What Glasser adds to the literature on this isn’t even the female perspective, although that’s interesting in itself. It’s that experts are unable to grasp how to think about Trump and the United States without a normal policy framework. For instance, she remarks on former Obama administration’s Michelle Flournoy’s inability to make the leap:
I was struck throughout the wide-ranging conversation by how difficult it still is to analyze Trump’s foreign policy by any of the standard Washington measures; Flournoy, in particular, kept struggling to offer rational, academic even, arguments about why an Alpha Male foreign policy wouldn’t work, citing studies about the benefits of diversity and the like. In explaining the Alpha Maleness of the new administration, Sherman looked to the politics of anger Trump has stirred up and, interestingly, connected the president’s disdain for the regular order of the interagency process that generally helps shape national security policy for an administration to his desire to play the strongman. That interagency process, developed over time by administrations of both parties, she argues, is “the difference between a democrat and an autocrat.”
I think that’s the leap that must be made although it sounds as though Flournoy may still be grappling with how to do that.
You have to look at Trump the way you look at other autocrats. If anyone should have an idea about how to do that it should be the foreign policy experts. They’re the ones who have actually had to think about this in the course of their work. But I think there is resistance to fully accepting that this is happening in America and I suppose that’s understandable. But it is happening and people had better figure out how to think about it and counter it. Soon.
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