As Trump unilaterally disarms
The Trump administration is busy with its ethnic cleansing campaign (someone told Trump to call it reverse migration) and trying to keep an expanding set of controversies in the air. Still, it was not too busy to issue a new National Security Strategy. Anne Applebaum believes it is anything but.
In his drive to overturn all things Biden, Trump terminated a series of agreements worked out last year between diplomats from “places as varied as Italy, Australia, and Ivory Coast” and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center to “jointly expose malicious and deceptive online campaigns originating in Russia, China, or Iran.”
Applebaum writes in The Atlantic (gift link):
The center’s former head, James Rubin, called this decision “a unilateral act of disarmament,” and no wonder: In effect, the United States was declaring that it would no longer oppose Russian influence campaigns, Chinese manipulation of local politics, or Iranian extremist recruitment drives. Nor would the American government use any resources to help anyone else do so either.
The recent publication of the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy showed that this decision was no accident. Unilateral disarmament is now official policy. Because—despite its name—this National Security Strategy is not really a strategy document. It is a suicide note. If the ideas within it are really used to shape policy, then U.S. influence in the world will rapidly disappear, and America’s ability to defend itself and its allies will diminish. The consequences will be economic as well as political, and they will be felt by all Americans.
Applebaum perceives several authors behind the effort the way scholars see the Bible. Those authors do not reflect the views of the Republican Party as a whole, nor of the U.S. government, but of “a particular ideological faction” now influencing foreign policy. It cannot (or refuses to) identify any countries that wish to harm the U.S. or any actions they are taking to do so.
The document portrays China not as a geopolitical competitor but as a trading rival. It dismisses other adversaries as weakened or else ignores them.
The U.S. spent the decades after World War II competing against geopolitical rivals and gaming out how to counter challenges to world peace and American power. Not anymore. It views the world, as Trump does, through a business lens. It directs our national security experts to focus instead on trade threats, to “control over our borders,” “natural disasters,” “unfair trading practices,” “job destruction and deindustrialization.”
Who does this document see as a threat? European liberal democracy:
This is what this radical faction really fears: people who talk about transparency, accountability, civil rights, and the rule of law. Not coincidentally, these are the same people whom the MAGA ideologues hate and dislike at home, the same people who are fighting to prevent MAGA from redefining the United States as a white ethnostate, who oppose the corruption of America’s democratic institutions, and who object when Trump’s friends, family, and tech allies redirect U.S. foreign policy to benefit their private interests.
Because kleptocrats gonna kleptocrat.
European and American liberal democracy is so dangerous to their project, in fact, that the MAGA ideologues seem to be planning to undermine it. They don’t want to meddle in anyone’s internal politics anywhere else on the planet: “We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change.” The glaring exception to this rule is in Europe. Here, it is now American policy to “help Europe correct its current trajectory,” language that implies that the U.S. will intervene to do so.
The Great Replacement Theory may go unmentioned, but is there in spirit. Europe is in fact on the verge of “civilizational erasure.” It worries that “certain NATO members will become majority non-European,” meaning less white and less Christian. Applebaum points out the irony that it is more likely that the United States could be “majority minority” first. Unless Stephen Miller has his way.
“The only possible conclusion”? Applebaum proposes:
The authors of this document don’t know much about Europe, or don’t care to find out. Living in a fantasy world, they are blind to real dangers. They invent fictional threats. Their information comes from conspiracist websites and random accounts on X, and if they use these fictions to run policy, then all kinds of disasters could await us.
If the U.S. survive this period, JV Last writes at The Bulwark, the right will accuse those like Applebaum (and we here at Hullabaloo) who raised the alarm about Trumpism of being alarmist:
Look how overwrought you were, they’ll say. You spent a decade telling us that Trump was trying to overturn democracy. But the fact that we don’t live in a dictatorship proves that Trump was normal and that we should never listen to you hysterics.
Our success will be used to discredit us, like a quantum theory of suicide:1 If democracy survives, then that is proof that it was never under threat in the first place.
Trump and Trumpism was never really a threat, see? Right-wing COVID survivors insist the same. Just a flesh wound. I’ve had worse. “The people who did this to America will never pay a price. And if we defeat them, our success will be used as an argument against us,” Last laments.
You know what? I’ll take that risk.
(h/t PM for catching misspellings.)
Happy Hollandaise everyone