Fears of a ‘Deep State’ in America
Reply With QuoteMr. Trump has said he might appoint Stephen A. Feinberg, a finance executive who was an early supporter of his campaign, to review the intelligence agencies.
“It looks, sounds and feels like a political witch hunt,” said Ms. Zegart. “It’s like pouring gasoline on the fire.”
“What’s happening here is that the president doesn’t even want to hear intelligence that he doesn’t agree with, and jumps to the conclusion that it must be politicized, and must be the result of people conspiring against him,” Ms. Zegart said.
By creating the perception of conflict, Mr. Trump may have made it more likely.
Crossing the Line
Mr. Flynn, in his short tenure, exemplified the breakdown between the president’s inner circle and career civil servants. He kept the National Security Council largely shut out of policy-making and sought sweeping changes in foreign policy.
For concerned government officials, leaks may have become one of the few remaining means by which to influence not just Mr. Flynn’s policy initiatives but the threat he seemed to pose to their place in democracy. That has fueled speculation that details of Mr. Flynn’s contact with the Russian ambassador could have been leaked as much to undermine Mr. Flynn as out of concern for impropriety.
Even if that was not the case, such practices are a hazard of officials’ growing reliance on leaks and other tools of bureaucratic resistance. This risks entrenching a culture of bureaucratic warfare that is adversarial and dysfunctional by default — not quite a Turkish-style deep state, but not a healthy democracy either.
Officials are stuck in a difficult position: Even if each individual leak is justifiable, as insubordination becomes more sustained and overt, it inches deeper into the gray zone of counter-democratic activities.
The distinction between deep-state meddling and acceptable protest is difficult to draw in the United States, Ms. Zegart said, because this degree of opposition is so unusual.
“I don’t think you can say in advance what inappropriate deep-state activity would look like, because we haven’t seen this before,” she said.
In countries like Egypt, Mr. El Amrani said, the line is much clearer.
There, “the deep state is not official institutions rebelling,” he said, but rather “shadowy networks within those institutions, and within business, who are conspiring together and forming parallel state institutions.”
Mr. Trump, by treating these institutions as if they are already his political enemies, makes that harder to avoid.
Bad for Everyone
As that gulf widens, it becomes more likely that mutual mistrust will lead the president and government bureaucracy to actively undermine one another.
A lesson of deep states: Even minor decisions become the subject of political infighting, making basic governance difficult. “We saw in Egypt in 2013 that the result is complete decision-making paralysis,” Mr. El Amrani
That is one of the milder outcomes. But when institutions with vast power to eavesdrop, fine, harass and detain see themselves as locked in a zero-sum struggle for survival, it is often basic civil liberties and democratic rights that end up in the crossfire.
Mr. El Amrani does not believe those worst-case scenarios are likely to come to pass in the United States. But there is still a risk that bureaucratic resistance against the president could become an enduring feature of American politics. Once trust is broken, it is difficult to rebuild.
Ms. Zegart agreed. “There are no good long-term consequences here,” she said. “This war between the intelligence community and the White House is bad for the intelligence community, bad for the White House, and bad for the nation’s security.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/w...rump.html?_r=0
Originally Posted by K I L L
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