Miller Would Be a Disastrous Choice

Miller is a dangerous ideological zealot.

The president reminded us yesterday that things can always get worse:

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Sunday he is considering naming his deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller as national security adviser and expects to appoint a successor to Mike Waltz within six months.

Miller would be a terrible choice. He has no relevant background or expertise that would begin to qualify him to advise the president on foreign policy and national security. To make matters worse, Miller is a dangerous ideological zealot. He is a particularly nasty authoritarian nationalist. Miller’s appointment would be a win for hardliners and authoritarians, and the administration’s cruel and destructive foreign policy would become even worse than it is.

If he were Trump’s National Security Advisor, the administration would likely use “war on terror” powers even more expansively as it falsely claims that cartels and street gangs are “terrorists.” He is one of the leading architects and cheerleaders of the administration’s lawlessness as it sends people to a Salvadoran gulag without due process and negotiates with the dictatorship in Rwanda about doing the same thing there. Giving Miller more influence and power would be a disaster for the country, as he would encourage Trump to break the law and to indulge all his worst instincts.

Trump has already done considerable damage to U.S. relations with most of our neighbors in the Americas. If Miller increases his influence with the president, there would be even greater damage in the years to come. Miller and Rubio reportedly work well together, and my guess is that the two of them would form a hawkish tag team from hell.

Because Miller’s focus has been entirely on immigration, he hasn’t had much to say about specific foreign policy issues, but it would be surprising if he weren’t a conventional hawk. We can see that he has no problem using expansive security state powers to pursue his goals. There is no reason to think that he would be any different from the string of hardliners that Trump has previously chosen for this role.

Miller certainly doesn’t seem to care about avoiding or ending unauthorized and illegal wars. When he participated in the Signal group chat, his only concern about the bombing was that the U.S. should be extracting “compensation” from other countries as payment for the military campaign. He seems to share Trump’s mercenary approach to foreign policy. Like Trump, he has no problem with the U.S. waging pointless foreign wars as long as someone pays the U.S. for services rendered.

Another reason to fear a Miller appointment is that he is a longtime Trump loyalist and would likely remain in that position for a much longer period than other appointees. At least two of Trump’s other choices for this role (McMaster and Bolton) ended up clashing with him on high-profile issues, and Waltz flamed out quickly. If Miller gets the position, he would probably last until the end of the term.