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Remember when the United States engaged in an act of war against a country of some 90 million people by sending its B-2 bombers into battle? No? Well, you can be forgiven for letting it slip your mind; after all, it was more than two weeks ago.
Besides, you’ve probably been distracted by more recent news. The United States has halted some weapons shipments to Ukraine, despite the increased Russian bombing of Ukrainian cities as Moscow continues its campaign of mass murder. Fortunately, last Thursday Donald Trump got right on the horn to his friend in Russia, President Vladimir Putin. Unfortunately, Putin apparently told Trump to pound sand. “I didn’t make any progress with him today at all,” Trump said to reporters before boarding Air Force One.
Meanwhile, the president has decided to review AUKUS, the 2021 security pact between the United States, Australia, and Great Britain, a move that caught U.S. diplomats (and their colleagues in Canberra and London) off guard and has generated concern about the future of the arrangement. Technically, the president didn’t decide to review it, but rather his handpicked secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, did. Well, it wasn’t him, either; apparently, the review was ordered by someone you’ve likely never heard of: Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, a career-long Beltway denizen who initiated the process on his own.
But at least someone’s keeping an eye on Asia: CNN is reporting, based on a Ukrainian intelligence report, that North Korea is planning to send as many as 30,000 more soldiers to assist Russia in its war of conquest. Of course, this is largely based on a single source, but Pyongyang has already sent at least 10,000 troops into the European battlefield over the past nine months, and things are going poorly for Russia’s hapless conscripts, so perhaps a deal really is in the works to provide the Kremlin with another shipment of foreign cannon fodder.
All of this raises an obvious question: Who’s running America’s foreign and defense policies?
It’s not the president, at least not on most issues. Trump’s interest in foreign policy, as with so many other topics, is capricious and episodic at best. He flits away from losing issues, leaving them to others. He promised to end the war in Ukraine in a day, but after conceding that making peace is “more difficult than people would have any idea,” the president has since shrugged and given up.
It’s not Marco Rubio—you may remember that he is technically the secretary of state, but he seems to have little power in this White House. It’s not Hegseth, who can’t seem to stop talking about “lethality” and trans people long enough to deliver a real briefing that isn’t just a fawning performance for Trump. (As bad as Hegseth can be, he seems almost restrained next to the State Department’s spokesperson, Tammy Bruce, whose comments about Trump—she thanks God for him from her podium and says he is “saving this country and the world”—have an unsettling Pyongyang-newsreader lilt to them.)
It’s not the national security adviser. That’s also Rubio.
Apparently, American defense policy is being run by Bridge Colby, and perhaps a few other guys somewhere in the greater Washington metropolitan area. Their influence is not always obvious. The order to halt shipments, for example, came from Hegseth, but the original idea was reportedly driven by Colby, who backed the moves because, according to NBC, he has “long advocated scaling back the U.S. commitment in Ukraine and shifting weapons and resources to the Pacific region to counter China.” (Per the NBC reporting, an analysis from the Joint Staff showed that Colby is wrong to think of this as an either-or situation; the Ukrainians need weapons that the U.S. wouldn’t even be using in a conflict in the Pacific.)
In this administration, the principals are either incompetent or detached from most of the policy making, and so decisions are being made at lower levels without much guidance from above. In Trump’s first term, this kind of dysfunction was a lucky break, because the people at those lower levels were mostly career professionals who at least knew how to keep the lights on. In Trump’s second term, though, many of those professionals have been either silenced or outright replaced by loyalists and inexperienced appointees. Ironically, allowing various lower offices to fill the policy void empowers the unknown appointees whom MAGA world claims to hate in other administrations.
The Trump White House’s policy process—insofar as it can be called a “process”—is the type found in many authoritarian states, where the top levels of government tackle the one or two big things the leader wants done and everything else tumbles down to other functionaries, who can then drive certain issues according to their own preferences (which seems to be what Colby is doing), or who will do just enough to stay under the boss’s radar and out of trouble (which seems to be what most other Trump appointees are doing). In such a system, no one is really in charge except Trump—which means that on most days, and regarding many issues, no one is in charge.
In Trump’s current administration, irrational tariffs and brutal immigration enforcement are the two big ideas. Both have foreign-policy ramifications, but they are being pursued by Trump and his team primarily as domestic political issues. Everything else is on the periphery of the White House’s vision: Pakistan and India, nuclear weapons, the Middle East (or nuclear weapons and the Middle East), the Ukraine war. All of these get Trump’s temporary attention in the form of a quick evaluation of their utility to Trump personally, and then they’re dumped back outside the door of the Oval Office.
Even the Iran strike—one of the most important military actions taken by the United States in years—has apparently lost its luster for the president. Trump said that Iran’s nuclear program was “obliterated”; other parts of the U.S. defense and intelligence communities said they weren’t sure; Israel thanked America; Trump moved on. This might be because the political advantage of the bombings never materialized: The American public disapproved of Trump’s actions, and so the president is now looking for some other shiny object.
Today, that trinket seems to be in Gaza. Over the weekend, Trump claimed that he has a “good chance” of making a deal, perhaps in the coming week, with Hamas for the release of more hostages. This is foreign policy in the Trump era: Announce deals, push their resolution out a week or two, and hope they happen. If they don’t—move on and declare success, regardless of any actual outcomes.
No one in Trump’s administration has any incentive to fix this, because serious changes would be admissions of failure. Repopulating the National Security Council with people who know what they’re doing means admitting they were needed in the first place. Hegseth or top people resigning would admit the enormity of the mistake that Trump made in hiring them. Reining in policy freelancers and curtailing the power of lower-level policy makers (as Rubio has at least tried to do with regard to diplomacy) is to admit that senior leaders have lost control of their departments.
This administration was never directed or staffed with any coherent foreign policy in mind beyond Trump’s empty “America First” sloganeering. Less than a year into his second term, it’s clear that the goals of Trump’s 2024 run for the presidency were, in order of importance, to keep Trump out of prison, to exact revenge on Trump’s enemies, and to allow Trump and his allies to enrich themselves by every possible means. No one had to think much about who would defend America or conduct its diplomacy; Trump’s appointees were apparently chosen largely for shock value and trolling efficacy rather than competence.
The rest of the world’s most powerful nations, however, are led by grown-ups and professionals. Some of them are enemies of the United States and are quite dangerous. Undersecretary Colby has had some bad ideas, but Americans had better hope that he and the handful of other guys trying to run things know what they’re doing.
Related:
Today’s News
- More than 100 people, including at least 27 campers and counselors from Camp Mystic in Kerr County, are dead after flash flooding hit central Texas over the weekend.
- President Donald Trump announced tariffs on at least 14 countries effective August 1, unless they can broker trade deals with the U.S.
- A man who opened fire and injured several people near a Border Patrol building in McAllen, Texas, was killed after exchanging fire with law enforcement, according to officials.
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