President Donald Trump’s recent choice of the relatively unknown Rep. John Ratcliffe for Director of National Intelligence and his elevation of Kelly Craft to the post of U.S. envoy to the United Nations, despite concerns about her inexperience, illustrates the power vaccuum within Trump’s cabinet that may favor the agressive foreign policies of men like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. 

The rash of remarkably unqualified and inexperienced candidates for top slots points to a presidency that values personal loyalty to Donald Trump above the ability to govern effectively, and this atmosphere favors those with Washington insider status and the policy goals to bring it to fruition, say defense analysts that spoke to TAC. 

 Trump’s picks to lead the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, and the ambassador to the U.N. “fits the pattern of the eroding of competence which is particularly happening in the national security apparatus,” said Trita Parsi, associate professor at Georgetown University, in an interview with TAC. These are “clearly people that are just willing to go along with whatever the political agenda is.”

 Almost everyone else who originally held a senior national security job has now left the Trump administration, including his defense secretary, national security adviser, attorney general, FBI director, secretary of state, White House chief of staff, secretary of Homeland Security, and director of the Secret Service.

This week the Senate confirmed multi-million dollar Republican donor Kelly Craft to serve as ambassador to the United Nations. Craft was mostly absent from her previous position as ambassador to Canada, and Democrats expressed concerns that she has no experience relevant to her new job.

“Craft’s appointment as UN ambassador is just one more step towards the ‘Trumpification’ of government functions, whether it’s putting his unqualified family members in key White House roles, or rewarding countries that patronize his businesses with sweetheart deals,” Emma Ashford, a research fellow in Defense and Foreign Policy for the Cato Institute, told TAC.

“Rather than simply pointing out how unqualified Kelly Craft is for the United Nations job, I think it would be wise for us to reconsider the idea of politically appointed ambassadors entirely. Is there really any ambassadorial appointment so unimportant that it should be handled by a donor, rather than by experienced diplomats? The whole donations-for-ambassadorships system is bad for U.S. diplomacy and national security.”

Given that John Bolton once suggested that if the United Nations building “lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” it is possible that the choice of Craft simply reflects the Trump administration’s distrust of the U.N. and international assistance, and that her tenure will deemphasize the U.N.’s significance.

But that plays into the hands of Pompeo and Bolton.

 “Certainly, having an entirely inexperienced diplomat in the United Nations role will probably empower Pompeo, and is reflective of Bolton’s own antipathy towards international organizations,” said Ashford.

 “There will not be diplomats with experience on U.S. national interest that can push back on the war mongering policy that Bolton is trying to implement,” said Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council.

 Inexperience in so many top national security slots is “going to make it easier to have a non-fact based foreign policy, a profoundly confrontational foreign policy, that will please John Bolton but that will not in any shape or form serve US national interest,” said Parsi, who added that Bolton seems to be determined to “neutralize these positions.”

 Since Bolton joined Trump’s cabinet, the Pentagon began referring questions about troop deployments to the National Security Council, in his purview. As TAC reported previously, Bolton appeared to take a page from former vice president Dick Cheney’s playbook when he took the highly unusual step of convening a meeting about a possible confrontation with Iran not at the White House, but at CIA headquarters. Trump also granted Bolton’s wish for the  UN ambassador position to be demoted from the president’s cabinet. Bolton is an unapologetic Bush-era war hawk with four decades of experience inside the Beltway, who has used his long career to advocate for regime change in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and Iran.

Like Craft, the new Pentagon chief and former Raytheon lobbyist Mark Esper, is unlikely to push back on empty or wrong-headed proposals, particularly when there’s so little longevity within Trump’s cabinet.

 “We’ve seen people that push back being replaced with people without any capacity to push back,” said Parsi.

 Trump’s choice of Rep. Ratcliffe to replace Dan Coats as Director of National Intelligence was so weak that it undoubtedly led to his decision to withdraw from consideration today.  While the man he would have replaced was a former Indiana senator, U.S. ambassador to Germany, and one of Trump’s least difficult Cabinet confirmations, Ratcliffe is a former U.S. attorney who has engaged in some serious resume inflation and was only recently elevated to a seat on the House Homeland Security and Judiciary committees.

 Coats famously contradicted Trump on the threat posed by Russia and North Korea’s willingness to give up its nuclear arsenal; whereas Ratcliffe appeared to have been chosen for his Trump-boosting questions at the Mueller hearing, a performance which thrilled the president.

Ratcliffe apparently was surprised by the intensity of the reaction after his name was floated. His credentials were so thin that it led some to question whether Trump can field a bench and if anyone vets his picks before he announces them. 

After all, Ratcliffe had touted his tenure as a “terrorism prosecutor” even though during his four-years with the Justice Department, his office did not prosecute a single defendant on terrorism-related charges, according to Justice Department records. His “claims to have worked on the terrorism prosecution of the Texas-based Muslim charity Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development” are “actually grossly exaggerated his very minor and tangential role in the case,” reports The Intercept.

That’s important because the DNI chief has little direct power and, to be effective, needs to corral our 17 diverse intelligence agencies, from the Justice Department to the State Department to the Pentagon and even the Energy Department.

An inexperienced leader as director will also allow Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to continue heavily influencing the U.S. intelligence community, as he has continued to do over a year after he left the CIA, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials.

“Pompeo, who was Donald Trump’s first CIA director, is now serving as a key intermediary between Trump and the U.S. intelligence community, the officials say, a very unusual role for the secretary of state, who is supposed to be a customer of the intelligence community, not its master,” The Intercept reported. “Pompeo has emerged as the administration’s de facto intelligence czar.”

Not everyone shares the concern that a relative lack of experience means that a candidate will be ineffective. Maryscott Greenwood,  former chief of staff to the U.S. ambassador to Canada during the Clinton administration, told TAC that applying that criticism to Craft is “a reach.”

“I think a better way to judge someone is by the work they do, so whether you’re physically sitting in the embassy in Ottawa or somewhere else, the better question is: are you doing the job, are you advancing the goals of the country?” said Greenwood. “The narrative that she was absent or didn’t uphold her duties [as US ambassador to Canada] that’s not what I observed. I saw her as a workaholic.”

“It’s not easy to be a Trump ambassador,” she added. Due to Trump’s “particularly confrontational style” which “makes the job of diplomacy more challenging,” it’s particularly impressive that Craft was able to “keep the relationship going extraordinarily well on behalf of the U.S. and Canada” throughout the renegotiation of the trade deal and the “daily work of solving border issues.”

 “Craft played a key role at a time when” the role of ambassador to Canada was particularly difficult, said Greenwood.

 It is also worth noting that Trump also didn’t have experience, just like his unusual choices for leadership roles. And no matter how aggressive the positions of his advisors, In the final analysis, as Trump frequently likes to remind us, the Commander in Chief is his own man.

“I have John Bolton who I would definitely say is a hawk. And I have other people that are on the other side of the equation,” Trump has said. “Ultimately I make the decisions so it doesn’t matter.”