November,
2015, the Islamic State mounted devastating attacks in Paris, gunning down more
than a hundred people at a rock concert, in restaurants, and outside a soccer
stadium. In response, Donald Trump, then preparing for the Iowa caucuses,
fulminated about the radical measures he would impose on Muslims seeking to
enter the United States, if he were elected President. Trump was hardly alone
in announcing rash proposals; on the subject of counterterrorism, it was a time
of competitive opportunism among Republican Presidential candidates. Yet, in
his nativism and bellicosity, Trump was already separating from his opponents. He
began by making a series of loose comments during television interviews,
including a suggestion that he might force American Muslims to register in a
database. The following month, after a mass shooting in San Bernardino, he
issued a formal statement promising “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims
entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out
what is going on.”
It
would likely be unconstitutional to ban people from America on the basis of
their religious faith, and so, as the campaign progressed, Trump refined this
proposal, or at least the terms he used to describe it. (Rudolph Giuliani has
said that he advised Trump on how to make a Muslim ban more difficult to
overturn on constitutional grounds.) Last June, following a massacre carried
out at an Orlando night club by Omar Mateen, an American citizen of Afghan
descent, Trump promised to “suspend immigration from areas of the world where
there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe, or
our allies until we fully understand how to end these threats.” He said he
would lift the ban “when, as a nation, we are in a position to properly and
perfectly screen these people coming into our country.” Muddying his
prospective constitutional defense, he told Bloomberg, “I want terrorists out. I
want people that have bad thoughts out.” He did not elaborate about how his
thought police might operate.
A
few days later, Politico asked retired Marine General James Mattis, then a
private citizen, what he thought about the talk of a Muslim ban. Mattis said
that it had caused allies of the United States in the Islamic world to think
“we have lost faith in reason…. They think we’ve completely lost it. This kind
of thing is causing us great damage right now, and it’s sending shock waves
through this international system.”
Last
Friday, as Mattis, now the Secretary of Defense, stood behind him, Trump signed
an executive order suspending travel to the U.S. by citizens of seven Muslim-majority
countries. According to many news accounts, Trump relied on the views of a
small group of White House advisers, including his senior policy adviser,
Stephen Miller, and his senior counsellor, Stephen Bannon, the former head of
Breitbart News. They have relished the opportunity to “shock the system,” as
another adviser, Kellyanne Conway, put it last week. Bannon has made plain that
he seeks upheaval; in that respect, he once mentioned Lenin as a model, however
facetiously.
Bannon
is like the sorcerer’s apprentice; he may want chaos, but he doesn’t know how
to control the chaos he creates. He may not care. Since Friday, Trump’s travel
order has caused large public protests; forced the White House chief of staff
to go on television and announce major changes to the policy’s scope less than
two days after it was enacted; attracted criticism from world leaders and
allies; and led to the defiance, on principle, of acting Attorney General Sally
Yates, who had been appointed by Obama. Trump fired her on Monday night.
In
its furious efforts to spin a defense, the Trump Administration has argued that
it was just building on Obama Administration policy after the Paris attacks. This
is a slightly complicated form of nonsense. To understand the scale of Trump’s
departure from past policy, however, requires a short tour through recent
visa-policy history.
In
1986, Congress established the Visa Waiver Program. It allows citizens from
approved countries to travel to the United States without a visa, for business
or pleasure, for as long as ninety days. Britain was the first country to join.
Today, there are thirty-eight participants, mainly in Europe, but also
including Asian allies such as Japan and Australia. No Muslim-majority country
is a participant. Neither is Israel.
After
the September 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush Administration tightened scrutiny of
Visa Waiver travellers, mainly by deploying technology. It required Visa Waiver
travellers to have machine-readable or biometric passports. Later, the Bush Administration
set up an online registry system that allowed for screening of such travellers
before they flew to America.
In
December, 2015, after the Paris attacks, President Obama signed into law the
Visa Waiver Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act. The law sought to
address the problem of Belgian, French, and other European-passport holders,
who had volunteered by the hundreds to fight for ISIS, and who might be able to
fly into the United States, under Visa Waiver, without being noticed.
The new law said that if a traveller from a
Visa Waiver nation had, at any time since March, 2011, visited a country
compromised by terrorism he or she would have to attend an American consulate
to apply for a regular visa and submit to an interview, as many other
travellers to America from the around the world do routinely, rather than
simply entering visa-free. Early in 2016, the Obama Administration named seven
countries as destinations that would disallow subsequent use of the Visa Waiver
program. They were Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran, and Yemen—the same
seven named in President Trump’s order, as Trump’s spokespeople have often
pointed out this week.
The
Obama list, though, was not a ban but a chance to ask more questions. Syria,
Iraq, and Libya host significant numbers of Islamic State volunteers from
Europe. If a Belgian kid travelled to those places, it would be prudent to ask
why he had done so before he turned up in New York. Somalia is the home of
Al-Shabaab, a regional terrorist group that has attracted international
volunteers. Yemen hosts an Al Qaeda branch that has attempted attacks on U.S.
soil. The inclusion of Iran and Sudan was less persuasive, yet both countries,
along with Syria, are on the State Department’s official list of state sponsors
of terrorism, so that provided a rationale for including them. The most notable
omission was perhaps Pakistan, the locus of a number of terrorist groups with
records of cross-border attacks, including a fizzled attempt to set off a car
bomb in Times Square, in 2010.
Donald
Trump and his advisers received this inheritance not as counterterrorism
technocrats but as political opportunists. Trump’s order on Friday went far
beyond the policy set last year. First, Trump’s order was not limited to Visa
Waiver travellers from Europe or Asia who might have visited the flagged
countries. In its initial formulation, the order apparently covered everyone born
in those seven countries who was not a U.S. citizen. Nor did it merely require
the designated travellers to attend a consulate to apply for a regular visa. It
banned all travel to the U.S. for at least ninety days, while the Trump
Administration worked out its plans for “extreme vetting.”
After
the weekend’s furious reaction, the Administration has now said it will not
halt travel by permanent residents of the United States, unless they are
thought to pose a specific security risk. British and Canadian leaders
announced they had won exemptions for their citizens. But it is doubtful that
Customs and Border Protection officers will have a clear idea anytime soon
about how they are supposed to proceed, given the contradictory statements by
the Trump Administration.
Back
in 2015, Mattis outlined the greatest failings of Trump’s proposal as
counterterrorism policy. Its blanket exclusions—of women, children, the
elderly, and the disabled—were all but scripted for the Islamic State’s
propagandists. These elements remain in the executive order. Trump’s statements
that he will prioritize Christian travellers over Muslim ones are likely to
have a similar effect. An initiative so reviled and so easily caricatured
across the Islamic world will inspire terrorists to action and invite various
forms of retaliation against Americans. It will make shaky governments in
Muslim-majority countries that coöperate with the United States—from Morocco to
Indonesia—vulnerable to domestic protests and political pressure to break ties
with American counterterrorism programs. The policy’s rollout has combined, in
one act, all of the features of the Trump Administration’s startling first
eleven days: it places political theatre before considered policy; it threatens
constitutional principles; it reflects incompetent and hasty decision-making;
and it is plainly dangerous.
Photo:
Trump’s team has argued that his executive order on immigration built on Obama
Administration policy after the Paris attacks. This is a slightly complicated
form of nonsense.Photograph by Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty
Steve
Coll, a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at
Columbia University, and reports on issues of intelligence and national
security in the United States and abroad. More
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