{"id":27231,"date":"2020-01-07T12:59:13","date_gmt":"2020-01-07T18:59:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=27231"},"modified":"2020-01-07T12:59:13","modified_gmt":"2020-01-07T18:59:13","slug":"another-defense-down-and-twitching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2020\/01\/07\/another-defense-down-and-twitching\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Defense Down And Twitching"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the defenses of the election of President Trump is that he’d learn on the job<\/em>. So has he? Professor Rebecca Friedman Lissner of U.S. Naval War College, who studies Strategic and Operational Research, thinks not<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Although considerable variation characterizes this administration\u2019s approach to decision making, learning should be apparent in across-the-board procedural improvements. Instead, President Trump\u2019s decision to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria is a useful, recent test case that suggests the foreign policymaking process has, at minimum, not improved and may actually have grown less effective with time. Reportedly, the president \u201cinstinctively<\/a>\u201d elected to withdraw U.S. forces after a call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in which Erdogan signaled his intent to attack Kurdish forces in northern Syria near the Turkish border. The decision was not part of a formal policymaking process and ignored the recommendations of the Departments of Defense and State. In fact, it came as a\u00a0surprise<\/a>\u00a0to the Pentagon, which indicates its\u00a0disassociation<\/a>\u00a0from a meaningful interagency process and precluded carefully considered implementation. The abrupt withdrawal was rife with unintended consequences the president does not seem to have considered, from the\u00a0liberation<\/a>\u00a0of Islamic State prisoners to the\u00a0complication<\/a>\u00a0of an ultimately successful mission against Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and diplomatic\u00a0fallout<\/a>\u00a0from the abandonment of the United States\u2019s Kurdish partners. Its suddenness echoes earlier presidential decisions about Syria, most notably Trump\u2019s surprise\u00a0order<\/a>\u00a0to withdraw 2,000 U.S. troops in December 2018\u2014which the president later\u00a0partially reversed<\/a>, but not before the\u00a0resignation<\/a>\u00a0of Secretary Mattis in protest. In a further procedural parallelism, the president seems to now\u00a0support<\/a> a new plan that leaves approximately 200 U.S. troops in eastern Syria to guard local oil fields.\u00a0[Lawfare<\/strong>]<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I found her use of the instinctively<\/em> interesting. In the evolutionary context, we do well with off-the-cuff decisions when they regard situations which we’ve faced many times before as a species. It should be obvious that making complex decisions regarding whether or not troops should be stationed in the Middle East on an instinctive basis is simple madness.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most critically, the president\u2019s personality is simply not amenable to learning. Research in cognitive psychology indicates that individuals tend to be better learners when they are open to environmental feedback, change their beliefs readily and receive discrepant information open-mindedly. Yet first-person\u00a0accounts<\/a>\u00a0of those who have worked with the president, at-a-distance psychological\u00a0assessments<\/a>, and observation of President Trump\u2019s public\u00a0rhetoric<\/a>\u00a0and behavior all indicate that the president indexes poorly on each of these dimensions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I would simply say that the President is a narcissist who cannot, in his own mind, be wrong. Since improvement implies failure, in his mind, we won’t see failure.<\/p>\n

In fact, learning on the job<\/em> was the expectation of people who didn’t understand the inferior nature of Donald J. Trump.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the defenses of the election of President Trump is that he’d learn on the job. So has he? Professor Rebecca Friedman Lissner of U.S. Naval War College, who studies Strategic and Operational Research, thinks not: Although considerable variation characterizes this administration\u2019s approach to decision making, learning should be \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27231"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27232,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27231\/revisions\/27232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}