The Fear and Weakness at the Heart of Trump’s Strategy

0:00I'm Dan Kurtzvailen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview. The Trump administration's strategy is basically a declaration of war against our closest friends on the assumption that we are in closer alignment with our actual adversaries, the countries China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, who are working to undercut American power. It's lunacy.

1:00Washington's traditional allies in Europe, and fixates on security issues in the Western Hemisphere, but has little to say about American rivals such as China and Russia. In recent weeks, the administration has provided a demonstration of what its strategy looks like in practice, launching controversial strikes against boats allegedly trafficking drugs in the Caribbean, and mulling military intervention in Venezuela, while also putting the trade war with China on hold and pushing for a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine. To Corey Shockey, this approach represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the means and ends of American power.

1:38Now a senior fellow and director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Shockey served on the National Security Council and in the State Department in the George W. Bush administration, and she has become one of Trump's sharpest critics. What she sees from the administration is solipsism masquerading as strategy, as she put it in her most recent piece for Foreign Affairs. Schalke argues that the administration's actions and the worldview undergirding them are based on faulty assumptions with potentially dire consequences. An America hostile to its longtime allies, a brewing civil-military crisis at home, and a world order that could leave Washington behind.

2:27Corey Shockey, welcome to the Foreign Affairs Interview. It is such a privilege to be on the interview. Well, we're really happy to have you. I wanted to start today by talking about something that's been in the news last week and this week, and which I think you'll be able to bring a lot of insight to bear on. And that is the national security strategy that the Trump administration released last week. Like so much about this presidency, I think it's fair to say that it's unusual in its tone and its substance. It's unlike any of the other NSS documents I've read, including the Trump administration's first one, you know, which had some idiosyncrasies, but was sort of, I think, more recognizable example of this genre.

3:13And this one, kind of not so much. We sometimes joke here, the editors at FA, that these documents, they read a little bit like first drafts of foreign affairs essays. You know, we sort of want to tell the writers, OK, you know, it needs a sharper introduction. You need to address some counter arguments, get rid of these bullet points. You know, we need a little more detail in the prescriptions. As the recipient of many of those directives from foreign affairs editors, I can attest that it improves the article. and the national security strategy would have been much better if forced to go through the foreign affairs review process.

3:53Did you ever work on one of these during your time in government? You served in the George W. Bush administration. Was this ever part of, were you involved in the drafting of one of these? Only very, very marginally in the 2002 NSS, but very marginally. And maybe you could shed some light anyway on what's the typical process here? Like, What produces a document like this? Yeah, so it's required by law for the White House to produce a national security strategy. And mostly they're bad. I think the worst one of all time is the last one of the Clinton administration, which just put every ornament on the Christmas tree.

4:37Most of them are not actual strategies. Most of them are, as this NSS rightly criticizes, most of them lack prioritization. Most of them are just wish lists. But what makes that so richly ironic with this Trump administration, NSS, is that they rightly identify the weaknesses of prior national security strategies, and then they replicate those weaknesses. I think the best one of all time is Eisenhower's from 1954. It's the one that in my read is the most clear eyed about what's happening in the world. And the one that has the strongest sense of what actually produces American power. I mean, it says that the purpose of the military establishment of the United States is to hold security in place while the advantages of American culture and the American economy win the Cold War.

5:44So means and ends. Yeah. Yeah. It's such an affirmative and such an integrated sense of what makes the United States strong and safe and prosperous. What do we know about who wrote this particular one, this new Trump NSS? There's a lot of different kind of factions within this administration. And I think oftentimes what people do when they read these is they try to understand which faction is representing which point of view. And I think in this particular administration, that's often difficult to do. What's your sense of what this reflects about the kind of struggle within the administration over these ideas?

6:23it's a great question i think it's indicative that nobody's rushing to take credit for this national security strategy when typically everybody tries to pretend they were the lead author on it so i think it is a subtle acknowledgement by whoever wrote it that it's not great work um my guess given that the national security council staff doesn't really have strategic planners anymore. I mean, my guess is probably Mike Anton and the policy planning folks at state had the pen on it. Anton was until recently the head of policy planning at state, right? Yeah, because I don't see a nexus on the NSC that might have produced it.

7:12But there's just not a lot of transparency in this administration. So it's quite hard to say. Let's get to the substance of it, one of the things I thought was interesting about is that it defines what a strategy is. It says, and I'm quoting here, it's a concrete, realistic plan that explains the essential connection between ends and means. And then it goes on to say, a strategy begins from an accurate assessment of what is desired and what tools are available and can realistically be created to achieve the desired outcomes. That's actually not right. Where a strategy begins is with an accurate assessment of the environment, right?

7:53Interesting. And so they skip a crucial step, which is a description of what are we looking at in the world? What are we concerned about? What are the problems we need to manage? And then you proceed to what are the means we can bring to bear. And what a strategy should do is orchestrate those means to minimize your vulnerabilities and maximize your ability to achieve your objectives. That's interesting. So it's almost as if they're skipping right to where are we going before saying, where are we? And that's actually, that's an interesting point. I wonder though, you know, if you stick with just sort of ends and means and the connection, The ends are in this document seem fairly clear to me.

8:42In fact, there's almost this, there is literally a kind of wish list. I think there's about 10 paragraphs in a row towards the start that just begin with the words, we want. Kind of reminded me of like a Christmas list almost. So there, maybe we could start by just talking about how would you describe in broad strokes the ends that this strategy envisions? My sense is that it is designed to produce an international order where the United States is unshackled from either anybody else's concerns or international institutions that have legitimated American power in the eyes of others. I think the biggest problem with this as a strategy is that it assumes that the U.S.

9:35can be a terrible ally and a terrible international citizen, and yet other countries, for their own interests, are going to help us achieve what we want in the world. And I think it just doesn't work that way. They don't seem to understand that what is unique about the moment of American dominance is no other dominant power in history has had as much voluntary assistance in achieving its aims as the United States has had. And that's a function of how we have exercised our power, not wringing every ounce of leverage out of every negotiation, caring about small and middle states' concerns and shielding them from predatory great powers, embedding our power and voluntarily limiting it in institutional practices that produce not just legitimacy by other powers, but voluntary assistance.

10:46This harkens back to this great piece that you wrote for Foreign Affairs in our July-August issue. And you really elaborated on this argument at that time. You wrote, the Trump team has taken an approach predicated on a pair of faulty assumptions that other countries, international organizations, businesses, and civil society organizations have no alternative to capitulation in the face of U.S. demands. And that even if alternatives emerged, the United States could remain predominant without its allies, right? So this is sort of the next part of what you're saying is that it takes for granted that there's all this voluntary assistance.

11:22And it also kind of takes for granted that people are not going to have any kind of plan B. These faulty assumptions, the two that you mentioned there, I'm wondering, you know, we're almost a year in now. What's the best evidence so far that those assumptions are, in fact, faulty, right? And that they're not correct. In other words, if you had to point to evidence to say, you see how this is playing out, you know, what would you point to? Well, I guess the first evidence I would produce is that America's allies are hedging against American power. I mean, Japan and South Korea are considering a three-way trade arrangement with China in order to hedge against the U.S.

12:12weaponization evident with Trump tariffs. Europeans who have been comfortably sheltering under the American defense umbrella are now scrambling to figure out how to build a defense industry that isn't connected to American defense firms because they so fear the American government doing to them what it did to Ukraine, turning off intelligence sharing, turning off weapons deliveries. And I guess the third piece of evidence I would produce is that some of America's closest allies in intelligence sharing, Britain and the Netherlands, are restricting the intelligence they will share with the United States because they disapprove of US operations in the Caribbean, in the case of Britain, or in the case of Netherlands, they keep finding information they shared with us turning up in Russian channels.

13:16And so the untrustworthiness of the United States is making us blinder and it's making us less capable. You know, China has 230 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States. If you think we're going to fight a war with China, where all of us need to rely on our industrial capacity to replace broken and destroyed things, we'll be lucky to get to the economy of scale we need with all of our allies. And the Trump administration strategy is basically a declaration of war against our closest friends on the assumption that we are in closer alignment with our actual adversaries. The countries, China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, who are working to undercut American power.

14:17It's lunacy. You wrote this pretty blistering critique of the document for foreign policy. And at one point you wrote, I'm quoting here, that the only war that the Trump administration wants to fight is a culture war. What do you mean by that? So the Trump national security strategy doesn't list either China or Russia as predatory powers. It doesn't acknowledge Russia's aggression against Ukraine. And even when it delicately tiptoes up to identifying Chinese economic policies that are damaging to the United States, The administration that campaigned on the Obama team being unwilling to name China is unwilling to name China.

15:10But the people they do go after are America's closest friends. reading this strategy you would think that the united states was under siege from europe as opposed to free societies that have a lesser risk tolerance than the united states attempting to preserve what they value about their countries this national security strategy Voschef's criticism of China or Russia, but it considers the Netherlands or France as a major threat to the United States and the need to undercut those friendly governments in order to elect more Christian nationalists. That's crazy. It's so self-defeating. Do you think it casts a place like the Netherlands as a threat or as a kind of cost, which is a little bit different, right?

16:18I mean, to me, when I read it, it's a little bit more familiar sort of critique of free riding, but you seem to think that it's actually recasting them as something else. Yeah, I actually do. It's a really interesting distinction you make between cost and risk. As I read this national security strategy, it sounds fearful to me. it's empty chest thumping without a strategy to produce the kind of military they say we need to produce an international trading order that opens markets for american businesses and levels the playing field the very things they say they want they just stipulate they don't demonstrate how you're ever going to get there in a weird way it connects to the first trump term for me because remember the eight point plan about the Iranian nuclear program that Secretary Pompeo thundered out again it was we need these eight things and there was no plan to produce those eight things and I feel like this strategy repeats that mistake it's sort of it says here's here are our strengths.

17:40Here's what we want in the world. Glitter, unicorns, magic ending. And that's not strategy. I think it's fair to say that part of your critique of this, and of Trump more broadly that you've been making for years now, is that there's a failure to see all the good reasons why traditional post-war U.S. foreign policy and even post-Cold War U.S. policy took the shape that it did, right? That the kind of Trump view ignores all of the benefits that those traditions and the institutions that grew around them produced. I guess I have two questions for you. I'll ask you the first one, which is, if that's true, why does it seem like so many Americans agree with Trump about that?

18:31and kind of disagree with the post-Cold War foreign policy establishment, right? If it so kind of obviously makes this error, why does it seem so persuasive? Because the last four presidents haven't spent time and effort bringing Americans along, right? I mean, how many times did President Obama, President Trump, or President Biden explain to Americans why we were in Afghanistan? The only time I can think of President Biden did was in the aftermath of the attack on Israel. And then he paired Afghanistan with it. so you know my mom doesn't spend her time and effort the way we do nor should she because if you and i are doing our jobs right she doesn't need to and the u.s has won the geopolitical lottery we have canada and mexico as next door neighbors and oceans on the other side we produce our own raw materials our market is largely a self-looking ice cream cone less only 11 of american gdp comes from trade so we will be the last to feel the erosion of a beneficial international order and the last several presidents have had ambitious plans that they didn't expend the political capital to bring people along on and so people haven't come along on.

20:07But what Trump is doing is lighting that international order on fire in a way it's going to take a generation to repair. And remember, the men who built this international order weren't, you know, leftist college professors sitting around the faculty lounge. They were the people who had fought World War I and World War II and saw the damage of an unstable order and the advantages that would accrue to underwriting security in crucial regions in ways that facilitated prosperity at a very low cost to the United States. I think I would push back a little bit and see what you think about this on the idea.

20:58I mean, part of what you're saying, it sounds like, well, there was sort of a messaging failure, right? We just didn't explain to people why we were in Afghanistan. A lot of Americans say, no, no, I understand why we were there. You know, I just think it was a terrible idea and we did it really poorly. And so, you know, it's not that it wasn't explained to me. It's I understand it. What's wrong with that point of view? so i don't think it's just a messaging problem but i think it is if you're gonna put american troops in harm's way for 23 years the president has a responsibility to win the political argument about it and just saying the american military is so far removed from american society i don't to have to expend my political capital this way creates cynicism on both sides of the equation.

21:51And so I'm not saying it's just a messaging problem. I think it's an ethical failure to commit the United States internationally, whether it's on trade. I mean, I don't think we have a global failure of the trading order. I think what we have is we permitted China into the global trading order without requiring it to follow the rules. That's what collapses the global trading order, which is not to say there weren't pressures as early as the Doha round, but why didn't any administration fix that? And why didn't they explain that this is a China a problem. It's not a global trading problem. Trump critics, critics of Trump's approach to foreign policy and politics in general, I think, have a good line that they often use.

22:49You know, they say Trump's MAGA idea to make America great again. The problem with it is, well, when was America great exactly, right? Like you want to go back to something, but when was it? And I kind of want to ask you a version of that question based on the critique you've been making. I think that you and many other people who are foreign policy professionals with a lot of experience are watching what's happening. And there's sort of this idea that we want to make American foreign policy, let's say, good again, you know, by restoring some of the post-war traditions and norms and institutions that have eroded, not just under Trump, but in general in the past few decades.

23:31But I guess that I think it would be fair to ask sort of the same question of you, which is when was the last time that American foreign policy was great or good in your view? In other words, when was the period in which all the things that, you know, we might point to alliances and trade and a strong military and a preference for supporting democracies? When were all those things kind of operating and producing really good results for the American people? So I think almost the entirety of the post-1945 period, that's true, right? It's true in the Carter administration. It's true in the Reagan administration.

24:10It's true in the Nixon administration. It's true in the Eisenhower administration. It's true in the Clinton administration. It's true in the Obama administration. It's true in the Bush administrations, right? Like this system mostly has worked incredibly advantageously to Americans. And we've had the luxury of just pretending it's like the operating system on our computers. We don't have to do maintenance or regular upgrades that magically the service provider is going to do that. But we're the service provider.

24:50We'll be back after a short break. What if you could explore places in the news like a reporter does? I'm Nicholas Wood, a former journalist with the New York Times and BBC. And 16 years ago, I created the travel company Political Tours. Our small groups are led by top correspondents around the world. In the next few months, we're off to Mexico, followed by South Africa, Japan and the French presidential elections. Come and join us. Go to politicaltours.com. That's politicaltours.com.

26:11That's foreignaffairs.com slash J-U-L-Y.

26:21And now back to my conversation with Corey Schake. I want to talk about some of the ideas from your most recent book and how they relate to the news. Yeah. That book is called The State and the Soldier, A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States. And this is, of course, a topic that's been in the news almost constantly really throughout Trump's second term, right from the get-go. His defense secretary or secretary of war, to use the administration's phrase, Pete Hegseth, has overseen this purge of senior military officers. Trump and Hegseth have talked about using the U.S. military to do law enforcement, basically, in American cities.

27:03There was this gathering of the uniform brass for this sort of strange spectacle where Hegseth kind of lectured them about, you know, ridding the military of wokeness and DEI and basically told them to get on board with Trump's political agenda or resign. But recently, I think this civil military debate has kind of focused more narrowly in a very interesting way, actually, on the strikes that the Pentagon has been carrying out in the Caribbean and in the Eastern Pacific that are targeting boats that are allegedly transporting drugs bound for the U.S. Can you tell me from your point of view, why are these strikes in particular troubling to so many people who really know about this?

27:49And how do they fit into this context of this broader debate about civil-military relations we've been having now for the past nine or ten months? Yeah, well, there's nothing like the state-sanctioned use of violence to focus people's attention. I think that's why the strikes in the Caribbean and the administration failing to explain itself. And Congress only quite recently beginning to demand the right of oversight of the use of force. So I think that's what's focused attention. I worry, though, that we are telescoping down to judging the decision-making of the military. And there are three higher levels of accountability that we ought to be demanding.

28:45First, under what authorization is the president doing this? has congress in its role as the authorizer for the use of military force where did they fit into this have they been informed have they approved is there a formal process as the constitution requires and third this civilian secretary of defense what orders did he issue under what what was the command climate he created and the expectations, we're about to grill the military and let the civilians off the hook. And I think the arrow should be pointing the other direction because, I mean, what is most fundamental to civil military relations in the United States is the constitutional, legal, policy and ethical subordination of the United States military to the civilian leadership.

29:52And what is destabilizing the relationship to the extent that it's destabilized is the behavior of the civilians, not the behavior of the military. And it's not just the Trump administration. Senator Tuberville holding up hundreds of military promotions for things that the military had no control over, the politicization that everybody's trying to pull the military into their side of the political argument. And that doesn't actually change public attitudes. But what it will do is demolish public confidence in our military. It corrodes the support for the institution by the American public. It's such a strange reversal, right?

30:42Because in your book, The history of this, usually the concern is in the other direction, right? That the military, either a rogue leader or some movement within the military will seek to overstep that boundary like a MacArthur figure or someone like that. Whereas now the concern runs in the other direction. The firing of MacArthur is the canonical civil military case for a reason, right? He's the only example in modern America of a military leader insubordinate to the civilian leadership. Maybe for our listeners, many abroad, maybe you could just quickly recapitulate why was MacArthur fired? Sure.

31:22So General MacArthur was the commander of the UN force fighting on the Korean peninsula to reestablish the sovereignty of South Korea. And he chose to do that in a way that violated the president's principal objective, which was that this should remain a regional war, not a global challenge to the Cold War order. And so the president wanted no decisions that were going to draw either China or the Soviet Union into the war. And General MacArthur, not only by his conduct of the war, did draw them in, but he also was overtly politicking to be the Republican nominee for president and sending accounts contrary to the president's to the Republican minority leadership in Congress.

32:20and when ordered to cease doing so, he did not cease doing so and that's what got him fired. To quote Harry Truman, I didn't fire MacArthur because he was stupid. If I did that, I would have to fire two-thirds of the generals in the army. I fired him because he was insubordinate to the President of the United States and Truman had a constitutional responsibility. He also did it in a very smart way that won the political argument, because what MacArthur was doing was suggesting that the civilian leadership ought to have to adopt his strategy for fighting the war. And ever since George Washington, the rule in American civil military relations is that the political leadership sets the strategy and the resourcing.

33:14And the military figures out to the best of their ability how to try and accomplish the political objectives with the resources they have. You mentioned that everybody is kind of trying to draw the military into their political argument. One of the interesting things that happened in regard to, well, I'm not sure it's in regard to the boat strikes, but in regard to this broader debate, it was there was a video of a number of Democratic congresspeople who had served in the armed forces or in the intelligence agencies. This came out last month, sort of speaking directly to service members and reminding them that they had a duty to not obey illegal orders.

33:53Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this constitution. Right now, the threats to our constitution aren't just coming from abroad, but from right here at home. Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders. You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders. And of course, Trump was furious about this and accused these congresspeople of treason. What did you make of that video? So the first thing I would say is nothing justifies the president inciting political violence against elected politicians. I mean, Senator Slotkin had a bomb threat at her home after the president's statements.