RECKLESS AND INCOMPETENT

How Trump’s ‘Stupid’ Move Backfired on Him

Former Obama national security adviser Ben Rhodes says Trump is sidelining experts on Iran and repeating mistakes the Obama team worked to avoid.

President Donald Trump is doing what the Obama administration worked to avoid, one of the former president’s national security advisers says.

Ben Rhodes, the Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting throughout Obama’s eight years in office, told The Daily Beast Podcast that the Oval Office’s current occupant is making “stupid” mistakes when dealing with Iran. And that Trump’s preference for advisers such as Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner over subject-matter experts was especially concerning.

Rhodes explained that during negotiations over the Iran nuclear deal, which the Trump administration withdrew from in 2018, Obama used a variety of experts.

“Any expert you could think of, we found the best one related to these negotiations and had them supporting the work. I don’t think a single one of those people is still in the U.S. government, because they’re the kind of people that were purged by Trump,” Rhodes told host Joanna Coles.

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“But part of what I think and I can feel has happened is that not only do they not know anything about what they’re negotiating—I mean, they don’t know the mechanics of how… uranium is mined and milled and put through centrifuges—but they’ve gotten rid of all the experts,“ he said.

”The National Security Council, [which] I used to work on, used to have a staff of some 250 people,“ Rhodes explained. “People said that was too big. OK, maybe a little bit. But I think the last I’ve heard is that now there’s like 25 or 30 people in the White House working on this.”

“They’ve gotten rid of all of USAID. They’ve attacked their own intelligence community. They got rid of the experts who said that the Iranian nuclear program wasn’t obliterated,” Rhodes continued, while also making note of the 100-plus vacancies in U.S. ambassadorships.

Rhodes then addressed how Trump’s “recklessness” and “incompetence” were on display in how he underestimated Iran’s willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz.

In the Obama administration, he explained, a conflict with Iran was gamed out in part because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “constantly pressing us to go to war with Iran and bomb their nuclear facilities.”

“I was never in a war game in which the first thing the Iranians did wasn’t to close the Strait of Hormuz,” he recalled.

“I think what you get in Iran is this weird convergence of Trump’s recklessness and incompetence,” Rhodes said. “The cost of getting rid of all that expertise for so many years, because it was in Trump’s first term, too—all this is converging in this one event because he is reckless enough to listen to Netanyahu and think, ‘If I do this, I’ll collapse the Iranian regime and be a hero,’ and incompetent enough to not have had experts who were like, ‘Hey, they’d close the Strait of Hormuz and paralyze the global economy.’”

Trump’s war on Iran, which has lasted more than three months, killed 13 U.S. service members and caused more than 1,000 civilian deaths, qualifies as “stupid s--t,” Rhodes said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal was struck because it was the best one possible, Rhodes said, amid suggestions from outsiders to hold out for a better one.

“And so if you don’t do a deal and don’t want Iran to get a nuclear weapon, at some point you’re going to end up in a war,” he said. “And that would be stupid. And here we are.”

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