The End of Foreign Policy Ideas?
LOL nothing matters in the Ideas Industry right now.
There was not a lot of amusing elements to the Trump administration’s Potemkin bombing effort in Iran last month — one out of three ain’t bad amirite?! There was, however, one legitimately funny bit: the revealed powerlessness of the MAGA intellectual. To their credit, folks like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson opposed U.S. military action in Iran and were rather vocal about it. None of their vocalizing, however, dented GOP support for Donald Trump. As the Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg wrote:
The U.S. strike may or may not have obliterated the country’s nuclear facilities, but it has certainly obliterated the notion that any of the self-proclaimed MAGA intellectuals, such as Carlson and Bannon, speak for the Trump movement. Far from shattering the president’s coalition, Trump’s strike on Iran brought it together, despite the loud protestations of some of its supposed elites….
Few jobs in Trump world are more farcical than the position of “architect” of “America First”: There are no MAGA intellectuals, just Trump and opportunistic ideologues attempting to hitch their pet projects to his brand. The self-styled thought leaders of the Trump movement are merely political entrepreneurs trying to appropriate the president for their own purposes and to recast his chaotic and idiosyncratic decisions as reflections of their personal worldview.
As much schadenfreude as I might want to feel about the impotence of self-styled MGA intellectuals, however, there is a deeper, more depressing truth that must be confronted. No foreign policy intellectuals currently exercise real influence over American foreign policy. Worse, far too many wannabe foreign policy mandarins are prepared to abandon their prior beliefs to preserve some access to power.
Consider the 2025 Aspen Security Forum.1 Politico’s Nahal Toosi reported earlier this month that the Trump administration decided to turn its back on the confab:
The national security elites gathered in this mountain retreat this week are finding themselves playing defense about their beliefs, motivations and patriotism — and whether they even deserve attention from the people in power.
It’s a result of the Trump administration’s 11th hour decision to pull nearly all of its speakers from the annual Aspen Security Forum, with the Pentagon alleging that the gathering “promotes the evil of globalism.”
Many of the current and former officials I’ve spoken to here have wielded enough influence and dealt with enough criticism in their careers that at first, they responded to the administration’s move with eye-rolls and words such as “moronic.” Some questioned, in genuine frustration, what the administration means by “globalism.” That America can ignore the world? Others suggested it is all a performative stunt by the administration, or at least Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, to gain favor with a MAGA base angry over issues like the Jeffrey Epstein case….
But the people here are making an argument in return: If President Donald Trump and his team are willing to snub an event like the Aspen forum, it means government officials are increasingly sealing themselves off from outside opinions. Doing so could hamper the administration’s efforts to achieve its national security goals.
No matter how much the MAGA-heavy administration may dislike the Aspen conference, attendees argue, it is at least a place to stress-test ideas to make sure they’re viable.
Unfortunately, I fear that any administration willing to use the phrase “promotes the evil of globalism” is not overly concerned with stress-testing ideas. It is easy to rip apart a strategy based on personal grievance as a guiding purpose and “tariff everything!” as a grand strategy. In this instance stress-testing is worthless: Trump’s ideas crumple at even the mildest intellectual rejoinder. They crumple immediately.
For criticism to matter, folks have to be willing to promulgate it widely. And here the response of the Aspen Security Forum to the Trump administration’s fits of pique has been extremely disappointing. As a follow-up story from Politico’s Eric Bazail-Eimil suggests, Aspen’s attendees faced a choice between defending their foreign policy principles and maintaining some access to the Trump administration. Mostly, they chose access:
Against the backdrop of the leafy Aspen Meadows Resort, former and current U.S. and foreign officials, business leaders and analysts acknowledged publicly and privately that the Trump administration has dealt a lasting blow to much of the post-World War II consensus around free trade and long-term cooperation….
Attendees at Aspen are trying to adjust to an America First world order.
The first time Trump was president, the national security establishment started out thinking they could influence his policy, and then assumed his policy moves could be easily reversed once he left office. Now that same group is struggling to come up with strategies to influence even on the edges, especially when the administration doesn’t want to be part of the conversation….
Given the administration’s limited presence, attendees were forced to wrestle with how to address the president’s many changes to foreign policy amongst themselves. The main approach at the conference seemed to be to at least avoid antagonizing team Trump….
Some attendees expressed frustration at what they saw as pandering to Trump, saying there was a missing opportunity to have more discussion on the main stage about the potential impacts of Trump’s policies and governing style on U.S. democratic institutions and institutions around the world.
To be sure, an honest foreign policy professional can and should point out when and where the Trump administration might have a valid critique of the previous status quo. The problem is that far too many Aspen attendees sounded as though they were willing to go along with the following syllogism:
Something must be done.
Donald Trump did something.
Let’s at least agree that something had to be done.
I fear this is how the Ideas Industry will be functioning for the remaining seven-eighths of Trump’s second term. If access is prioritized over principles, then I fear that Aspen, the Council on Foreign Relations, and other think tanks will decide not to defend a system that worked better than the current conventional wisdom perceives. The result will not be just a piss-poor American foreign policy, but a piss-poor American foreign policy without viable challengers.
That, in turn, will allow the stupid to persist for far longer than necessary.
Yet another creation of Joseph Nye.
You are right about that. The foreign policy equivalent of a Stephen Miller (who is both ideologue and ruthless enforcer and yet seems to float free of the MAGA influencers in civil (sic) society) has yet to emerge. But someone -- or a handful -- will eventually. Foreign policy is an easy area to demolish if you are an isolationist, but trickier if you are an aggressive chauvinist, as Trump and his cronies surely are.
Elbridge Colby could be such a figure if his aperture was sot so narrow, China-obsessed with no room to spare for a larger vision. Yet, I'm sure there is no dearth of swivel-eyed, avaricious opportunists who are trying to get the Leader's attention. Meanwhile, institutions crumble. The UN and its agencies are under unending siege though, oddly enough, the Bretton Woods institutions (other than the WTO that came out of GATT) that were created under the UN charter have been left alone. The G20 is lost its cohesion. The BRICS are viewed with implacable hostility by Trump and Rubio. Smaller regional grouping such as the one that just ended in Santiago yesterday are in disarray.
But is there an ideology, a system of ideas that underpin MAGA's overweening desire for National Greatness? It's clear to me that they this Administration does not want the US dollar to lose its centrality in the international monetary system. Nor does it want the US military not to patrol the seal lanes and infrastructure of undersea cables, etc. It wants America to be fully embedded in the international security architecture. But here's the rub; this government is not interested in these things as global public goods and a projection of US soft power for which it derives huge benefits but indirectly. They see it as hard power and they want everyone else to pay for it with cold, hard cash. It is a kind of protection racket on a global scale, just what NATO is being subjected to with unbearable intensity but on smaller scale.
Have kleptocracies ever had anything other than transactional & dishonest foreign policies? That seems to be what the psychology tells us will happen 99 out of 100 times. Still a shock to see how in the dark my home of international relations is to psychology. Plenty of ideas there.