But I did not write this post because I wanted to offer my opinions about al-Soleimani and American Middle East policy and strategy. There are too many opinions. Many of them are totally useless. And others, even if voiced with great sincerity and erudition, are besides the point regardless. My excavation of the al-Solomeini affair’s context is only the backdrop for my underlying gripe: that we are analyzing any of this with the pretense of seriousness when we have known for some time that President Trump is pathologically unserious. His psychological profile – known to all of us prior to him becoming President – suggests he is incapable of being constrained by reality and will not take responsibility for any of his behaviors. His political profile – evident from the 2016 presidential campaign onwards – suggests his primary aim is to dominate the domestic public space in American politics and by design will tolerate or even cause frequent instability, abrupt policy shifts, baroque palace intrigues, and other quirks of his unique combination of reality TV politics and personalist governance. This has significant domestic consequences, but in the realm of foreign policy and national security it has far more sweeping implications. You see, Trump has a reality distortion field (RDF) that allows him to skillfully shape events in American politics. You do not have to like him to respect his ability to do so. It is what allowed him to become President despite the opposition of both the Republican and Democratic party establishments, even if that opposition was also inept, inconsistent, and weak. You do not have to approve of his actions to understand that something within him made him the man of our particular hour or note that the unique species “Homo Trumpicus” seems to be well-adapted to our current political ecosystem.
Still, it must be said: Trump’s RDF only operates domestically. The farther away one travels from American borders, the weaker the RDF gets. By the time one reaches the assault rifle or IED of a Middle Eastern militiaman, the RDF is nonexistent. But the Middle Eastern militiaman’s behavior is an nonetheless an input to the American domestic system that Trump lords over. And we know that the President and his men are unlikely to respond to such inputs in any way other than what we have repeatedly seen since January 2017. That is, sheer pandemonium. Its impossible to fully enumerate why but I will again make the futile attempt to provide a partially useful summary. The White House is a pirate ship of feuding personal and bureaucratic factions, all of which leak sensitive information promiscuously to the mass media. The President, primus inter pares among his collection of warlords, bandits, and princelings, presides over the chaos when he is not watching TV and shotgunning 12 cans of Diet Coke a day. Typical bureaucratic structures designed for national security policy decision have been hollowed in favor of personal channels, often corresponding as much to the President’s personal financial interests as they do to any publicly declared goal he ostensibly pursues. And as demonstrated by the case of the unfortunate General Flynn it is clear that a good portion of his aides are similarly freelancing, perhaps for multiple foreign and domestic interests. The President hires and fires key cabinet officials like a Hollywood starlet picking up and discarding boyfriends, preventing the building of long-term rapport with any one particular figure. Perhaps foreshadowed by his notorious habit of not paying contractors in private life, the President ultimately owes loyalty to no one but expects absolute loyalty and deference in return. Impulsive decisions by the President – often announced via social media – send his subordinates scrambling to adjust policy and implement them, only for the President to often forget them later and move on.
Worse still, many Trump decisions are slow-walked or even ignored and disobeyed outright, leaving some portions of the government operating more or less autonomously from political control. Even though many of the commands generated by unpredictable firings of synapses in the President’s Diet Coke-addled brain are nonsensical, outrageous, or even insane they are nonetheless lawful orders that must be obeyed. In thwarting his will, Trump’s subordinates go beyond what prior civil servants have done in response to the madness of Richard Nixon and other psychologically (and physiologically) unstable presidents, lending credence to the President’s dark allegations that a “deep state” is out to get him. If the President’s subordinates ignore and undermine his will, he in turn ignores their counsel in favor of insights from network TV shows he obsessively watches. It is said that Ronald Reagan had a “cinematic” style of governance, but the President at heart believes he is a TV character and that the ultimate measure of his performance is how well it plays on TV. The results of this fixation in the national security realm range from comedic to terrifying. We can laugh at the President’s angry tweeting during the 2017-2018 North Korea crisis. But it is much less humorous to observe that the President flew into a rage when he was told that the South Koreans would not move their capital from Seoul and had to be talked out of withdrawing American civilians from the Korean peninsula – a step that would almost certainly be interpreted by the North Koreans as a prelude to war. Trump would not be dissuaded from the course of action, but as his wont eventually dropped it after a fusillade of empty bluster. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, as is the habit of officials during the Trump administration, ignored and thwarted the lawful authority of the President rather than implementing it during this crisis. At least if reports are to be believed, because accounts of the President’s national security decision-making come from large numbers of “officials not authorized to speak on the record” or “individuals with knowledge of the situation.” Anonymous sources.
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When analysts do not trust the President they trust that there are others around him who can moderate, shape, or otherwise direct his tendencies in a certain orderly fashion and impose discipline. This has never been particularly true and – given that Trump has done away with many of the more moderate and established figures of the cabinet – it is far less true today. And in some cases, bizarrely enough, the “adults in the room” have been even more out of touch than the President himself. H.R. McMaster, one such figure expected to guide the President, ended up arguing dubiously for military strikes on North Korea out of the even more dubious presumption that the North Koreans could not be deterred. If individual officials can moderate the President, cumulatively the pandemonium of the administration’s competing personalities and factions negates the benefits of their moderation. And yet, analysts nonetheless seem to persistently tie their hopes to the administration being able to do what it cannot: consistently make responsible national security decisions. For sure, it would be unfair and delusional to blame all of this on Trump himself. He has inherited decades of flawed, compromised, and otherwise difficult policy situations. In many cases he has simply accelerated what otherwise was a slow rot. In some cases he is unfairly blamed merely for highlighting that the rot existed to begin with. And it can be hard to argue that Trumpian chaos and frivolity is uniquely bad when non-Trumpian order and seriousness has brought catastrophe. That being said, the President bears ultimate responsibility for actions taken under his time in office. Quite literally, it is the price of command.
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Each analysis of a core national security decision by the administration will very likely in some way ultimately lead back to the same abhorrent conclusion: that the analyst has devoted far more brainpower towards interpreting a Trump behavior than Trump has in formulating and executing it, that the entire thing is just another episode of the Donald Trump Show, and that we are all hostages to his stochastic narcissism. This is not always true, but is true enough to be one of the few reliable constants of the Trump years. Hence it is understandable that analysts would resist acknowledgement of the situation that confronts them and attempt to persist as if they could dispassionately and professionally evaluate national security policies, strategies, and tactics the way they always have. The alternative is too radically divergent and painful to fully accept.
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During the height of the Bush II administration, Karl Rove is alleged to have said some version of the “we’re an empire now” monologue quoted at the beginning of this post. Setting aside the contentious debate about whether or not Rove – or anyone, really – ever said those words, it seems rather obvious to me that the Trump administration is the apotheosis of what they signify. This requires some further elaboration. If you interpret the Rove pseudo-quote literally, it seems insane. No single administration can control reality! George W. Bush could not simply just tap in the Konami Code and get whatever he wanted!
But the statement is best interpreted the way we interpret Jean Baudrillard’s infamous claim that the Gulf War did not take place. This too is a seemingly bizarre and nonsensical claim that becomes more legible with careful re-reading. The Cold War, Baudrillard observed, was as much conducted via simulations of conflicts that never occurred as it was by actual blood and force of arms. Therefore, it is not particularly surprising that the first Gulf War was rehearsed as a simulation, implemented for the viewing public as a simulation, and consumed in the same manner one might binge-watch a TV show. So we should look at the Rove pseudo-quote in a similar fashion. Let us now return to what Rove supposedly said in 2004. What Rove is “really” saying is that people who “study” mind-independent external reality are suckers. The epistemological equivalent of a Warner Bros cartoon villain building an elaborate (and comically flawed) trap to catch an elusive prey,
they attempt in vain to analyze and interpret the news of the day and impose linearity and rationality on what is neither straightforward or rational. And just as soon as they are done doing so, another event occurs that overturns their analysis of the prior event and forces them to once again restart their analysis from scratch. They are passive, forever reacting to a stream of novel stimuli that they must force into fragile and rigid mental models that collapse as soon as they are constructed
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And this, as Henry Farrell argued in 2016, is exactly what Donald J. Trump aspires towards as a politician. To force everyone to react to events he sets into motion, even when they are themselves opportunistic and impulsive reactions to events outside of his control. To keep on analyzing these eruptions and disruptions is mostly to grant this grotesque circus an air of dignity, nobility, and sobriety it does not deserve. This is true of domestic politics, and I see no reason why foreign policy and national security is any different or should be treated any differently. This poses a problem for analysts of all kinds, but particularly defense and security analysts. It gets tiring to say “this is the chaotic and muddled product of a chaotic and muddled administration” over and over again. It negates their unique and hard-earned currencies of expertise. It renders them just another group of people shouting in the cacophonous din of the Trump years, just more noise that can be ignored without much consequence. But this is far better than the fate that awaits those that insist on trying to impose normalizing assumptions on what is profoundly abnormal.
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In many cases, analysts quite literally retreated into analysis of fantasy worlds because dealing with the world as it is today is too great of a burden. Fiction provides order and structure when reality itself feels fictional. If one cannot analyze the fever dream that passes for American national security policy, one can at least argue about how a fictional general ought to have deployed dragons or Star Destroyers. There is, after all, ample precedent too for that. The historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga argued that the late medieval court responded to the increasing savagery and disorder of the world outside by immersing itself in chivalric romanticism and expressions of nostalgia. However, this is not enough. At some point we have to at least momentarily abandon the comfort of childish things and put down the action figures, comic books, and video game controllers to deal with the harsh realities of the adult world. And one of the harshest realities of the adult world is traditionally the child’s realization that the adults themselves are no better than – and are frequently worse than – children. The recognition that the adults will not be coming to the child’s rescue – in part because they cannot be trusted to behave responsibly or benignly – is the basis for the child learning to cope with the world as it is, not as the child wishes it to be. This is not a task that ever naturally stops, it only ceases upon the moment of death.
Re: Trump Thread
Originally Posted by Philippus Flavius Homovallumus
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