Trump insists he's right on foreign policy after his intelligence officials break with him - POLITICO

On North Korea, President Donald Trump said that the historically isolated country’s relationship with the U.S. is the “best it has ever been.” | Alex Wong/Getty Images

President Donald Trump insisted Wednesday that his administration had made significant progress toward wrapping up the U.S. military’s longstanding engagements in the Middle East, contradicting his top intelligence officials by proclaiming that the Islamic State in Syria “will soon be destroyed."

Trump’s tweets seemed to be a rebuttal of the public testimony his top intelligence chiefs gave Tuesday morning before Congress while discussing the gravest threats to the U.S. worldwide.

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Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and CIA Director Gina Haspel both indicated that there is significant daylight between the president and the intelligence community on three significant issues: that the Islamic State remains a forceful presence in Iraq and Syria, North Korea is not likely to give up its nuclear weapons and that Iran is not yet seeking a nuclear weapon.

The president addressed some of those contradictions in a series of tweets Wednesday morning. He wrote that “tremendous progress” had been made in the fight against Islamic State militants since he assumed office two years ago, “especially over [the] last 5 weeks,” when he abruptly announced they had already been defeated and that he would pull U.S. forces out of Syria.

The Islamic State's self-declared “Caliphate will soon be destroyed, unthinkable two years ago,” he claimed.

That position puts the president at odds with what Coats told lawmakers Tuesday, when he predicted that the Islamic State “very likely will continue to pursue external attacks from Iraq and Syria against regional and Western adversaries, including the United States” and noted that the militant group "is intent on resurging and still commands thousands of fighters in Iraq and Syria.”

On North Korea, Trump said that the historically isolated country’s relationship with the U.S. is the “best it has ever been.”

Though he has previously declared that he would push the volatile regime of Kim Jong Un to totally wind down its nuclear weapons programs, on Wednesday Trump said there was a “decent chance” of that.

While Coats on Tuesday told lawmakers that Kim's regime has "halted some provocative behavior" related to its nuclear program and that Kim "continues to demonstrate openness" to denuclearizing the peninsula, the director of national intelligence also noted assessments show that some of North Korea's activity is "inconsistent with full denuclearization."

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“Time will tell what will happen with North Korea, but at the end of the previous administration, relationship was horrendous and very bad things were about to happen. Now a whole different story,” Trump said Wednesday.

“I look forward to seeing Kim Jong Un shortly,” he added, referring to his second summit with Kim at the end of next month. “Progress being made-big difference!”

The president also said that peace negotiations with the Taliban “are proceeding well in Afghanistan after 18 years of fighting,” adding “fighting continues but the people of Afghanistan want peace in this never ending war. We will soon see if talks will be successful?”

While the U.S. peace envoy to Afghanistan said over the weekend that negotiators had “made significant progress on vital issues,” one former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan on Wednesday slammed the administration’s agreement to exclude the Afghan government from peace talks with the Taliban, calling the emergence of such a framework for peace equivalent to surrender.

Ryan Crocker, a career diplomat who served as ambassador to Afghanistan during the Obama administration, wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post that negotiating with the Taliban while agreeing to their demands to leave the Afghan government out of negotiation will enable the terrorist group to flourish again once U.S. forces are withdrawn.

“The Taliban will offer any number of commitments, knowing that when we are gone and the Taliban is back, we will have no means of enforcing any of them,” he wrote.

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