In private chat with senator, Trump hints at policy shift in Afghanistan — and a return to isolationism
In the days leading up to a key vote last week over the fate of his nominee for secretary of state, President Trump found a way to win over one of the biggest skeptics in the Senate.
Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), a rare isolationist Republican, was signaling that he would oppose Trump’s pick, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, a hawkish former congressman who had backed the Iraq War.
But the more Trump and Paul spoke, including three calls last Monday, the more assured Paul became that the president was moving back toward the non-interventionist world view that Trump had championed on the campaign trail. The conversations left Paul with a particularly enticing notion: that Trump was prepared to end the war in Afghanistan.
“The president told me over and over again in general we’re getting the hell out of there,” Paul said in an interview Thursday in his Senate office. “I think the president’s instincts and inclination are to resolve the Afghan conflict.”
The two men discussed no exit dates and did not strike a written agreement, as Trump urged Paul to meet one-on-one with Pompeo and ultimately secured the senator’s support ahead of a key Foreign Relations Committee vote that paved the way for confirmation...
...It is unclear just how much Trump’s private conversations signal a public shift in policy or, rather, if they are just maneuvering by a famously transactional leader who often says what he needs to say to make a deal and then reverses himself. The White House declined to comment for this story, but an official confirmed the outlines of the interactions that Paul described.
Nonetheless, Trump’s talks with Paul reflect an area of growing tension between the president, whose instinct is to withdraw from overseas entanglements, and his military, whose leaders think that swift pullouts would spark dangerous instability. In Afghanistan, one indication of the military’s nervousness is its eagerness to open peace talks with the Taliban and try to negotiate an end the conflict...
...The Trump-Paul conversations also point to an effort by the dovish senator and former Trump rival, long treated by his party as a foreign policy gadfly, to assert influence over a president who chafes at being managed by his advisers and the Republican foreign policy establishment.
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