Never Give an Inch, page 22
The man who held the drafting pen was my critical partner and paisan Pat Cipollone, the brilliant White House counsel. He had what may have been the most difficult and least appreciated job in our administration. From managing impeachment, to addressing complex claims about the election, to helping the secretary of state, Pat delivered excellence all around him. His two deputies, Patrick Philbin and Michael Purpura, did yeoman’s work for President Trump, as well. That team—along with my dear friend Emmet Flood—served America nobly and with excellence.
When we reported the outcome of our “Remain in Mexico” negotiations to the president, he wasn’t as happy as I’d hoped. “My Mike, this is a great deal, but we need a press conference.”
I told him the truth: “We can have a press conference announcing the Mexican government’s commitments on enforcement and that the US is going to return asylees, but we cannot—cannot—convey an understanding between our two governments to move down this path together.”
The president relented, and we arrived at a good solution. Remain in Mexico, formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, worked magnificently. We sent a strong message of deterrence. The simple fact that people around the world learned that coming to the United States illegally with a bogus asylum claim no longer led to automatic entry stopped many crossings before they started. It took a few months to implement effectively, but combined with amazing work by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and the building of barriers along the border, we changed the calculus for illegal immigration and didn’t have to shut down the border. The Mexican government saved face, too. It was free to complain about our policy and to pretend that it had not signed onto it.
This deal had what every good deal needs: something for everyone. Marcelo knew that for Mexico, the politics were tough in the short run. But he also knew he was helping his country. Having hundreds of thousands of people transiting through his country to make their way to the United States was not only bad for America but bad for the Mexican people, as well. Marcelo knew that if we could deter would-be illegal immigrants, it would reduce costs and risks for his country. His diplomatic skills on behalf of his own nation were truly magnificent.
* * *
Even as we cut the flow of questionable asylum seekers, the Trump administration, paradoxically, was also a victim of its own economic success. The domestic economy under President Trump roared, producing massive gains for people in every income strata. This prosperity drew people seeking a piece of the action from all over Latin America. When the numbers from May 2019 reflected the highest number of illegal border crossings in thirteen years, the president became furious. He threatened tariffs on Mexico if its government didn’t do more to control the surge. He proposed an escalating system that started with a tariff of 5 percent on all goods crossing the border and increased to 25 percent if the problem persisted.
The National Security Council convened meetings in the first week of June on how to find a way forward with Mexico. Kim Breier came back from one meeting and told me, “I have just two words for you on tariffs: Michigan. Ohio.” As it turns out, the president’s proposal would have decimated the US auto industry. In many cases, individual automotive parts and pieces cross the US-Mexico border multiple times during a vehicle assembly. Each one would have been subject to a tariff at every instance of entry.
This threat to the American automotive sector, combined with the president’s pressure, led to creative diplomacy. On June 7, 2019, the United States and Mexico jointly announced reforms that better protected national sovereignty and local communities. Mexico agreed to deploy its National Guard near its own southern border to deter illegal migrant flows from Central America. And we expanded the Remain in Mexico policy beyond the initial pilot programs at certain checkpoints. If Mexico didn’t enforce these deals, the United States would require it to absorb all asylum seekers before they even reached the United States. Mexico hated this idea, so it served as our main point of leverage, which had to be kept secret, save for a handful of trusted souls inside the US government.
When we briefed the president on the final deal, he asked Cipollone for a copy of the final document that would not be made public. President Trump was thrilled that we had gotten this done, congratulated us for the work, and then placed the paper in his suit-coat pocket. Days later, on a walk across the White House lawn to Marine One, he held it up and proclaimed that Mexico would have to honor the agreement. I immediately called Ebrard and apologized. Nonetheless, implementation of the plan continued.
Getting this agreement over the finish line involved a bunch of difficult, ticking-time-bomb negotiations between the Mexican delegation on one side and Breier, Cipollone, and me on the other. Kim’s strong rapport with the Mexicans helped smooth over various rough patches, and she was a major asset for our Western Hemisphere diplomacy all around. I was sorry to see her depart public service soon after, but I understood how senior-level jobs at the State Department took a brutal toll on folks with young children. I also missed her because she was an uncompromising fighter against the socialist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela—a rarity at State.
Over the course of 2019, we signed similar agreements with El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Chad Wolf and his team at Customs and Border Patrol were extraordinary in working to make this happen, and it would not have happened without them. These agreements were a big deal, as more than 71 percent of apprehensions at the US southern border during fiscal year 2019 involved migrants from those three countries. Ultimately, our border-security policies defended American sovereignty and stemmed the tide of irregular migration. In the year after our dealmaking, the number of apprehensions at the southern border dropped 53 percent. Our administration had not just the more effective policies but the more humane ones. We freed up resources to help legitimate asylum seekers, and we cut into a major source of income for the Mexican cartels that prey on people trying to get to the border.
Under President Biden’s lax policies, however, Customs and Border Patrol recorded an all-time high number of detentions at the US-Mexico border in 2021. Mexican coyotes and cartels are exploiting vulnerable people and getting rich doing it, because President Biden has given the green light for people to come via lax enforcement policies. The fact is that the Biden administration believes these newcomers are future Democratic voters and thus is willing to compromise national security, the rule of law, and the essence of nationhood to bring them here. Americans must never cede the moral high ground to the Left on immigration—or any other issue.
LOOMING THREATS FROM UNGOVERNED SPACES
Now that I’m out of office, I frequently get asked things such as “What would you do if China invaded Taiwan? Or “Should the Biden administration bomb Moscow?” What these questions miss is that the hard work of deterrence must happen before a crisis. You can’t fix that failure to prepare after the crisis has begun. A sure tell for failed preparation is whenever a White House press release at the onset of a dire situation reads, “In response to this crisis, we have convened a Deputies Committee meeting of the National Security Council.” I love that agency deputies meet, but in the moment, such meetings—if not accompanied by a real-time response of deeds executed without delay—are proof of inadequate preparation. The bad guys love it when a cumbersome interagency planning process is the response to real challenges.
That’s why America must begin thinking now about the challenge of undergoverned spaces—something I tackled during my four years. Early on in my time at the CIA, an intelligence professional told me something that I had already suspected but was disturbed to hear confirmed. For the first time in perhaps over a century, our country was confronting what a junior analyst called “ungoverned spaces on our border.” The problem of ungoverned spaces (or more accurately, territory not controlled by any nation-state government) is not new. Throughout history, security threats metastasize when malign actors can exploit a geographic location without interference from a legitimate national government. An “ungoverned space” may become a breeding ground for evil if a government doesn’t have the resources and capabilities to police it. Al-Qaeda in Somalia, also known as al-Shabaab, thrives in ungoverned spaces. In Colombia, the Marxist-Leninist FARC and ELN terrorist groups have built their power bases in rural areas of the country. In remote areas of Nigeria, terrorists routinely slaughter churchgoers. Our enemies love the vacuum of ungoverned spaces.
Yet asserting control over these lawless zones is not just a matter of having enough resources such as bodies, guns, and surveillance assets. In some cases, ungoverned spaces also reflect political decisions. The 9/11 attacks were successful in large part because the Taliban had given al-Qaeda safe haven to gain strength and plot external operations from the remote caves of Tora Bora. Every American should know that today, the United States faces significant ungoverned spaces close to places such as El Paso, Phoenix, and San Diego. Significant parts of Mexico are no longer policed by the central government; the Washington Post has reported comments from several current and former US officials concluding that drug-trafficking groups now control a significant portion of Mexican territory. There are entire well-armed militia forces—the private armies of Mexican criminal syndicates—that impose their gangland rule without government interference. Just as ISIS could resemble a civil government inside its own terror state, the drug cartels act as the civil authority in cities and towns under their control. Of course, they use their power to protect their ill-gotten wealth and to prevent the apprehension and prosecution of their murdering leaders.
Attorney General Bill Barr and I took ungoverned spaces very seriously, for two main reasons: First, while drugs have flowed into the United States across our southern border for decades, the smuggling of chemicals from China for the manufacture of fentanyl has increased a massive drug-related threat to the American people. Second, ungoverned spaces, in addition to destabilizing Mexico, could provide safe havens for terrorists seeking to strike Mexico or the western United States. The cartels are known to have contacts with jihadist groups and Hezbollah through the international arms and drugs trade. Mexican drug lords could invite their terrorist friends to crash at their houses if counterterrorism pressure in Afghanistan, Syria, or Yemen becomes too much. One group of foes worships Allah, and the other worships power, but they are coreligionists in their devotion to money and banditry.
The media reported in May 2022 that President Trump had at one point considered flying drones into Mexico to take out the cartels with missiles. Attorney General Barr had begun to think about this issue seriously. The leftists at CNN and MSNBC prattled on about how this would violate Mexican sovereignty, which they seemed to care about far more than our own. Go ahead and call me crazy for considering how to take out groups that are—functionally speaking—terrorist organizations.
On the diplomatic front, the Trump administration asked Mexico to partner with the United States to regain control of its ungoverned spaces. We sketched out ideas on resources, protection for local officials, rules of engagement, and more. Mexican leaders didn’t want to hear it. I told Foreign Secretary Ebrard that what looks like the mafia today would look like jihad tomorrow. Still nothing. To the Mexicans, allowing a greater US presence on Mexican soil was an admission of failure. Letting the Yankees operate on Mexican soil also presented an intolerable domestic political cost. The depressing irony, of course, is that Mexico has already ceded sovereignty to the Mexican cartels in allowing them to run rogue governments inside their own borders. Our concern was never to cede ours. There will come a day when the way the United States addresses this risk of ungoverned spaces will have to change. Whether with the Mexican government’s permission or otherwise, the United States must ensure that these spaces do not expand or become breeding grounds for terrorist activities. My assessment is that Mexico as a safe haven and launching point for terror operations inside the United States is a serious possibility within the next ten years. If we refuse to put America first, we may have to wait until we have a Nueve-Once event—and then it will be on the backs of those who failed us.
MULTILATERAL BODIES: BATTLEGROUNDS FOR AMERICAN SOVEREIGNTY AND INTERESTS
Over our nearly 250 years, America has signed up for many international commitments, from NATO and the United Nations to recent trade deals. One of my missions under President Trump was to make sure these international arrangements, understandings, and organizations enhanced our security and prosperity. Foreign policy elites, many of whom crafted these relationships, joined media partisans in condemning our efforts as blasphemy. The media was constantly snarking and complaining during our four years that we were upending American commitments left and right, including breaking “treaties.” They bleated sensationalist drivel about America’s retrenching, withdrawing from the global stage, and becoming an international pariah.
What hogwash. We were simply and importantly conducting a performance review of our international commitments and asking the reasonable questions: Does staying with this arrangement or being part of this international organization honor our sovereignty? Is it good for the American people? And if not, what would be better? One option was to stay in it because the cost of leaving would damage American credibility in the world. A second option was to try to fix and reform it. Finally, if we couldn’t solve a problem, and if leaving an arrangement was lawful and not too costly to our interests, we had a duty to walk away.
The claim that we were breaking treaties was a product of ignorance. For many, a “treaty” connotes any kind of international commitment. But in the United States, a treaty is a specific kind of commitment, one that requires a majority vote in the Senate. When a president makes a deal with another country but refuses or fails to gain consent from the Senate, we have not a treaty but a press release. For the historical record, the Trump administration did not unlawfully break or withdraw from a single treaty during our entire four years.
The initial America First departure from a bad international arrangement happened early on. Almost immediately, the Trump administration stood up for America’s economic well-being by pulling out of the Paris Agreement, or climate accords, the 2015 pact that imposed limits on US greenhouse-gas emissions. One study found that the deal would have cost the US economy $3 trillion and 6.5 million industrial sector jobs by 2040. Obama had also put a down payment of $1 billion into a Green Climate Fund to help developing countries, with billions more to come. At the same time, the climate alarmists allowed China—the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitter, and never a country to uphold its promises—to increase its emissions until 2030. This bad deal for America—which Secretary Kerry no doubt obtained at the cost of spending gobs of taxpayer dollars on fuel for his many flights to France—was poised to slow our growth and hurt our competitiveness. President Trump saw this and announced a pullout from the accords in June 2017.
We had no compunction about pulling out on procedural grounds, because the Paris Agreement is a nonbinding international agreement. It isn’t even close to a treaty, and the Senate never would have ratified it if the Obama administration had put it forward. This agreement wasn’t even necessary to help or force America to reduce carbon emissions. From 2005 to 2020, with virtually no domineering restrictions on carbon emissions in place, America’s emissions fell by 10 percent, even as our economy grew by 25 percent. Those sounds you hear are liberal heads exploding over the fact that the free market is the secret weapon for reducing emissions! Unfortunately, climate change has become the Left’s religion, and they want to impose all regulations necessary to achieve net-zero carbon emissions, which is the Left’s idea of global salvation. Joe Biden got right back in the Paris accords on his first day in office.
My role in pulling America out in 2017 was limited, but I made clear to the president, Tillerson, and Mattis that we had no intelligence showing that the CCP had any intention of complying with its commitments under the Paris accords. Indeed, to the contrary, it was to be expected that they would not comply even with the generous terms we gave away to them. The CCP was in the deal because it raised costs on America and gave them political cover. The first rule of international agreements is not to evaluate what a deal pledges, but to identify your no-BS enforcement mechanisms to punish violations. Without enforcement provisions—and these accords had none—there’s a near-zero chance that authoritarian regimes will comply with any element that doesn’t suit their needs.
The Iran deal, too, was just a press release, not a treaty. As with the Paris Agreement, President Obama didn’t submit it to the Senate because he knew it would never pass. As secretary of state, I encountered enormous resistance from Europeans who refused to back away from the deal and join our pressure campaign. Many of them told me behind closed doors that they agreed with our concerns, but they couldn’t ultimately break from the deal. I’m glad we had the flexibility and resolve to quit.
European anger over our decision to say adieu to the Paris accords and Iran deal reflected a curious feature of Europe’s geopolitical psyche. Many Europeans believe that multilateralism—multiple nations working together—isn’t just a good way of doing things but a great end unto itself. They live in the historical shadow of two continent-destroying world wars, so they see multilateralism as an ethical imperative. This in part explains their anger over the Trump administration’s decisions to back out of bad international deals.
We believed multilateralism has its uses, such as when we reinvigorated the Quad—a partnership of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States—to strategize on defending our people from China. When we worked with more than seventy partners to take down ISIS, multilateralism again made sense. So did the international effort to defend ships transiting the Persian Gulf from Iranian assaults. Our multilateral work was important. But we also knew that American sovereignty and interests must come first. Sticking with a deal just because it’s already in place is foolhardy.
