Trump-Obama turf war
Donald Trump isn’t president yet, but he thinks he is.
“In some ways, Trump is neutering the Obama administration,” said Douglas G. Brinkley, a professor of history and a presidential historian at Rice University in Houston. “They’ve avoided personally attacking each other, but behind the scenes, they’re working to undermine each other, and I don’t know how the American people benefit from that.”
For its part, the Obama administration on Tuesday announced a permanent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling along wide areas of the Arctic and the Eastern Seaboard, invoking an obscure provision of a 1953 law, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, to claim that Mr. Trump had no power to reverse it.
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White House officials asserted a similar privilege in their decision not to veto the Security Council resolution. Israel’s aggressive construction of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, they said, puts at risk a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Mr. Trump’s opposition to the measure, and the likelihood that his administration will reverse the position, played no part in the decision, they said.
“There’s one president at a time,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser. “There’s a principle here that the world understands who is speaking for the United States until January 20th, and who is speaking for the United States after January 20th.”
In the last week, Mr. Trump has written on Twitter that the United States “must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability”; accused China of an “unprecedented act” in seizing a United States Navy underwater drone in the South China Sea; and then, after the Pentagon and the Chinese negotiated the drone’s return, suggested that the United States should “let them keep it!”
…Mr. Trump’s pronouncements are often so vague and offhand that their long-term impact on policy is open to debate. But his intervention to press Egypt to delay the Security Council vote disrupted a sensitive diplomatic negotiation, and muddied perhaps Mr. Obama’s final opportunity to make a statement on the stalled Middle East peace process.
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