Not only is Trump’s Muslim ban generating protests and chaos across the country and around the world, it also has a negative impact on national security.
Though cast as measures meant to make the country safe, the Trump administration’s moves during its first week in office are more likely to weaken the counterterrorism defenses the United States has erected over the past 16 years, several current and former U.S. officials said.
Let us count the ways the Trump regime, headed by regent Bannon, screwed this up.
Through inflammatory rhetoric and hastily drawn executive orders, the administration has alienated allies, including Iraq, provided propaganda fodder to terrorist networks that frequently portray U.S. involvement in the Middle East as a religious crusade, and endangered critical cooperation from often-hidden U.S. partners — whether the leader of a mosque in an American suburb or the head of a Middle East intelligence service.
Allies alienated. Propaganda provided to enemies. Cooperation ended. It’s hard to think of how Trump could have done more for ISIS without shipping them a box of fighter jets (and the traditional cake). Any pretense that the executive order benefits the United States is an illusion.
The executive order signed Friday is ostensibly meant to protect the United States from terrorism, but will almost certainly have the opposite effect, said experts, former senior officials, and lawmakers from both parties.
How many of the people detained by Trump’s Muslim ban represent a threat to the United States? That would be none. The stories coming out of the ban are heartbreaking—elderly parents kept from visiting their children, exemplary students trapped away from their schools, and those who risked their lives and their families to work with the United States military denied the protection they were promised.
It’s exactly the blanket, thoughtless nature of the order that gives it such little value in protecting the United States, and such great value in being used against us.
Trump’s inauguration vow to put America first and “only America” rattled allies. A leaked draft of an order on U.S. detention policies compounded those concerns by raising the prospect of rebuilding the CIA’s network of notorious “black site” prisons around the world. The immigration measures imposed late Friday were seen by U.S. counterterrorism officials and analysts as particularly counterproductive and poorly conceived.
“The whole order is and will be read as another anti-Islam, anti-Muslim action by this president and his administration,” said Paul Pillar, a former top official at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. “It is not targeted at where the threat is, and the anti-Islam message that it sends is more likely to make America less safe.”
In fact, it’s hard to find anyone to defend the action. While grossly inflating the danger represented by refugees was a part of the Trump campaign, even Trump supporters didn’t seem to anticipate that he would move to not just shut out children fleeing from the same “Islamic radicals” he claims to hate, but also to block green card holders who had lived in the United States for years and those coming into the country for a brief visit. The level of overreach, and the resulting damage, is hard to estimate.
The sweeping action against people from Muslim-majority countries, including permanent legal U.S. residents, reflected the growing influence of Trump’s senior advisor and strategist, Stephen Bannon, the architect of the president’s populist campaign rhetoric demonizing immigrants and Muslim refugees in particular. As a candidate, Trump promised a ban on all Muslims entering the country, before later revising it to apply to people from “terror prone” countries.