The Death of Expertise
Trump humors Putin because no serious person tells him not to
There was once something called the “conservative foreign policy establishment” comprised of Republicans like Henry Kissinger, the one-time secretary of state and national security advisor to Richard Nixon, and George Schultz, Ronald Reagan’s top diplomat. James Baker, a Reagan confidante, was part of the GOP establishment and served as George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state.
John McCain, the Vietnam era POW and Arizona senator, certainly enjoyed foreign policy establishment standing, as did Indiana senator Richard Lugar, general and secretary of state Colin Powell and Bob Dole, the Kansas senator and presidential candidate.
None of these guys, and I could add many more names to the list, were perfect or even often right, but they were serious people. They worked to know the world and developed policies and approaches that were, if not perfect, at least informed and again - serious.
But the “the establishment” – people with expertise, real world experience, intellectual heft and historical perspective – no longer counts in the modern MAGA GOP.
Now only loyalty to the leader translates into status and influence.
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Never has the lack of actual foreign policy capability by the current president and his sycophantic gang of turd polishers been more on display than when Russia’s international war criminal landed in Anchorage last week to be greeted by a smiling, clapping Donald Trump.
Trump, or someone around him, made the decision to debase American military personnel by having them literally get on hands and knees and roll out a red carpet for the Butcher of Kiev, Vladimir Putin. It was the sorriest spectacle since Trump met Putin in Helsinki in 2018 and sided with the Russian mob boss over the U.S. intelligence community.
Trump went to Alaska without preparation, without a reasonable objective and without honor in order to fawn like a fan boy over a former KGB agent. He ended this performative foreign policy charade by reversing himself on the need for a cease fire in Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.
Trump is back to giving away Ukrainian territory rather than confronting Putin’s desire to dominate, even eliminate Ukraine. Putin’s aim is clear: he intends to recreate the old Soviet empire and Ukraine is critical to his mission. Pretty much every serious person knows this with the exception of the president of the United States.
The sound you heard in the wake of this “summit” was John McCain rolling over in his grave.
Never has Trump, intellectually or practically, articulated what he sees as the stakes for a democratic Europe, an independent Ukraine or a retreating U.S. as he continues to fluffer and fuss over Putin, a man clearly intellectually and practically smarter than Trump.
Putin understands perfectly the president’s preoccupation, as with all narcissists, with fantasies about his success, power and brilliance. The Russians played the American president like Rostropovich once conducted the National Symphony.
For Trump, as Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic, “Zelensky and Ukraine are the problem, and the rest is just an ongoing tragedy that the Ukrainians can end by being ‘flexible’ and by putting their president in a room with the man conducting atrocities against them.”
A half dozen European leaders immediately rushed to Washington in the aftermath of the Alaska farce to help make sure Trump didn’t again assault Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. The Washington chapter of the summit of nothing ended with no path forward, but with the Russian’s rejecting Trump’s idea that the Putin and Zelensky get together and make a deal.
Through it all the president bloviated about his pursuit of peace while continuing to channel Kremlin talking points about the origin of Putin’s bloody war. Trump then had the gall to quote Putin on the dangers of mail in voting, as if Russia has had anything like a fair election since, what, 1917?
This is not a foreign policy; this is a deadly dangerous fantasy from a man historically ill equipped for the task at hand.
“As flaccid as a boned fish,” said that liberal squish George Will, “Donald Trump crumpled quicker than even Vladimir Putin probably anticipated. The former KGB agent currently indicted for war crimes felt no need to negotiate with the man-child.”
After World War II when (mostly) serious people governed in both political parties, Republicans who lived through the spectacle of Nazi domination of Europe, the Holocaust, the bloodiest war in human history and the dawn of the nuclear age systematically shed the head-in-the-sand isolationism that had defined the party after World War I. The Republican Party (mostly) embraced the notion of American leadership in the world.
In the post-war world the GOP “establishment,” built around real experience and serious grappling with the U.S. role in the world, eclipsed the then hard right wing of the party. The GOP turned to a legitimate war hero, Dwight Eisenhower, and largely banished the cranky kooks of the Birch Society, but the isolationist, conspiracy tinged hard right never completely went away. And now they dominate the party.
The foreign policy chops of the modern MAGA party, such as they are, reside with people like Putin and Nazi apologist Tucker Carlson, unhinged MAGA influencer Laura Loomer and Steve Wikcoff, Trump’s special envoy who came to the job without a lick of diplomatic experience.
As Foreign Policy magazine noted of the president’s “expert”, “Notoriously, Witkoff has been accused of not knowing the names of the Ukrainian provinces whose fate he is now working to decide.” 1
Instead of a John McCain or a Bob Dole the Republican Senate features shrinking men like South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, who clearly wakes up every day determined to slobber over the president, and Idaho’s Jim Risch, the Foreign Relations Committee chairman in name only, who takes no position without calibrating how it will play in Trump world and regularly asks “how high” when this feckless administration says “jump.”
No words from these elites as Trump, aided by his secretary of state who once called Trump a “con man,” cleans out decades of expertise at the State Department, destroys foreign aid programs and bans many foreign students from studying at American universities. The old elites knew that our nation’s “soft power” – aiding the developing world and educating young people – was often as important as another aircraft carrier.
But with our current wholesale retreat from American leadership the new GOP establishment is working overtime to make Russia and China great again. 2
The old GOP elite was quick to invoke the Munich analogy, the fateful and repugnant decision by Britain and France in 1938 to attempt to appease Adolf Hitler’s designs on Czechoslovakia. That appeasement only emboldened Hitler and a year later all of Europe was at war.
The Munich analogy can be overdone, but in the present case it offers a crystal clear warning.
Trump will abandon Ukraine and side with the aggressor, and in the reverse of World War II it will rest with democratic Europe, the old world, to come to the aid of a new world debased and disgraced by Trumpism and its incompetent, cultish “elites.” 3
A recent Tucker Carlson episode featured an interview with Cornell Professor Dave Collum, not a historian but a libertarian chemistry professor, who went off on a bit of a revisionist rant suggesting the U.S. made a mistake in opposing Nazi Germany in World War II. “And therefore, we should have been, one can make the argument, we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin.”
Whew. I actually listened to some of the wild conspiracy so you don’t have to.
Loomer is the subject of a profile this week in The Atlantic by Michael Scherer. A little taste of her Trump World influence: “Last week, she got ahold of a video showing happy Palestinian refugees arriving in the San Francisco airport, owing to efforts by Heal Palestine, a group that provides treatment in the United States to children wounded in Gaza. The group says that the children and their families arrived on temporary visas and will return to the Middle East after treatment. She called the spectacle an “Islamic invasion” and asked the Trump administration to shut it down. A day later, the State Department announced a stop to “all visitor visas for individuals from Gaza” to review the situation. “It’s amazing how fast we can get results from the Trump administration,” Loomer posted on X.”
Marco Rubio, before his spine was removed, once asked, “If America stops leading, who will fill the vacuum we leave behind?” Reading a Rubio speech from 2013, before Trump time, is an exercise in what might have been. Link here.
Winston Churchill’s speech after the Munich agreement remains a classic of 20th Century history. There are many memorable lines as Churchill bemoaned the appeasement of a dictator. Here is just one: “What I find unendurable is the sense of our country falling into the power, into the orbit and influence of Nazi Germany, and of our existence becoming dependent upon their good will or pleasure.”
Now, substitute Nazi Germany with Putin’s Russia.
Very good column. I believe the deplorable state of our nation is directly traceable to the trend that began with events you wrote about in "Saturday Night Massacre."
David French's latest column, "One senrence....." is a good reminder that Congress is also failing us. I enjoyed the trivia that the only Senator to have ever voted against the party line is Mitt Romney.
Jim Heffernan, Tillamook