This series tracks prominent Republicans and senior personnel who served former Republican presidents now campaigning for Trump’s defeat next month. This is part 46. For earlier episodes, click on Alan Austin, above, and scroll down the page.
Our tally so far is 297. More to come. Today, however, as is our occasional whim, we present perceptive commentary from just one well-placed and highly-respected observer.
Ambassador William J Burns retired from the US Foreign Service in 2014 after a 33-year diplomatic career under all presidents from Reagan to Obama. He holds the highest Foreign Service rank, career ambassador, and is only the second serving career diplomat in history to become deputy secretary of state.
These reflections on Donald J Trump are from interviews with CBS News on 11 March 2019, The Atlantic on 9 March 2019 and World Politics Review on 10 June 2020:
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We have a White House that’s deeply divisive at home, and we’re equally divisive on the international landscape, undermining what ought to be a unique asset for the United States: our ability to invest in alliances, to draw in coalitions of countries.
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Over the three and a half decades that I served as a professional diplomat, I’ve never seen a moment when foreign policy has been more adrift, when our institutions, in particular the State Department, are more in danger of being hollowed out by a White House whose view of that landscape is that American power is best served unilaterally.
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The chaos in foreign policy—which has only accelerated in terms of the predictability of America’s role in the world—serves Putin. International uncertainty, and a situation where our allies are hedging and our rivals like China are taking advantage, and where the international institutions we’ve built in our own enlightened self-interest are beginning to teeter—those all serve Russia’s and Putin’s interests.
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It’s hard to find effective workarounds at a time when you have a White House that is dismissive and disdainful of career expertise, with its accusations that all of those people who serve from one administration to another, who serve loyally to the best of their ability both Republican and Democratic administrations, are somehow seen as a “deep state” and as suspect.
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I have seen Putin lots of times over the years. I watched their event in Helsinki. I said publicly it was the single most embarrassing performance by an American president on the international stage I’ve ever seen. And that goes back a long ways! You had Trump standing alongside Putin, throwing seventeen US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies under the bus—all in an apparent effort to get along with Putin.
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Which is totally at variance with what diplomacy is all about. It’s not about getting along with people. It’s about promoting your interests.
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If you’re a foreign government and you see these realities in Washington, what incentive do you have to pay attention to career diplomats in an embassy, when it’s crystal clear as a result of the latest Tweet that their advice and expertise is not given much credence at the White House?
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There were a number of aspects of the Ukraine episode that were deeply disturbing. First and foremost was the politicization of diplomacy — what Fiona Hill said was using diplomacy to pursue “domestic, political errands.” That’s not only deeply wrong, but it’s deeply corrosive to American interests in a very complicated, vulnerable society like Ukraine.
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If you see a collapse of arms control, that can do huge practical damage to American interests. It can restart arms races at precisely the moment when we can least afford it, when we’re dealing with the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression and still wrestling with the terrible pandemic that is affecting almost every society around the world.
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North America ought to be logically the natural strategic home base for the United States. And instead, we’ve managed that rare feat in diplomacy, which is to piss off the Canadians, which I think is deeply unfortunate.
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There’s a big difference between four years, and the damage we’ve seen so far, and eight years. I think if you had a second term of President Trump, you have to assume that you’re going to see a continuation of the instincts and the unilateral blustering that you’ve seen over the course of his first term in office. And I think that’s going to do permanent damage to American interests in the world.
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I saw a poll of Germans where they were asked, what foreign leaderships can you trust? Thirty-five percent said they could trust Putin's Russia; only 24 percent said they trust Mr. Trump's America. That's a really troubling sign. These are amongst our closest allies in the world.
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This series is to be continued …
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“Alan Austin is a great Australian journalist and, I think, a pirate. I steal Alan Austin’s findings all the time.”
~Jordan Shanks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtV-2X4BjQI