In a world where Russian tanks rumble into eastern Ukraine with impunity; Islamic State of Iraq and Syria thugs run amok in Syria and Iraq; Iran continues to build a bomb while our president secretly sends unrequited love notes to the country’s Holocaust-denying supreme leader; and China rolls us on a meaningless anti-climate change treaty while building nuclear ballistic missiles at record pace; the worst news to hit America’s standing in the world was the announcement in the Hill newspaper last week that Susan Rice is staying on as national security advisor.
Since taking the post in July 2013, Rice has presided over a record decline of American power and prestige, even by Obama-era standards. For President Obama to hand her a pink slip would send a strong message to friends and foes that America is taking its foreign policy seriously again.
Rice's is probably the most difficult and sensitive position in the entire executive branch. It involves staffing and advising the president on foreign and defense policy; coordinating the activities of the Pentagon, State Department, every intelligence agency and now the Department of Homeland Security; and making sure the president’s decisions in all these areas get implemented.
The national security advisor must project competence and confidence in meeting with foreign leaders as the president’s most trusted deputy; serve as architect and general contractor for American policy around the globe; and be able to smooth or ruffle the feathers of leading government officials, as the situation dictates.
In the right hands — those of a Henry Kissinger or a Zbigniew Brzezinski or a Brent Scowcroft — it’s a position that can shape and strengthen American leadership abroad. In the wrong hands, it becomes a cockpit of chaos, filled with bureaucratic backbiting, petty vendettas and covering for the boss instead of protecting America’s most vital interests.
Rice did not get the job not because of any expertise or skill in foreign or security affairs. As a 28-year-old consultant on Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, she advised him not to denounce the massacres taking place in Rwanda in 1994 as genocide — an act of omission that still stands out as Bill Clinton’s greatest shame.
Her tenure as assistant secretary of state for Africa and UN ambassador was one of courting Marxist dictators and defending the indefensible. That includes her now-notorious appearances on national TV insisting that the death of our ambassador in Libya was caused by a YouTube video, when word was already out that it had been an al Qaeda plot. She would again deceive the public when five Taliban terrorists were exchanged for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, describing him as having “served his country with honor” without letting on that this was in fact a hotly disputed assertion.
It is Rice's deep loyalty to Obama that got her the national security advisor slot, along with Obama’s knowledge that as national security advisor she can’t be made to testify before Congress about what really happened during those fateful hours in Benghazi — or indeed on any of the administration’s other foreign policy disasters.
Those now include the mishandling of the Islamic State crisis, where Obama and Rice ignored the Iraqi government’s repeated requests for air strikes against the radical Islamic group going back to August 2013. They include the administration's deer-in-the-headlights passivity as Vladimir Putin overran Crimea and his thugs shot down a commercial airliner. They include the president’s secretive, desperate-looking courtship of Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, even as one of his senior officials described the prime minister of Israel — a country Khamenei wants to wipe off the map — as a “chicken s**t” (some speculate the official was Rice herself, whose potty mouth is notorious).
She’s not the only arrogant incompetent on Obama’s foreign policy team. Rice deputies Tony Blinken and Ben Rhodes, and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough — not to mention Secretary of State John Kerry — deserve the axe, as well.
By replacing Rice with a serious person — like former Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy, former Adm. Dennis Blair or Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution — Obama could send a signal to friends and foes alike that this White House finally understands the peril it’s put the world in by renouncing American leadership.