Aspen: Security: Reactions to the Four Ex-National Security Advisors Panel
Aspen: Security: Nine Reactions to the Four Ex-National Security Advisors Panel: Most important:
- Joe Nye—and the others—should not have pretended that that the Trump Administration has a strategy, and is some sort of unitary actor. It doesn't. It isn't. For the right analogies, we need to reach back to the Tudor or Stuart dynasties—a King Charles II Stuart without the work ethic, mostly concerned with his mistresses, his parties, and deference to himself; easily bribed by the King of France, &c.; plutocrats maneuvering and using access to advance their interests; other kleptocrats manuevering and using access to advance their interests; and a few technocrats—a Pepys, a Godolphin—trying to hold things together. Graham Allison's three analytical perspectives—rational actor-organizational process-bureaucratic politics—are not sufficient to understand this thing. We need a fourth perspective: weak chaos monkey king, perhaps?...
And here are eight more:
Once again, it was genuinely scary how rapidly all four of them segued into zero-sum thinking. We true globalists need—badly, very badly—to gain mindshare, so that they believe truly that world trade and globalization is usually win-win and can almost always be win-win—that it is win-lose only if somebody is being very stupid. They mouth the words, but you can see that their hearts are not in it, and they will very quickly slip the leash and run off into the bracken...
Stephen Hadley made the point that Trump's strategy of insult-degrade-squeeze-deal is always risky, and does not work unless interactions are one-shot only. This is belied by Trump's success in insulting-degrading-squeezing-dealing with Republican legislators and would-be policymakers. It really depends on who his counterparty is. Those counterparties who offer up their dignity find that he takes it, and then asks for more.
Condi Rice's pivot within five minutes from "we need special focus on minorities and women" to "we must 100% reject 'identity politics'" and "'identity politics' will trigger white 'identity politics'" was, from one perspective, a thing of rhetorical beauty. Nice work if you can get it—and she has gotten it...
We old white guys need, badly, to:
- Stand up and immediately separate ourselves from any claim that white men in America regard themselves as an identity politics group first and not as Americans first...
- Reinforce at every opportunity the contingent and recent nature of "whiteness"—say that in the South Boston I knew in the 1990s, when an Irish-Catholic married an Italian-Catholic, it was described as a "mixed marriage"...
- Start taking a knee during the national anthem...
Condi Rice really needs to cool it with the: "I'm a free trader, but...", "I'm a believer in immigration, but...", "I believe in the North Atlantic partnership, but...", &c. It's really not helpful—or illuminating. See #2 above...
Tom Donilon and Susan Rice should not have engaged in unilateral disarmament with respect to the repeated digs from Rice and Hadley at Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and anyone who dares note that January 20, 1993 was the last time there was a Republican president who gave evidence of having read and understood his briefings. I would rather not have partisan point-scoring. But asymmetric niceness is not effective...
All of them talked much too much about "U.S. Leadership" with a capital "L". None of them was willing to observe that, after this mishegas, nobody is going to be willing to give us the keys. None of them was willing to say that after 2003-2008 and 2017-?, the U.S. now has a well-deserved reputation as a chaos monkey, that the task is that of managing hyperpower descent to create a world in which it is comfortable for us to live after we are no longer the hyperpower. (Of course, if they did say it, they would be unlikely to ever be asked back as Secretary of State or whatever.)...
They really need to cool it with the "National Security Advisor the toughest job in government" flattery. It ain't, and it's undignified to claim it is. Not just President, but Chief-of-Staff, Speaker, Senate Majority Leader, State, Defense, the service Secretaries, White House congressional affairs posts all have a greater mismatch between expectations and capabilities...
Some of My Less Polite Thoughts from Aspen
#shouldread
#security
#acrossthewidemissouri
#development
