The Brainless Ideas Guiding Trump’s Foreign Policy

The moderator leans forward in his chair and issues the mating call of official Washington. “We have a lot to cover and we only have thirty minutes,” he tells Robert O’Brien, President Donald Trump’s last national security advisor. In the District, where even low-level appointees are capable of dishing out unintended consequences to seven continents, both brevity and depth of knowledge are scorned. The critical skill, the serious thing, is to say very little over a moderate length of time.

O’Brien is the opening act of the third annual Grand Strategy Summit, hosted by the Richard Nixon Foundation on September 25. After his scandals, deprived of the typical tools of the legacy-builder, Nixon tried to reestablish himself as a freelance statesman, a modern-day Metternich who could see the full chessboard. The foundation inherited this thin reed. It has gathered conservative foreign policy and national security grandees for a day in the basement of the Ritz Carlton nearest the White House, for two purposes.

Speakers come to glorify Nixon—and in the process, reminisce about a conservative internationalist, a hawk with a heart of gold, at a time when right-wing ideas about foreign policy have gotten weirder and dumber and more inchoate. The base no longer cares for the bomb-droppers. But they ran the show in the first Trump term, and will in the second, if only because they are the only ones who can.

The Grand Strategy Summit is a reflection of this absurd configuration. Trump has, for the entirety of his political career, eviscerated the foreign policy establishment, arguing that it is both too eager to start wars and too timid once it has. But beyond a relatively simple heuristic—Trump admires strongmen and scorns long-standing alliances with democratic allies—there is no Trump Doctrine.

Eager to cast himself as a modern day isolationist, Trump was nevertheless a reckless and trigger-happy president, who very nearly started wars with both Iran and North Korea. Trump and much of his base has rejected the neoconservative framework that has dominated Republican foreign policy for decades. But instead of shunning the hawks, he empowered them, placing men like O’Brien and his predecessor John Bolton in positions of high authority.

In the basement of the Ritz Carlton, dozens of men like O’Brien gathered with the ostensible purpose of laying out a Republican foreign policy for the Trump era. Instead, it’s clear that they don’t have a plan at all.

Jim Byron, the CEO of the Nixon Foundation, is a former Nixon Teen who joined the firm at 14 and became its leader at 28. At the Ritz, he boasts that the audience—of perhaps two hundred—contains “representatives of 41 countries that are here with us, including 14 ambassadors to the United States.” There are a line of diplomatic cars parked illegally on the sidewalk of the hotel. They are here to listen to men who aim to rule the world.

What is the new Republican Grand Strategy? America faced an “Axis of Authoritarianism,” O’Brien said: Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Pyongyang. “Four powers. They’ve got internal lines of communication between them.” It’s unclear what he means by this. “Internal lines of communication” is a very Strategy term, but you would typically hear it in relation to the movement of troops around a field. Here, he seems to mean that all four countries are in Asia.

O’Brien ping-pongs between name-dropping, descriptions of various weapons systems, and complaints. He was recently at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York, “behind enemy lines,” he says, but they “couldn’t have been nicer, maybe because I published this article” in their journal. “They asked this question about China: Do we want regime change? What do we think about the people in China? And I think that’s the same question about Iran.”

The question of pursuing regime change in China is a refreshingly psychotic opening to the morning’s discussion. But we don’t dwell on it. “What we do want is for the people of Russia, the people of Iran, the people of China,” is to see that America is “the shining city on the hill,” a place where “freedom thrives, freedom is alive.” Soft power, in other words, but eventually it gets too soft for his liking. The idea of America “has to penetrate” foreign regimes, he says, fertilize the brain ovum of our many enemies.

“We’ve got some problems with our navy,” the moderator says, changing the subject. O’Brien is eager to reply, but takes the subject in an unexpected direction. “We need some more Top Gun movies,” he says. “We need more Officer and a Gentleman movies. The kind of movies we grew up with,” he said, adding A Few Good Men after a moment’s thought. You know, the classics—with “Richard Gere, Tom Cruise, Debra Winger.” That would help us recruit. “Instead we’ve gone on this woke experiment.” The military was supposed to be for “men who play football in rural Idaho, Utah,” who run “track in the inner cities.” To make the army strong, “we’ve gotta get rid of the wokeness.”

And we needed better weapons, developed more quickly. “I was at Anduril the other day in Costa Mesa,” he said of Palmer Luckey’s drone company and defense contractor. “These guys are like rocket men in the Marvel Movies.” They were hard-charging and forward-facing, unlike the military itself, which reminded him of something he had seen in a satirical newspaper. “There was a Babylon Bee headline that said ‘The Navy is Giving Up, It’s Just Too Hard,” he said. “This kind of ties back into the whole ‘woke’ thing.” (It wasn’t clear precisely which Babylon Bee headline O’Brien was referring to, though several reference the Navy, including “Navy SEALs To Be Replaced With Social Workers” and “Navy Brags To Other Branches Of Military That It’s Gay All 12 Months Of The Year.”)

“That’s a great way to conclude, Mr. Ambassador,” says Byron. “Thank you.” O’Brien wasn’t one of the nobodies that the churn of Trump’s first term elevated beyond his station: He is considered a prominent voice in conservative foreign policy. He was a member of the George W. Bush administration, advised the Mitt Romney, Scott Walker and Ted Cruz campaigns on foreign policy, and served as Trump’s senior advisor on foreign affairs for a year and a half, helping to negotiate the Afghanistan withdrawal agreement. Upon leaving office he was promoted by his friend, the conservative radio host and commentator Hugh Hewitt, as a possible 2024 presidential contender, and has been discussed as a cabinet secretary in the next Republican presidential administration.

The Grand Strategist—think Henry Kissinger orGeorge Kennan—is supposed to be capable of taking all of the nation’s priorities and blending them into a coherent whole. But here, in front of a friendly audience, representing a foundation he helps lead, and given the opportunity to speak expansively about his vision of the world, O’Brien seems incapable of cohering even his own mind—let alone distinguishing between Hollywood and reality. What must the ambassadors be thinking?

“Do you not know, my son,” Axel Oxenstierna wrote to his son Johan in 1648, “with how very little wisdom the world is governed?” Johan was on his way to represent Sweden in the negotiations at Westphalia, and he worried that he wouldn’t hold up. Axel, a veteran ambassador, tried to reassure him: The world’s best and brightest aren’t very.

This has been no less true in the United States than in other countries, but we have an additional problem. We are particularly solipsistic, in part because we are so powerful. America’s foreign policy since the Cold War is to an even greater degree than elsewhere shaped by internal political debates and the ambitions, professional milieu, and insecurities of its practitioners. The material reality of the external world has some import too, but it’s down the list.

This becomes thuddingly obvious at the Grand Strategy Summit, where the psychological projections of one after another former Trump administration official or pundit gives the proceedings a dreamlike quality by the time the breakfast buffet is swapped for lunch. It does not help that the carpet in the Ritz Carlton’s basement has the same design as the one in The Shining’s Overlook Hotel.

“I would remind everybody that there were times that if you were an American you would stride the world like a colossus,” retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, another Trump administration vet, says during one address. “Now if you’re an American you get shot.” Here, at least, is one continuity in conservative foreign policy: American power is a way of making Americans themselves feel virile.

At age 80, fortunate enough to have been in positions of power when America’s enemies were Granada and Serbia, Kellogg’ stride is not as confident as it once was—but he has a cure for what ails us. In the Middle East, he says, “our major mistake is that we haven’t picked a side,” he says with remarkable conviction. “And I think the side we should pick is the side of Israel.”

Some are not done striding. O’Brien tells the crowd with obvious pleasure that everyone he meets, these days, wants to sound out his opinion. “Everyone thinks President Trump is coming back,” he says of a recent trip to the U.N. General Assembly, “and they wanted to talk to myself and Mike Pompeo.” It’s nice to be desired.
Others still, who perhaps have not yet got their time to be the colossus, are here simply to strive. A panel moderated by Eli Lake of the Free Press convenes to consider more great questions: “How does what happens in Ukraine affect what happens in Beijing? How does what happens in Lebanon affect what happens in Moscow? What are the most likely outcomes for each of these wars—and then what?”

His panel is dominated by Carrie Filipetti, a former Trump state department official who was briefly tasked with investigating Havana Syndrome and, after that was all squared away, joined a new hawkish think tank chaired by famed neoconservative Elliott Abrams, and Matt Pottinger, former deputy NSA under O’Brien. Lake introduces Pottinger, who joins via livestream, as a “rising star.” His excessively white teeth and media training shine through the screen.

Pottinger is a rising star, perhaps, because of his ability to develop new theoretical frameworks on behalf of the cause. Lake asks him if Taiwan will succeed in its “porcupine strategy,” becoming strong enough to deter a Chinese invasion. This allows him to tout his preferred concept, the title of his new book, The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan. Taiwan is in a better position than Ukraine, he says, because it is surrounded by the ocean. He has a different name, too, for the opposing team. It’s no longer the Axis of Evil, or O’Brien’s Axis of Authoritarianism, but the “Axis of Chaos.” (“I love that phrase, the Axis of Chaos,” Lake coos.) The panel loathes the idea that has cropped up in foreign policy discourse, in relation to the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, of “escalating to de-escalate.” They prefer escalating to escalate.

To the extent that the summit was a bid to help right-wing hawks join minds under the watchful ghost of R. Milhous, the most interesting thing was the disdain young hawks had for Nixon’s two greatest accomplishments. On the one hand, Nixon negotiated an exit from Vietnam—albeit after sabotaging a potential end to the war during his 1968 campaign and continuing it for several years. He also normalized relations with mainland China, citing—in a clip played at the start of Lake’s panel—the need to maintain balance among the great powers.

Pottinger says the idea of maintaining a balance of power is a bit idiotic, though he graciously predicts Nixon would have “revised himself on this question later in life.” A “balance of power,” the work of generations of American diplomats until the end of the Cold War, is a “very dangerous thing,” he says, a “prelude to war.” The way to peace is for America to become and remain much, much stronger than its collective enemies. (“Is that possible?” asks the somewhat more contemplative third member, Nadia Schadlow. “I’m not so sure.”)

Filipetti agrees. “With the cyber sphere, it’s no longer possible for us to think about balance of power in the same way,” she says. “They’re able to influence us at home because of disinformation and propaganda.”

The Afghanistan withdrawal, Vietnam’s modern-day counterpart, is similarly slammed. Biden, like Nixon, ended America’s longest-running war without the additional dishonor of first prolonging it even further. The panel agrees that American weakness in Afghanistan is the reason that Putin invaded Ukraine, and might contribute to China’s decision to invade Taiwan. Falling dominoes, you might remember. Nobody offers a plan that would have “won” Afghanistan, of course. And the counter-theory—that the U.S. would not have been in a position to rally NATO against a Russian invasion had it been stuck in a once-again hot war in Afghanistan—is never offered even to dismiss it.

“Not one person lost their job for the Afghanistan debacle,” Pottinger says. Of course Trump, who negotiated the withdrawal timetable with the Taliban, did lose his job. But he means liberals, those whose softness shamed our great nation. “A private will be punished more for losing his rifle than a general will for losing a war.”

Let’s say a general was punished for planning failures at Kabul airport. What punishment should then be levied against the American Foreign Policy Professional of both parties, which have brought a litany of calamity and disaster upon this country and entire regions of the world since the turn of the millennium? In Foggy Bottom and Arlington men and women behind desks call sanction orgiastic violence in places they barely know and will never travel to, in an attempt to maintain the nation’s confident stride.

None of them will ever be held accountable in the way they deserve to be. This would not be such an unhappy fact if it were not that there appears to be no alternative on offer. The rare foreign policy official like the Obama administration’s Ben Rhodes, who seems skeptical of American abilities and intentions, are shouted down and sidelined. Domestic political conditions constrain the country and prevent its statesman from even considering alternate ways of being in the world. At the Ritz, it was clear that this point—that America should be swaggering and strong and powerful—was the beginning and the end of the “grand strategy” in the Trump era. But Republicans are not alone in their incoherent approach to foreign policy.

On the day of the Grand Strategy Summit, The Atlantic published a lengthy account of the Biden Administration’s behind-the-scenes handling of the Gaza war—with testimony from the men who are in the positions that O’Brien and Kellogg and Pottinger used to hold. It was a sympathetic portrait of men who had failed and knew they had failed. “Could they have done anything differently?” Foer asks at the end. “Over the course of two hours, the group batted ideas back and forth. In the end, they threw up their hands. There was no magical act of diplomacy, no brilliant flourish of creative statecraft that they could suddenly deploy.”

America has never been able to perform magical acts of diplomacy. The more disquieting prospect, as the nation slides deeper into a century that seems likely to become more violent and chaotic, is that the nation can no longer properly practice diplomacy at all.