Susan Rice on Trump’s new Russia problem.
 | By Max Strasser International Editor, Opinion |
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When I saw the news story last weekend, I almost didn’t believe it: Russian intelligence had paid bounties — actual money — to militants in Afghanistan in exchange for killing American soldiers. American intelligence knew about this and told the Trump administration, which didn’t do anything about it. |
Is this for real? It seems like a caricature of international nefariousness and presidential incompetence. I still have a lot of questions — and you might, too: What were the sources of this intelligence? Why would Russia want to do this? How could the president — and, more shocking, the people around him — essentially brush it aside? (Trump, of course, denies everything.) |
The truth is, I can’t find answers to those kinds of questions. I endlessly admire my colleagues in the newsroom who are investigative reporters, but I’m a very different kind of journalist. What Opinion editors like me can do instead is ask an expert with firsthand experience to write about a subject like this. |
So we got in touch with Susan Rice. |
Susan is a contributing writer for Opinion, but before that she had a slightly more stressful job, as President Barack Obama’s national security adviser from 2013 until 2017. She brings her real-life experience in the White House and the trenches of the American national security establishment into her columns — and to our readers. She’s written about American policy in Iran and Afghanistan, North Korea and Russia. |
She had some strong feelings about the Afghanistan bounties story. “None of this adds up,” she writes of the Trump administration’s denials. “As a former national security adviser, I find it exceedingly difficult to believe that no one told Mr. Trump about this intelligence.” She lays out what she would have done if she were still national security adviser and goes on to raise what are now familiar questions about Trump’s soft policies toward Russia. |
She doesn’t have all the answers — it’s either “a dangerously dysfunctional national security process” or an administration that “is being run by liars and wimps catering to a tyrannical president” — but she does have a unique perspective. |
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