Efforts to bolster the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris by the D.C. foreign policy establishment kicked into overdrive over the course of the past week with the near simultaneous release of two open letters signed by hundreds of former U.S. national security officials.
It is an accelerated version of previous campaigns in 2016 and 2020, where ex-officials and military officers on both sides of the aisle vocalizing major opposition to Trump offer to give national security cred to the Democratic candidate — in this case Harris. For their part, the candidate virtually ignores that many of these endorsements are in many cases coming from odious individuals, including architects of wars and interventions that Democrats have openly criticized as stains on recent American history.
The first was a letter signed by over 100 former Republican national security officials stating that while they, alumni of every Republican administration from Reagan to Trump, “expect to disagree with Kamala Harris on many domestic and foreign policy issues” they also “firmly oppose the election of Donald Trump.”
According to the former GOP officials, Trump’s “susceptibility to flattery and manipulation by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, unusual affinity for other authoritarian leaders, contempt for the norms of decent, ethical and lawful behavior, and chaotic national security decision-making” render him a danger to U.S. national security interests.
Critics of course point out that many of these people are the same Washington creatures who got our country into endless foreign wars and profited from them for 20 years straight — and until this day support cruel, authoritarian dictators when convenient to U.S. policy. They are not wrong.
As a group, the signatories of the first letter are a very mixed bag. The missive does feature a few sensible, responsible pillars of the Washington establishment, including those of former defense secretary (and U.S. senator) Chuck Hagel, and former FBI and CIA director William Webster.
Yet for the most part, the letter carried with it the odor of the consensus minded War Party, if not 9/11-era neoconservatism. In the past this would have been a problem for traditionally liberal and progressive outlets, but Mother Jones and the New Republic were quick to applaud the letter as a “win” for the Harris campaign. Not surprisingly, only The Nation has called out their fellow liberals and progressives for making common cause with the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, both of whom have also endorsed Harris in recent days (except for columnist Joan Walsh, who found Liz Cheney's endorsement of Harris "strangely moving," writing, "Liz, I told you we could find common ground. Let’s have a cup of coffee. Or even a beer?"
This columnist at Al Jazeera, however, offers no stated desire for beers with the Cheneys, particularly father Dick. “What makes Cheney’s endorsement, and the Democratic Party’s embrace of it, particularly galling is the way in which they gloss over these past sins in order to paint him as a guardian of American values,” charged Howard University Law school professor Ziyad Motola.
Just so.
The letter features dozens of embittered Republican hawks who claim to deplore Trump’s “unethical behavior and disregard for our Republic's time-tested principles of constitutional governance” when they evinced no such concerns when they worked for the likes of George W. Bush, Cheney, former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Gonzales, and old boss John Ashcroft during the Global War on Terror.
Among the signatories is a pair of neocons with ties to Johns Hopkins SAIS, Eliot Cohen and Eric Edelman — the latter fresh off of co-chairing the RAND Corporation’s congressional mandated Committee on the National Defense Strategy which called for (what else?) rather generous increases in defense spending for a multi-theater war against China and Russia.
Former NSA and CIA director Michael V. Hayden, long said to be among the chief architects of the Bush/Cheney administration’s program of warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens and denier of CIA torture, also signed on.
The first Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, also added his ‘John Hancock’ to the letter. Negroponte, one of the architects of our blood-stained interventions in Latin America under President Reagan, now apparently loses sleep over Trump’s “contempt for the norms of decent, ethical and lawful behavior.”
The second letter, boasting 700 signers and released on September 22 by the group National Security Leaders 4 America, is a more serious effort if only because the caliber of people, whether you agree or disagree with them, is far higher.
The bipartisan effort portrays the choice in November, perhaps correctly, as one between “serious leadership and vengeful impulsiveness.”
“Vice President Harris defends America’s democratic ideals, while former President Donald Trump endangers them,” the group said, adding:
Vice President Harris has proven she is an effective leader able to advance American national security interests. Her relentless diplomacy with allies around the globe preserved a united front in support of Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression. She grasps the reality of American military deterrence, promising to preserve the American military’s status as the most “lethal” force in the world.
While the signatories were mainly retired generals, flag officers, and diplomats, the letter boasted its own share of armchair militarists, very much including the 2016 Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton. The inclusion of a number of the most reckless and irresponsible civilian national security leaders of our time only serves to dilute the seriousness of the message — any letter featuring John Brennan, Victoria Nuland, Michael McFaul and Leon Panetta is one that can and should be safely ignored.
The message coming from Washington’s foreign policy elite, many of them directly responsible for the counterproductive and failed U.S wars and interventions of the last 40 years, is loud and clear. They do not like, trust, and indeed, perhaps even fear, the return of Trump to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The Harris campaign appears willing to exploit this politically with the unfortunate byproduct being the exclusion of any serious conversation about the odious ghosts of America’s past.
