In 1970, when President Richard Nixon announced the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, twenty foreign-service officers signed a letter to the Secretary of State protesting the decision. According to "The Dissent Papers," a history of bureaucratic opposition to Presidential policies, by Hannah Gurman, of New York University, it was the largest protest in the State Department's history. Nixon was not impressed. He had a well-known hostility toward federal employees, especially at State, which he saw as filled with Kennedy-era liberals who were more interested in thwarting his policies than carrying them out. “When a bureaucrat deliberately thumbs his nose, we’re going to get him,” he said, privately, soon after taking office. “The little boys over in State particularly, that are against us, we will do it.”
The letter opposing his Cambodia campaign leaked, and Nixon was predictably furious and vindictive, telling aides, “Make sure all those sons of bitches are fired first thing in the morning.”
The following year, the State Department established a formal mechanism, called the Dissent Channel, to allow officials to formally express “dissenting or alternative views on substantive foreign policy issues.” The rules for using the channel included protections against “any penalty, reprisal, or recrimination.” Over the years, State’s culture of dissent, while still seen by some foreign-service officers as a career risk, has become so ingrained that the department hosts an annual Dissent Awards to honor officials who have constructively used the channel.
It’s unlikely that Donald Trump will be showing up for this year’s ceremony. Ten days into his Administration, Trump has returned the White House to a Nixonian hostility toward opposing views. The State Department, which has to implement many of the new rules relating to the President’s executive order temporarily banning all refugees and immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries, has become a locus of opposition. A draft of a Dissent Channel letter circulating inside the department has reportedly attracted the interest of perhaps hundreds of foreign-service officers and other State Department employees. “A policy which closes our door to over 200 million legitimate travelers in the hopes of preventing a small number of travelers who intend to harm Americans from using the visa system to enter the United States will not achieve its aim of making our country safer,” one version of the document, which was leaked to the press on Monday, says. “Moreover, such a policy runs counter to core American values of nondiscrimination, fair play, and extending a warm welcome to foreign visitors and immigrants.”
Asked about the document yesterday, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, dismissed his fellow government officials as “career bureaucrats,” and told them to resign. “I think that they should either get with the program or they can go,” he said.
We are still early in what will be a long-running institutional conflict over Trump’s executive order, but the reaction from the White House so far is troubling. Trump’s response to criticism has been to lash out with insults and personal attacks. When Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, Republicans whose support Trump will need to pass his legislative agenda, said in a statement that they “fear this executive order will become a self-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism”—a view that is echoed by most counter-terrorism experts—Trump ridiculed the pair as “former Presidential candidates” who “are sadly weak on immigration” and “always looking to start World War III.” The initial White House reaction to court orders that temporarily stayed the executive order was simply to ignore them. Last night, when the acting Attorney General, Sally Yates, refused to defend the order, Trump replaced her. And, as is now routine, the White House spent an enormous amount of energy over the weekend and on Monday attacking the media for its reporting.
Every institutional check in the democratic arsenal—Congress, the judiciary, career officials in the executive branch, the press—has been met with petty insults and defiance.
But, of all the attacks, Spicer’s threat may be the most concerning. It’s not outside traditional political norms for the President to fight with senators, though Trump brings a unique spitefulness to these fights. Trump was also within his rights to sack Yates, a holdover from the Obama era. And although the White House has been attacking the media with a new and venomous intensity, that’s not exactly a new phenomenon, either.
But the White House encouraging dissenting officials to leave the government has accompanied the worst mistakes, especially in foreign policy, in recent history. The efforts of Lyndon Johnson and Nixon to silence internal critics fuelled the excesses of the Vietnam War. George W. Bush’s intolerance for criticism, including dissenting views about the intelligence concerning Iraq’s weapons programs, helped lead to the spectacular failure of the Iraq War.
I asked Brady Kiesling, a State Department official who resigned in protest on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, in 2003, what he thought of the standoff between Trump and the State Department. “A large percentage of those foreign-service professionals were appalled by Trump’s executive order, because it was ignorant, counterproductive, and crudely unjust to everyone caught up in the existing system,” he told me. He added a hint of encouragement about the early and widespread opposition at the State Department, saying, “I regret to say that many colleagues more qualified than I to speak on Middle East issues failed to sound the warning they should have before the 2003 Iraq War.”
P. J. Crowley, a former State Department spokesman, said that he was similarly concerned about the threats emanating from the White House. “The press secretary's 'Trump's way or the highway' response, together with the firing of the acting Attorney General and the Pentagon's angst regarding the impact on the battle against the Islamic State, was unnecessarily combative,” he told me. “We're only in Trump's second week, and the walls are already going up around the White House. It's not a healthy dynamic.”
Kiesling was more alarmed and despairing. “Where will this lead?” he asked. “Ultimately, if Trump is not reined in by Congress, we will see a collapse of the post-Second World War international order, and massive bloodshed.”