The Story That Perfectly Encapsulates Trump 2.0's Foreign Policy Carnage

There has been a tsunami of awful foreign policy news. Here is the perfect story to symbolize the entirety of the shitstorm.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

How is the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World doing in processing all of the foreign policy news emanating from the Trump administration? Pretty much how Captain James T. Kirk was doing when he opened up that cargo container on Deep Space Station K7 and got buried in Tribbles. There is too much! It’s been one damn catastrophic thing after the other, with Elon Musk playing everything at two times normal speed.

According to Axios’ Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, that’s kind of the point:

Chaos isn't an accident. Trump and his aides know that the tsunami of ideas, executive orders and proclamations makes it hard for opponents to unite around a single message.

Think about you or your friends: Are you more intrigued or worked up by all his controversial nominees ... or Greenland ... or trade wars ... or USAID ... or Elon Musk ... or Ukraine ... or South Africa ... or TikTok ... or a new sovereign wealth fund ... or Trump's own crypto? No human can process this much he-did-what news this fast.

They’re right. I have a whole bunch of half-written newsletters, left incomplete because something new and even more disconcerting crops up.

I very much intend to get to at least one of those stories in the coming days — and try to link to others doing good foreign policy writing along the way.¹ As the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World is preparing for an imminent overseas trip, however, I did want to focus on one particular story. It is not the worst thing to happen over the past 2+ weeks — though that is a very high bar. But it seems like the perfect synecdoche of the myriad ways the new administration is sabotaging the U.S. national interest.

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal’s Joel Schectman and Dustin Volz reported that, “the Central Intelligence Agency offered buyouts to its entire workforce Tuesday, in what officials said is a bid to bring the agency in line with President Trump’s priorities, including targeting drug cartels.” These offer ostensibly allows those who take it to keep their government pay and benefits through September 30th of this year.

Given the extremely shady fine print in those job offers — not to mention the fact that since the federal government is only funded until March — most government employees are unlikely take such an offer at face value. Given their low acceptance rate, the White House is trying to find other ways to cut government workers.

It sure does not seem as though Trump and Musk care whether these means are super-legal or not, however. That might explain how the New York Times’ David Sanger and Julian Barnes reported out a story perfectly encapsulating the carnage that the Trump administration is wreaking:

The C.I.A. sent the White House an unclassified email listing all employees hired by the spy agency over the last two years to comply with an executive order to shrink the federal work force, in a move that former officials say risked the list leaking to adversaries.

The list included first names and the first initial of the last name of the new hires, who are still on probation — and thus easy to dismiss. It included a large crop of young analysts and operatives who were hired specifically to focus on China, and whose identities are usually closely guarded because Chinese hackers are constantly seeking to identify them.

The agency normally would prefer not to put these names in an unclassified system. Some former officials said they worried that the list could be passed on to a team of newly hired young software experts working with Elon Musk and his government efficiency team. If that happened, the names of the employees might be more easily targeted by China, Russia or other foreign intelligence services.

One former agency officer called the reporting of the names in an unclassified email a “counterintelligence disaster.”

This is the kind of reportage that generates a surfeit of emotional and analytic responses. So, in order:

1. Oh, savor the irony! The guy who got elected president because he hammered Hillary Clinton’s lax email security protocols to death has now fostered a culture among his appointees requiring CIA officials to send identity information about their hires via an unsecured email?! Are you fucking kidding me?!

2. Disbelief at the White House’s spectacular lies! Trump officials claimed to the NYT that this is no big whoop because no last names were sent (just the first letter of the last name). As Sanger and Barnes report, however: “former officials scoffed at the explanation, saying that the names and initials could be combined with other information — from driver’s license and car registration systems, social media accounts and publicly available data from universities that the agency uses as recruiting grounds — to piece together a more complete list.”

3. Fury at the implications. This is not just a mistake that puts the CIA’s most recent recruits at risk. It acts as a deterrent for any aspiring foreign policy wonk interested in working for the CIA. No guarantee can be proffered that Trump appointee John Ratcliffe’s minions won’t do something even dumber in the future. Even after Trump leaves office, this episode will haunt recruitment — which, as Sanger and Barnes note, went like gangbusters in 2024 — for years to come.

4. A sense that the Trump folks have no idea what they actually want. The WSJ story suggests that the Trump White House wants to focus on drug cartels, but Sanger and Barnes’ story says that Ratcliffe is emphasizing China. Which is it?! This is Galt’s government on steroids.

5. Finally, there is an almost Zen-like acceptance of the perfect karma this story brings to the table — the conceptual cherry on the top of this foreign policy shit sundae. See, in order to comply with Trump’s executive orders regarding DEI and trimming payroll, the CIA wound up taking actions that severely weakened any ability to get China right. As Sanger and Barnes explain:

Under William J. Burns, the former C.I.A. director, the agency put a new emphasis on trying to recruit a diverse group of officers, arguing that overseas spying operations required people with an array of language skills and cultural knowledge. He focused particularly on expanding the agency’s coverage of China, creating a China center at the headquarters that included analysts, operatives and others. When Mr. Burns arrived at the agency in 2021, about 9 percent of the agency’s budget was devoted to China-related analysis and espionage; today it is closer to 20 percent.

So any large-scale culling of more recent hires could have a disparate impact on Mandarin speakers and technology experts, along with the agency’s minority work force. But current officials said the C.I.A.’s new director, John Ratcliffe, was prioritizing China and did not want to see any mass exodus of people with expertise in that area.

The Trump administration has made quick work of diversity programs, ordering them shut down and scrubbed from websites.

Oh, wow, you mean having a diverse workforce enhances American foreign policy and national security?! Knock me down with a feather!!!

So, to sum up: in order to comply with the Trump White House’s myriad edicts, the CIA has:

• Burned its most recent cadre of recruits;

• Weakened its ability to focus intelligence assets on China;

• Undermined its recruitment capacity for the future; and

• Unwittingly demonstrated why a jihad against DEI weakens rather than strengthens U.S. foreign policy competence.

To be sure, the Trump administration is generation other, more appalling stories. This one, however, perfectly distills the damage this administration has done, intentionally or unintentionally, to US national interests.

More to come…

1. For example, this Jamelle Bouie column does the best job of stepping back and assessing the permanent fallout of all of Trump and Musk’s moves to date.