American Foreign Policy Is Being Run by the Dumbest Motherfuckers Alive

The fuckwittery on display right now by Trump's foreign policy team boggles the mind.

Photo by Jørgen Håland on Unsplash

Back in 2017 I wrote a Washington Post column highlighting the first-term Trump administration’s myriad foreign policy fuck-ups, noting “I look at this president and his foreign policy team, and I just can’t stop laughing.” See if any of this next section has any ring of familiarity for 2025:

It’s hard to overstate just how badly Trump has navigated the global stage. The Chinese and Saudis have figured out how to buy him off with a couple billion dollars and some flattery. There is zero evidence of any appreciable policy gains. U.S. leadership is being constantly questioned. Whatever soft power resided in the United States has dissipated. Outside of the Persian Gulf, Trump’s approach has done nothing but alienate allies and bolster potential rivals.

How bad is this situation? I look at Trump, at McMaster, at Tillerson, and conclude, “Yeah, I could do better.”

I cannot stress enough how much I should not be thinking this. I am an international relations professor: The biggest deliverables I’ve ever managed is the occasional conference and handing my grades in on time. In the past, whenever the prospect of a policy position has come up, I start getting the hives because of the myriad ways I know how to screw things up. I know my skill set, and am rather dubious that ably managing the foreign policy process is part of it.

All that said, do I think I could run American foreign policy better than the current team? Yes. Heck, I could be on Twitter all day and only pay partial attention to briefings and still do a better job than the current clown show.

To be fair to Trump, he was in a bit of a pickle when he picked his first-term foreign policy team. He had to rely on a lot of mainstream Republicans and foreign policy professionals — you know, the “adults in the room” — to fill out his cabinet. These folks, in turn, resisted Trump’s more populist and immature policy impulses.

This time around, though, was gonna be different. Trump had MAGAfied the Republican Party. Through Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute, Trump would be able to staff his foreign policy and national security team with folks who believed in his foreign policy doctrines. Even if the policies themselves might represent a radical break from previous presidents, they would be executed competently and professionally, right?

Right?!

If you’ve read this far, you likely know the answer.

In two short months, the second Trump administration’s abject incompetence has managed to make his bumbling first-term crew look like a paragon of professionalism. Trump’s needless, groundless hostility towards Canada — egged on by advisor Peter Navarro and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick — has managed to turn one of the friendliest neighbors in international relations history into a prickly porcupine of a neighbor, complete with consumer boycotts and everything.

I mean, this is the advertisement that current Prime Minister Mark Carney is running:

If anyone can explain to me how making Canada more hostile to the United States puts America First, I would be glad to hear their reasoning. Because right now the effect has been entirely negative.

Meanwhile, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has managed to deliver the worst of both worlds: staffing cuts that do not save any appreciable money while simultaneously destroying state capacity during a pivotal moment of great power competition. As the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell has detailed, the series of DOGE actions have made everything worse without saving any money: “Routine tasks take longer to complete, grinding down worker productivity. DOGE is also bogging down employees with meaningless busywork, which sets them up to be punished for neglecting their actual duties…. These new directives are not only wasting government manpower and taxpayer dollars. They’re also resulting in worse services for Americans.”

This is not an example of short-term pain for long-term gain. So far this administration has instituted short-term pain in return for even more long-term pain.

To be fair, there is one government that DOGE’s actions are benefiting: China. This is not my assertion — the New York Times’ David Sanger makes this point:

As the Department of Government Efficiency roars through agencies across government, its targets have included some of the organizations that Beijing worried about most, or actively sought to subvert. And, as with much that Elon Musk’s DOGE has dismembered, there has been no published study of the costs and benefits of losing those capabilities — and no discussion of how the roles, arguably as important as a manned fighter, might be replaced….

In its first two months the new administration has been devastatingly efficient in tearing things down, but painfully slow to explain how their actions fit into their broader strategy.

All this has the Chinese celebrating. As the Voice of America was being dismantled and fell silent, The Global Times, a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, wrote that “the so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag.”….

“It’s a contradiction, as the Chinese say, that we are cutting back on our instruments of national power while saying that we are stepping up our competition with Beijing,” said Michael J. Green, chief executive of the United States Study Center at the University of Sydney in Australia. “When we reveal human rights abuses or Chinese misinformation, it’s another form of competition with China. And getting rid of it only creates a vacuum that Beijing is going to try to fill. And we are already seeing that happening.”

Trump’s defenders might respond by pointing out that Trump is a transactional president, and one should judge him by the deals he is trying to make right now — like negotiating a cease-fire in the brutal Russo-Ukrainian war.

The thing is, even a cursory review of U.S. intelligence and Russian rhetoric reveals that Russia has zero interest in a cease-fire except if it takes the form of Ukraine’s unconditional surrender. Most independent analyses of Trump administration negotiations with Russia to date use terms like “classic Kremlin tactic” or “name one thing that U.S. President Donald Trump has done since taking office that the Kremlin did not like. Crickets.”

The New York Times’ Anton Troianovski explains Russia’s negotiating strategy:

The Kremlin appears determined to squeeze as many benefits as possible from Mr. Trump’s desire for a Ukraine peace deal, even as it slow-walks the negotiations. Viewed from Moscow, better ties with Washington are an economic and geopolitical boon — one that may be achieved even as Russian missiles continue pounding Ukraine.

Interviews last week with senior Russian foreign-policy figures at a security conference in New Delhi suggested that the Kremlin saw negotiations over Ukraine and over U.S.-Russia ties as running on two separate tracks. Mr. Putin continues to seek a far-reaching victory in Ukraine but is humoring Mr. Trump’s cease-fire push to seize the benefits of a thaw with Washington.

Again, none of this is advancing U.S. interests.

Unsurprisingly, current negotiations in Riyadh contrast have played out along this dynamic, with U.S. negotiators like Steve Witkoff sounding eager and Russian negotiators throwing cold water on the process.

Unfortunately, this is not surprising — in a long interview with Tucker Carlson, Witkoff sounded just a little bit out of his depth:

In the second visit that I had [at the Kremlin], it got personal. President Putin had commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump from the leading Russian artist and actually gave it to me and asked me to take it home to President Trump, which I brought home and delivered to him. It’s been reported in the paper, but it was such a gracious moment.

And told me a story, Tucker, about how when the president was shot, he went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed for the president, not because he was the President of the United States or could become the President of the United States, but because he had a friendship with him and he was praying for his friend. I mean, can you imagine sitting there and listening to these kind of conversations?

And I came home and delivered that message to our president and delivered the painting, and he was clearly touched by it. So this is the kind of connection that we’ve been able to reestablish through, by the way, a simple word called communication, which many people would say, you know, I shouldn’t have had, because Putin is a bad guy. I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy. That is a complicated situation, that war and all the ingredients that led up to it. You know, it’s never just one person, right? So I think we’re going to figure it out….

Putin’s a very smart guy. You know, someone said to me that someone—I was talking to someone in the administration. They said, well, you got to watch it, because he’s an ex-KGB guy. So I said, okay, what’s the inference? Well, he’s an ex-KGB guy. He could be looking to manipulate you….

And I said, look, here’s how I see it. In the old days, the only people who went into the KGB were the smartest people in the nation. That’s who went into the KGB. He’s a super smart guy. Okay. You don’t want to give him the credit for it. That’s okay. I give him the credit for it.

Here’s a crazy thought: what if Putin is smart and he’s trying to manipulate the U.S. negotiator?! That possibility seems to escape Witkoff.

The conversation gets worse. Witkoff reveals the administration’s concern about Russia’s use of a tactical nuclear weapon at a moment when Russian credibility on this issue has evaporated. His knowledge of Russian and Ukrainian history is… inadequate. Little wonder that he says later on during the interview, “I underestimated the complications in the job, that’s for sure. I think I was a little bit quixotic in the way that I thought about it. Like, I’m going to roll in there on a white horse. And no, it was anything but that, you know.”

Yes, it’s safe to say Witkoff has underestimated the complications of the job.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World was busy assembling the research for this column when the latest piece of fuckwittery came across the transom courtesy of the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg:

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

This is going to require some explaining.

You should absolutely read the whole thing. The Trump White House has acknowledged that Trump’s national security team used Signal to share top secret information, unaware that a journalist had been added to the chat. It makes Hillary Clinton’s email server scandal look Lilliputian by contrast.

As Goldberg notes, the lax security and illegality of this group chat is damning:

I have never seen a breach quite like this. It is not uncommon for national-security officials to communicate on Signal. But the app is used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters—not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action. And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion.

Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of “national defense” information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by my colleague Shane Harris for this story….

There was another potential problem: Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved….

Several former U.S. officials told Harris and me that they had used Signal to share unclassified information and to discuss routine matters, particularly when traveling overseas without access to U.S. government systems. But they knew never to share classified or sensitive information on the app, because their phones could have been hacked by a foreign intelligence service, which would have been able to read the messages on the devices.

So let’s review: Trump and his second-term team are alienating Canada, eroding U.S. capabilities without saving any real money, fumbling their negotiations with Russia due to breathtaking naiveté, and degrading U.S. national security by adding a reporter to their illegal group chat coordinating airstrikes on the Houthis.

In other words, I find myself back to where I was in 2017: supremely confident that no matter how disorganized I might be, I would do a better job than these idiotic motherfuckers.