The Brainless Ideas Guiding Trump’s Foreign Policy

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.”