentary or local council elections, much less who was running or for what office. That sentiment was echoed in comments to VOA at polling stations.
To be sure, the voters were interested in the election. But few had illusions that meaningful changes could be expected from the candidates, who often seemed confused about why they were running, or what policies they would espouse should they win a seat.
Even so, the cynicism among the voters found expression in ways that, in themselves, suggested just how much has changed in Uzbekistan. For decades, the Uzbek media have been tightly controlled and a reliable mouthpiece of the state. But private journalists and bloggers found their voices in this contest. They asked tough questions of the candidates at state-organized debates.
In recent weeks, a humorous fake television advertisement, “As Much As We Can,” lampooned the electoral process, making fun of all five of the officially sanctioned parties by noting that they had simply promised to do “as much as we can.” The video and other commentary directly addressed the lack of substance and relevance in the political parties’ agendas.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE/ODIHR), which monitored the election, issued an official statement emphasizing that while the vote “took place under improved legislation and with greater tolerance of independent voices,” it “did not yet demonstrate genuine competition and full respect of election day procedures.”
Still, it added, “The contesting parties presented their political platforms and the media hosted debates, many aired live.” For a country that was among the world’s worst dictatorships just three years ago, that is notable progress that will raise citizen expectations all the more.
Hundreds of Iranians protested in several cities around the country Saturday after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps admitted to mistakenly shooting down a civilian Ukrainian plane, killing all 176 on board.
In Tehran, students of Sharif University, also known as Iran’s MIT, chant, “Referendum is our people’s salvation!”
Protest videos show some demonstrators shouting, “Down with the dictator!” and calling Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei a “traitor,” near Tehran’s Polytechnic (Amirkabir) University.
In the face of mounting evidence, Iran acknowledged Saturday that it had shot down a Ukrainian jetliner by accident this week after it took off in Tehran, killing all 176 people aboard.
Once Iran made the admission, after three days of denying it was responsible, the reaction came swiftly, from Iran and around the world.
From Iran:
General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ aerospace division, said his unit accepted full responsibility for the shootdown. In an address broadcast by state TV, he said that when he learned about the downing of the plane, “I wished I was dead.”
Hajizadeh said the missile operator mistook the 737 for a cruise missile and didn’t obtain approval from his superiors because of disruptions in communications.
“He had 10 seconds to decide. He could have decided to strike or not to strike and under such circumstances, he took the wrong decision,” Hajizadeh said.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, expressed his “deep sympathy” to the families of the victims and called on the armed forces to “pursue probable shortcomings and guilt in the painful incident.”
President Hassan Rouhani acknowledged his country’s responsibility.
“Iran is very much saddened by this catastrophic mistake and I, on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran, express my deep condolences to the families of victims of this painful catastrophe,” the president said.
Rouhani added he had ordered “all relevant bodies to take all necessary actions [to ensure] compensation” to the families of those killed.
A leader of Iran’s opposition Green Movement, Mehdi Karroubi, called on Khamenei to step down over the handling of the downed airliner.
FILE – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, right, leads a meeting of the emergency response team on the crash of the Ukraine International Airlines plane in Iran, in Kyiv, Ukraine, Jan. 9, 2020.
From Ukraine:
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy thanked the U.S, Britain, Canada and others for information about the crash. He said it “undoubtedly helped” push Iran to acknowledge its responsibility. Zelenskiy said the crash investigation should continue and the “perpetrators” should be brought to justice.
“It’s absolutely irresponsible,” Ukraine International Airlines Vice President Ihor Sosnovskiy told reporters. “There must be protection around ordinary people. If they are shooting somewhere from somewhere, they are obliged to close the airport.”
From Canada:
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau demanded Iran provide “full clarity” on the downing of the plane, which Ottawa said had 57 Canadian citizens aboard.
FILE – Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks during a news conference, Jan. 9, 2020, in Ottawa, Ontario.
“What Iran has admitted to is very serious. Shooting down a civilian aircraft is horrific. Iran must take full responsibility,” Trudeau told a news conference in Ottawa. “Canada will not rest until we get the accountability, justice and closure that the families deserve.”
Foreign governments condemned the downing of the plane, with Ukraine demanding compensation. Canada, Ukraine and Britain, however, called Tehran’s admission an important first step.
The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, and Reuters contributed to this report.
In a defining week for President Donald Trump on the world stage, national security adviser Robert O’Brien was a constant presence at the president’s side as the U.S. edged to the brink of war with Iran and back again.
The contrasts with O’Brien’s predecessor along the way — in secret consultations at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, in the Oval Office and in basement deliberations in the White House Situation Room — could not have been more stark.
While former national security adviser John Bolton spent decades as a conservative iconoclast in the public arena, O’Brien is far from a household name. While Bolton had strong opinions he shared loudly in the Oval Office, O’Brien has worked to establish an amiable relationship with Trump.
And while Bolton’s trademark mustache was a target of Trump’s mockery, the president is drawn to O’Brien’s low-key California vibe and style.
“Right out of central casting,” Trump says of O’Brien.
FILE – President Donald Trump and Robert O’Brien, the new national security adviser, board Air Force One at Los Angeles International Airport, Sept. 18, 2019, in Los Angeles.
Rapport with Trump
For all the differences between the two men, though, O’Brien ended up signing off on the same course of action that Bolton had long endorsed: a strike to take out Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani. The decision drew retaliatory missile strikes from Tehran.
The way that O’Brien steered the Trump White House through the process endeared himself to the president and widened his rapidly growing influence in the West Wing.
“He’s a deal guy and the president’s a deal guy,” said Jared Kushner, a senior White House adviser. “A lot of people inside the foreign policy establishment are good at explaining why things are wrong but are petrified to put things in play and take calculated risks.”
The Iran drama was set in motion when Trump summoned O’Brien from Los Angeles to the president’s Palm Beach spread, where Trump was spending a two-week winter holiday. While other top aides, including Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, consulted with the president from afar, Trump wanted O’Brien at his side.
“Robert was calm, cool and collected, constantly keeping the president updated,” Kushner said.
More than a half-dozen current and former administration officials and Republicans close to the White House contributed to this account. Many spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Rise of a new voice
Trump has long been known for tuning out old voices in favor of new ones, but O’Brien’s rise in the president’s inner circle has been rapid. The 53-year-old O’Brien, who has handled scores of complex international litigation, has a corner office on the first floor of the White House, a few steps from the Oval Office.
A sharp-dressing Republican lawyer who worked in the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, O’Brien was appointed by Trump in May 2018 to be the nation’s top hostage negotiator. He successfully worked for the release of several Americans, including pastor Andrew Brunson, who spent two years in a Turkish prison. O’Brien also traveled to Sweden to lobby for the release of rapper A$AP Rocky, imprisoned on an assault charge.
Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser, fell out of favor with the president after a series of sharp disagreements, including over North Korea and Iran policies. He was forced out in September. Trump’s previous national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, never developed a personal rapport with the president, who tuned out on McMaster’s long-winded briefing style.
Bolton had frequently tussled with Pompeo and Defense Department officials and, at times, frustrated the president with his sharp clashes and bureaucratic knife-fighting.
FILE – Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, back left, and National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien head to the Oval Office of the White House, in Washington, Nov. 25, 2019.
Honest, collaborative
O’Brien, in contrast, makes it a point to collaborate with the State Department and the Pentagon. People familiar with his work style describe an honest broker who is diplomatic but direct. He is known to present the views of Pompeo and top defense and intelligence officials to the president as he would brief a legal client.
Colleagues say he doesn’t try to push his own foreign policy ideas on the president and is more deferential to the views from other agencies than was Bolton. He has a plaque on his desk that says, “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.” It’s a replica of the one President Ronald Reagan kept on his desk in the Oval Office.
Administration officials, at least for now, point to a new camaraderie in the latest incarnation of Trump’s national security team: Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper were West Point classmates; Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has grown close to Trump; and O’Brien, unlike Bolton, has not tried to pull an end run around others in the decision-making process.
“I think he’s very comfortable with the idea of the job as a staff job, which I think is the model,” said former Sen. Jim Talent, a Missouri Republican who met O’Brien more than a decade ago when they were advising Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign. “Obviously when the president asks for his advice, he gives his personal opinion.”
FILE – Then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis speaks beside President Donald Trump during a briefing in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, Oct. 23, 2018.
Critics see ‘yes’ men without gravitas
Where Republicans see as collegial team, some Democratic critics worry that Trump is surrounding himself with advisers too eager to accede to his views.
New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the administration’s national security team seems to lack “discerning voices.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., lamented this past week that Trump’s current team lacked the gravitas of earlier advisers, including former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and McMaster, both retired generals.
“People like Mattis and McMaster, who disagree with the president because he’s so erratic, leave — leaving a bunch of ‘yes’ people, who seem to want to do whatever the president wants,” Schumer said recently on the Senate floor.
After the drone strike on Soleimani, there was a deliberate effort to give the Iranians some space to react without committing the U.S. to a military response. Even as Trump delivered fire and brimstone warnings, the rest of his national security team gave indications that not every Iranian response would send American missiles flying. When Tehran’s rockets left no casualties in attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq, the crisis abated, at least for the moment.
While former advisers such as Mattis and McMaster, attempted to check some of the president’s impulses, O’Brien has been regarded as enabling some of Trump’s high-risk inclinations.
O’Brien’s style has been to offer pros and cons before ultimately agreeing with Trump’s decisions, including the moves to abruptly withdraw U.S. troops from Kurdish-held territory in Syria and the military raid that killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
O’Brien has established good relationships at the White House and on Capitol Hill, said Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah.
“Every time I talk to the president about him — and his name comes up a fair amount when the president and I are talking — the president just always speaks glowingly about him,” said the Utah senator. He added that O’Brien “has a client. He doesn’t have his own agenda that he’s pursuing.”
