US election not over for Donald Trump until courts have their say: Robert O’Brien
- The outgoing US National Security Advisor made the comments after an Asia tour, during which he slammed China over issues including trade and Covid-19
- O’Brien said officials in Japan, Philippines and Vietnam had not conveyed concern about a potentially messy power handover by Trump to President-elect Joe Biden
Observers interpreted those remarks as the closest that someone from Trump’s inner circle had come to conceding the president lost the vote.
Instead, O’Brien in Monday’s press briefing said Trump had not exhausted his legal remedies – even though various challenges were being almost uniformly rejected by US courts and senior Republicans had begun urging the president to accept Biden’s victory.
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Asked by This Week in Asia if his counterparts had expressed concerns about the messy and truncated transfer of power, O’Brien said: “No. What I have heard from my counterparts at the highest level of government in Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan, is that they understand that Donald J. Trump will be president of the United States until January 20.
“And until noon on that day, they are going to deal with President Trump as the president of the United States of America as they should,” he said. “And that’s our tradition … that’s our law. There’ll be a transition if the courts don’t rule in President Trump’s favour, and it will be a professional transition. But President Trump has not exhausted his legal remedies.”
He added that Trump had “every right” as an American citizen to pursue the matter through the courts.
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At the Global Security Forum last week, O’Brien acknowledged that a new administration deserved “some time to come in and implement their policies”.
“If the Biden-Harris ticket is determined to be the winner, and obviously things look like that now, we’ll have a very professional transition from the National Security Council, there’s no question about it,” he said during the event.
Earlier on Monday, O’Brien held meetings with the Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin, where the US official handed over US$18 million worth of precision-guided munition to the Southeast Asian country.
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The US earlier this month slapped preliminary “anti-subsidy tariffs” on Vietnamese car and truck tyres, citing the country’s ”undervalued” currency as among the reasons for the move.
“We’ve got such a series of unfair and difficult conduct on behalf of the Chinese, that there’s a bipartisan consensus in America that we have to stand up to China,” O’Brien said. “We are not going to be pushed out of the Indo-Pacific region. We are going to fight for a free and open Indo-Pacific region, with all of our friends and partners. ”
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The US this year aligned its position on the sea dispute between Southeast Asian claimants and China with the findings of a 2016 arbitral tribunal brought by the Philippines. The arbitration panel ruled, among other things, that Beijing’s sweeping claim of the disputed waters based on its “nine-dash line” was baseless.
“O’Brien is likely doing [the Asia trip] as a last-minute attempt to reassure [Vietnam and the Philippines] of consistency and continuity in US foreign policy, despite the transition from Trump to Biden,” said Jay Batongbacal, director of the University of the Philippines’ Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea.
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O’Brien had been reported to be “agreeable to working with the Biden transition team, and his background indicates he is more of a conservative and traditional Republican – the kind that believes in the need to maintain US global supremacy and pre-eminence, and sees China as a threat to the global order”, the professor said.
Jose Antonio Custodio, non-resident fellow of the Manila think tank Stratbase ADR Institute, agreed that O’Brien’s visit signalled continuity as far as US-Philippines ties were concerned.
“The visit is important because of the fact that it cements Philippine-US military alliance, regardless of who is the president. So this is continuity,” the researcher said.
According to defence analyst Max Montero, who runs the MaxDefense Philippines portal, the US equipment donation formalised on Monday by O’Brien included at least 24 GBU-49 Enhanced Paveway II laser-guided bombs; 12 TOW ITAS (Track Optical Wire-Improved Target Acquisition System) launchers; and 100 rounds of BGM-71E TOW 2A missiles.
