Judging by General Flynn’s book, the media portrayal of a rift between Senator John McCain and Trump’s brain-trust is exaggerated.
One of the first great media riffs to define the Trump administration before it even takes power blares from the news pages of today’s Wall Street Journal. The paper outlines an “intraparty split over Russia — which pits GOP lawmakers like Sens. John McCain and Lindsay Graham against [President-elect Donald] Trump and his national security adviser designate, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.” The “disagreement,” we’re told, is “over a basic question: How much danger does President Vladimir Putin’s Russia pose to the U.S.?”
Correspondent Paul Sonne’s report elaborates that Senator McCain’s faction “believes Mr. Putin poses a grave threat to the U.S. by undermining democratic values, flouting rules of the international order and countering American influence around the world.” On the opposite side, we are led to believe, is General Flynn. According to the report, Flynn sees Putin’s regime “as a necessary ally in the graver global conflict with Islamist extremism and a potential partner more broadly.”
The report’s sole example pegging Flynn as part of a coterie of Trump “policy makers who have pushed for closer ties with the Kremlin” is a “Russian government-sponsored trip to Moscow for an anniversary of RT, a state-sponsored television network,” which the retired general took in December 2015.
That’s an awfully thin reed on which to hang an extravagant theory . . . especially when one considers that seven months later — in July 2016, while General Flynn was on the campaign trail as a top Trump adviser — he published a bestselling book in which he places Putin’s Russia at the core of “an international alliance of evil countries and movements that is working to destroy” the United States.
The book, unmentioned in the WSJ report, is The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War against Radical Islam and Its Allies. It is co-authored with Michael Ledeen, the Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former Reagan State Department adviser (and a close friend of yours truly). A distinguished historian, Dr. Ledeen has written for decades on the strategies and tactics of totalitarian governments (very much including the Soviet Union and KGB, from which Putin emerged) and their propensity to align with jihadist regimes and movements. As The Field of Fight elucidates, a particular concern of Ledeen’s, which Flynn shares, is the bond between Putin’s Russia and the Shiite jihadist regime in Iran.
Flynn and Ledeen correctly point out that Putin has a good deal to fear from radical Islamic groups operating within the Russian Federation. Indeed, Putin himself has dealt brutally with them, most notoriously in Beslan in 2004. These jihadist groups are predominantly Sunni, with al-Qaeda affiliations and a high degree of participation in the jihad against the Iran-backed Assad regime in Syria. Iran has nevertheless backed them — as it has historically backed Sunni Hamas, al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda in Iraq, an offshoot Tehran nurtured as it evolved into the Islamic State (ISIS).