by Susan Rice
I also believe we underestimated the extent to which growing domestic partisan divisions were hampering America’s ability to lead on the world stage. Opposing political parties too often consider withholding or blocking congressional support for a presidential foreign policy initiative that could advance U.S. interests, simply out of a desire to deny the sitting president a “win.” That calculus appears to have animated many Republicans in Congress who withheld support for Obama’s plan to use force to confront Syrian chemical weapons, sought to thwart the Iran deal, ridiculed the Paris Climate Agreement, and (like McConnell) failed to condemn Russian interference in the 2016 election in a forceful and timely way. Similarly, traditional GOP supporters of free trade (unlike most Democrats) who normally would have been inclined to support the twelve-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership to promote American exports and balance an economically rising China, could not countenance handing the administration even that foreign policy success.
Despite such headwinds, President Obama and his team succeeded in many important respects, starting with taking the necessary actions domestically and internationally to prevent a global economic catastrophe. We responsibly brought home the vast majority of our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, while taking bin Laden off the field and decimating core Al Qaeda. Though we did not anticipate quickly enough the gathering threat ISIS posed in Iraq and Syria, we adjusted and devised a sound strategy that resulted in its battlefield defeat. The Obama administration fully and verifiably rolled back Iran’s nuclear program and thus averted another potential major war in the Middle East through the skillful mix of diplomacy, economic sanctions, and the threat of force. Following the bitter acrimony over the Iraq War, we managed crucially to heal deep wounds with our European allies, despite the tensions reignited by the Snowden disclosures.
We positioned the U.S. to lead more effectively in the Western Hemisphere, particularly by normalizing relations with Cuba. In Asia, the Obama administration invested new resources and attention toward building our relations with India and Southeast Asian countries along with our treaty allies in Japan, Australia, South Korea, and the Philippines. We demonstrated the ability of the U.S. to simultaneously compete and cooperate with China, as most vividly illustrated by the understandings we reached on climate change. In Africa, President Obama hosted the first-ever U.S. Africa Summit and implemented numerous initiatives to bolster economic development and security sector capacity.
The landmark 2015 Paris Climate Agreement grew out of years of relentless personal diplomacy by President Obama, starting at the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009 and culminating in groundbreaking agreements with China, and later India, which were critical to achieving international consensus. Further, he demonstrated the power of effective U.S. leadership on numerous other global challenges from combating ISIS and global health security threats like Ebola to spearheading historic advances in arms control and nuclear security as well as landmark development initiatives to reduce poverty, boost food security, increase access to electricity, and empower girls and young leaders.
Our most notable successes were born largely of President Obama’s willingness to take risks and our collective determination to be proactive and persistent in pursuit of an affirmative agenda rather than simply manage the in-box of proximate threats and challenges. There was also the intangible persuasive power of an unlikely and inspirational American president whose election, reelection, and steady leadership reminded the world both of America’s ability to grow and change and of our collective potential to rise to meet even the most daunting challenges. On the international scene, as on the domestic front, progress resulted substantially from careful orchestration and coordination of effort among leaders in the Obama administration, who envisioned, pursued, and successfully implemented a wide range of initiatives that benefited the American people and countless others around the world.
Many of these important gains, along with the world’s faith in the constancy of American leadership, would later be sorely challenged, and in some cases undone, by what would come next—a new president with a very different temperament, principles, and priorities, as well as a dysfunctional national security decision-making process.
22 “He F#%@ing Won?”
—Eddie Murphy
I can’t say I didn’t see it coming.
Like most in the Obama administration, I was hopeful that Secretary Clinton would win the 2016 presidential election. I just wasn’t as sure as some that she would. Partly, that was because I never forgot how, in 2008 against Obama, Clinton seemed at least initially to have taken victory for granted and squandered her advantages. In addition, I found her 2016 campaign to be workmanlike, despite being as invested in her victory as any Democrat. Mainly, I long had a nagging feeling that Trump could tap into a nasty vein of populist nationalist American politics that was potent, if seemingly latent.
I first ventured this argument in August 2015, during a small dinner with President Obama and a couple of his senior political aides in his hotel room during a visit to Alaska. This discussion preceded any primaries but came after Trump had declared his candidacy. As we bantered about the coming primary season, I said that I could see a way for Trump to gain the nomination.
“No way, NO WAY,” the others said. “That will never happen.”
For a short while, I persisted, saying, “There is a lot of hate out there. You know some people just can’t get over where we are now”—meaning but not saying: the fact that we have an intelligent, successful, squeaky-clean, still popular, two-term African American president with a beautiful wife and kids. I was not suggesting then that Trump would be president, but I didn’t think the nomination was out of his reach. In response, I was sufficiently ridiculed that I dropped the argument, comforted that the political experts thought I was crazy.
In the two weeks before the 2016 election, I started to get that nagging feeling again. The unexpected, eleventh-hour announcement that FBI director Comey had reopened the Clinton email investigation reignited the media’s obsession with Clinton’s server. Popular energy for Clinton’s candidacy seemed underwhelming, despite her inner strength, deep experience, and commanding debate performances. It all left me uneasy. Trump was acting as wildly as ever but maybe, like my dad used to say, “crazy like a fox.”
The French government sent a couple of President Hollande’s senior advisors to Washington the week before the election. They were trying to get a feel for what was going to happen. They met with several administration officials before they got to me. Each of us was asked about his or her expectations for the election outcome. All my colleagues had said they were confident Clinton would win; so, the French were surprised and concerned to hear me say, “I’m not so sure.” Still, I tried to reassure them by stressing—I’m the national security advisor, not the political director, and this assessment falls outside my area of expertise.
I had a similar exchange with Emirati Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ) during my visit with him in Abu Dhabi the weekend before the election. He asked me what I thought was going to happen. Most people thought Clinton would win, I reported, but I believed Trump had a decent chance. “Really?” he said, leaning forward in his seat with deep interest and anticipation. He was genuinely shocked by my assessment, but I wasn’t sure at the time whether he took that as good news or bad. (In retrospect, it’s clear that it was the former.)
The day before the election, I traveled with President Obama on his last campaign swing. I rarely went on domestic trips with him, but this seemed historic and final, and I was curious to get a feel for the mood in the country. Obama held rallies in Michigan, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania, the last one jointly with Clinton. Hillary’s closest aides seemed pretty confident but by no means cocky. That we were even asked to go to Michigan concerned me. Then, in Philadelphia, the Obama team got wind that the Clinton team intended to play Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,” a staple of the 1992 Bill Clinton cam
paign, at their joint rally. Our folks said, “Not happening” and nixed the idea, but several of us could not help thinking privately that this too did not bode well. Still, Obama’s political advisors appeared confident Clinton was going to win. So much so that I slept well on election eve.
On election night, I planned to stop by two parties before heading home to share the election of the first woman president with my daughter, Maris. This was a moment I needed to be with her. By eight o’clock at the first party, things were starting to seem dicey. I called the White House political director for reassurance, but he had none to offer. It was looking like this could be a very bad night. My stomach started to churn, so I left quickly, not wanting to be far from my own bathroom. Ian and I made a quick appearance at the second party. By the time we got home, it was clear Clinton was done.
Donald Trump was going to be president.
Maris went to bed early, without knowing the final result. When I woke her in the morning with the news, she thought I was joking. As soon as she grasped that I was dead serious, she melted. Maris believed in Hillary but even more so in the power of her example for all young women. I tried to reassure Maris that what Hillary had done will pave the way for women who will ultimately fulfill our collective dream.
As I said goodbye, I knew, as in my favorite children’s book, that it was going to be a “Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.” Maris’s emotion was merely a harbinger of the devastation and raw pain of the young White House staffers I encountered throughout the day. I worked hard to maintain a brave face for them and my own shocked NSC staff, just as I had for Maris. I reminded the NSC senior staff that the president and I remained fully committed to executing a thorough and responsible transition.
“We’re all patriots and professionals,” I told my staff, and we will do our best to assist the incoming team. I urged those who were career professionals to commit to staying at the NSC as long as needed. I explained that we had seen radically different administrations succeed one another before, and our country and its institutions were strong enough to manage such change seamlessly. This should be no different. That was my mantra, and I was sticking to it.
Throughout the day, President Obama played consoler-in-chief, bucking up the White House team as best he could with the same stiff upper lip. I was starting to believe my own rhetoric. It would be okay. I kept up my reserve and resolve all through Wednesday and well into Thursday, when Obama met with Trump in the Oval. That evening, Obama hosted a reception for senior staff and cabinet members and their spouses. He was still bucking people up, and I was still sounding painfully rational refrains, even with colleagues who were confidently predicting that the Trump administration would be an utter disaster.
When Ian and I returned to my office in the West Wing to gather my stuff, I sat down at my desk. And… just… lost… it. I was almost gasping for air, as the tears rushed, and I finally let the enormity of this loss and its inestimable consequences hit me. Trump’s election felt like a stinging rebuke of all we believed in—unity, equality, dignity, honesty, hope, and progress. It presaged the wholesale unraveling of the accomplishments we had worked hardest to achieve and that would have the most lasting, positive impact on America and the world. His crude, zero-sum “America First” mantra also signaled a retreat from America’s allies, the post–World War II international institutions that had facilitated peace and growing prosperity for some seventy years, and the abdication of traditional American leadership in accordance with both our values and our interests. The more I thought about it, the worse I felt. To lead my team, effect a responsible transition, and finish the job, I had to focus on the present and not speculate about the ominous future. So resolved, after ten minutes I pulled myself together and held it together until January 20.
President-elect Trump began to announce his national security team during President Obama’s final foreign trip of his presidency. In mid-November, Obama traveled to Greece to pay respect to the birthplace of democracy; to Germany to say an emotional goodbye to his good friend Angela Merkel and to meet with other key European allies; and to Peru for his last APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) Summit, where he held final bilateral meetings with President Xi of China, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia.
The trip was depressing. Trump named Michael Flynn as his national security advisor, a choice Obama had warned Trump against, and appointed Jeff Sessions as attorney general, whose old-school Dixie, conservative credentials rendered his selection frightening on its face. We found all of America’s allies apprehensive, to put it mildly, about what a Trump administration would portend.
President Xi warned that China did not want a trade war with the U.S., but if one were foist upon it, China would play to win. The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which had been concluded with eleven other APEC countries, seemed set to be an early casualty of Trump’s reckless protectionism.
Against this backdrop, it was hard to muster much in the way of a silver lining. Yet, in the best Obama team tradition, we found one anyway. On the last night of the trip in Lima, the traveling staff—NSC, scheduling and advance, the president’s personal staff, and many others—commandeered the top floor of a popular Peruvian nightclub. We drank pisco sours and danced like fiends to R&B and hip hop. It was the party to end all Obama team parties. Finality and frustration, friendship and camaraderie made for potent fuel that drove us long into the night.
Unlike most others, I had to wake up early to join Obama in his first meetings. When I stood up in the morning at my bedside, my legs buckled in pain. I was only tolerably hungover, so the problem was elsewhere. My fifty-two-year-old knees were shot from raucous dancing, complete with many gravity-defying moves, such that I struggled to make it to the shower.
When I hobbled into the Beast to accompany Obama, he quizzed me as usual on the prior night’s exploits. His desire for detail belied a tacit tinge of regret that he could never join in the fun. As always, I gave it to him straight: “Mr. President, you missed a hell of a party, and none of us is going to be in top form today.”
The day after we returned from Lima, I called Michael Flynn to congratulate him and offer unlimited amounts of my time before Inauguration Day. President Obama was determined to execute a transition at least as professional and generous as the one he was grateful to have received from President George W. Bush. Our marching orders were clear: give them all they needed and then some.
While Flynn was cordial on that first call, I had a hell of a time nailing down meetings with him. We had prepared over one hundred carefully crafted briefing memos on every conceivable important topic from the administrative (like how to hire and budget for NSC staff) to hot policy issues like North Korea and the counter-ISIS campaign, to bad scenarios that could unfold early in the new administration (e.g., the collapse of Mosul Dam), complete with our suggestions as to how to approach each potential challenge. In the early weeks of the transition, Flynn seemed to spend the bulk of his time meeting with visiting foreign officials at Trump Tower and betrayed little interest in the policy advice of his predecessor or in hiring staff to fill key vacancies.
After two or more weeks of my persisting, Flynn and I met for the first time in early December and then three times thereafter for a total of over twelve hours. I walked him through the major issues he would encounter and encouraged him to digest the binders of written materials we prepared. Alas, the many memos we wrote did not get much attention during the transition, and it is unclear if they were ever read.
In our meetings, I found Flynn to be civil and respectful, but bizarrely focused on exotic, highly compartmented, classified matters, which I did not think he needed to know until after he took the job. As I shared privately with a couple close members of my team, I instinctively doubted whether Flynn would actually make it to become national security advisor and, if he did, I suspected he would not last long. I had no concrete basis for that doubt beyo
nd cumulative clues that left me dubious about his interests and capacity.
Flynn did not seem very focused on the nuts and bolts of running the NSC staff and the Principals Committee process, nor on how best to support the president. We had perfectly professional and pleasant interactions, but I was not very impressed by Flynn’s intellect, strategic vision, or his perspective on the world and key threats. Russia, in his view, is not a significant adversary, but a declining power of limited consequence. China is the greatest enemy we face, a huge bogeyman that’s already eating America’s lunch, and we would be wise to fight her sooner rather than later. Erdog˘an’s Turkey and the Sunni Gulf Arab states deserve America’s deference and unqualified support, given the threat of “radical Islamic extremism,” while our European allies barely rate mention.
During a couple of our meetings, we were joined by Flynn’s deputy NSA-designate, K. T. McFarland, and deputy NSA, Avril Haines. K.T., a former Fox News personality, shocked us by raising in our first encounter the question of whether it might be possible for them to work in shifts, so that Flynn, for example, might do mornings, and she would be there in the afternoon to cut down on the hours. Avril and I sputtered in response that there was no way that kind of arrangement would work, and I stressed to K.T. my view that the job of deputy national security advisor (when done right) is the toughest in government. She seemed surprised by that insight.
K.T. also made an impression with the full-length mink coat she wore to transition meetings in the White House. One day, when she walked into the Situation Room wearing it, I said (sincerely) that I imagined this was the first time such a garment had ever seen the inside of the Sit Room. She protested that, of course, it must have happened in the Reagan administration. I said, “I really doubt it,” thinking that the only woman who would have been invited into Reagan’s Sit Room was Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and she didn’t strike me as the mink-coat-wearing type.
