Gaming Out Trump's Foreign Policy

At times trying to figure out Trump’s foreign policy seems like a fool’s errand. His domestic policy actions followed clearly enough from his campaign, without many, if any, surprises or turn arounds. But his foreign policy was, to a great extent, farmed out to the Neocons. True, he exercised some restraint on the Neocons, but only some—he can say he didn’t allow them to start any new wars, but he definitely laid the groundwork for both the war on Russia as well as the genocide on the Palestinians.

This time around he’s sending all sorts of mixed foreign policy signals. On the one hand, he’s openly restating his desire to get along with Russia. But on the other hand he’s keeping up the pretense that our war on Russia is somehow a spat between Ukraine and Russia and that the US can somehow act as an honest and impartial peace broker. I don’t know the Russian for, wtf, but I can imagine Russian officials muttering it to themselves. He also says he wants to get along with China—and even with Iran. All of that sounds like a rather different sort of a “clean break” with Neocon orthodoxy—and his proxies have criticized Neocons by that tag. On the other hand, he’s spent months blathering about how much he loves Jews and Israel and why Jews should vote for him. Hey, what are we goys? Chopped liver?

Normally, the first thing you’d do when trying to suss out a candidate’s foreign policy views would be to check out who has his ear. That’s what Foreign Policy has attempted just this week:

Trump’s Foreign-Policy Influencers

Meet the 11 men whose worldviews are shaping the 2024 Republican ticket.

I’ve made a list of these eleven, with excerpted thumbnails to give a hint of who they are. Some you’ll be familiar with, like Kash Patel, Robert Lighthizer, and a few others. Others not so much—although I’ve written about Elbridge Colby. Some you may think you’re familiar with, but some caveats may apply. Pay special attention to Keith Kellogg and Fred Flietz—Neocons who are reported to have the inside track for key posts.

[O]ne way to gauge the possible foreign-policy agenda of a second Trump term is to profile the key national security thinkers in his orbit: Who are the advisors he listens to?

Elbridge Colby, a once and possible future Trump administration defense official, is the loudest and perhaps most cogent voice in Washington advocating a complete shift away from Europe, NATO, and Russia and toward the growing challenge from China.

If you’re a Neocon, you’ll luv this next one. A thought occurs regarding top FP pairings: Sullivan - Blinken, Kellog - Flietz. Huh.

Fred Fleitz spent more than two decades working in the U.S. government, bouncing between posts at the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, State Department, and the Republican side of the House Intelligence Committee. For significant chunks of his career, he circled the orbit of the pugnacious neoconservative hawk John Bolton, serving as his chief of staff in the George W. Bush administration when Bolton was the undersecretary of state for arms control, and then later as the National Security Council chief of staff when Bolton was Trump’s national security advisor.

A graduate of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Ric Grenell worked as a spokesperson for a number of prominent Republicans before joining the 2000 presidential campaign of former Sen. John McCain—who would later become one of Trump’s most vehement critics. From 2001-2008, Grenell served as the director of communications for the U.S. mission to the United Nations under four ambassadors, including John Bolton, who would go on to serve as Trump’s national security advisor.

Keith Kellogg advised Vice President Mike Pence and served as the chief of staff to the National Security Council.

Fleitz, alongside Keith Kellogg, drafted a plan for Trump to review aimed at ending the war in Ukraine if Trump wins reelection. The plan entails pushing Ukraine and Russia to come to the negotiating table and brokering a temporary cease-fire at the current battle lines, which would be sustained during the peace talks. The Trump administration would pressure Ukraine on one side by threatening to cut off U.S. aid if it didn’t negotiate, and Russia on the other by threatening to open the floodgates on U.S. military aid to Ukraine without peace talks.

Read that carefully. I actually took the trouble to glance through that draft. Obviously the idea of a “ceasefire in place” runs absolutely contrary to clearly enunciated Russian conditions. Another thing that jumped out was that the US would only agree to a “delay” in Ukraine joining NATO. So much for the US being a neutral peace broker. I doubt this fooled the Russians. Does Trump believe any of it? Is he actually committed to what looks like a ploy to escalate, to “open the floodgates on US military aid”?

Robert Lighthizer, a longtime trade lawyer who began his public service career in the Ronald Reagan administration, turned Trump’s inchoate notions on trade and the economy into a more or less coherent policy.

John McEntee helped get MAGA-approved people into top jobs. He helped orchestrate Trump’s reshuffling of the Pentagon brass, including the firing of then-U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper. He also tried, with others, to stack the Pentagon’s top policy boards with close Trump allies. Had Trump won, McEntee would have played a key role in trying to implement Trump’s planned “Schedule F” reforms that would have essentially turned tenure-track government jobs into at-will employees. Since then, loyalty tests have become standard practice in Trump world. McEntee is now at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, where he’s helping to spearhead Project 2025—an initiative that calls for the next president to “confront the Deep State.”

Christopher Miller. Trump moved Miller from the National Counterterrorism Center to take over for Esper as acting secretary of defense. Miller, a former Green Beret, was given an ambitious lame-duck agenda for the Pentagon ahead of Biden’s inauguration. The Pentagon was tasked with withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia—all in the course of two months.

Miller faced widespread criticism for his failure to approve the deployment of the National Guard to contain the Jan. 6, 2021, pro-Trump insurrection at the U.S. Capitol for more than three hours after the Pentagon became aware of the breach. Miller said later that he feared creating “the greatest Constitutional crisis” since the Civil War by deploying active-duty U.S. troops. He has also said that Trump deserves blame for stoking the riots—but he hasn’t explicitly ruled out working for him again.

Stephen Miller made a name for himself as the architect of the president’s immigration policies. If Trump triumphs in November, he is widely expected to again lean heavily on Miller, who has already outlined sweeping new proposals to overhaul U.S. policy and crack down on immigration.

Today, Miller spends much of his time waging legal battles against “woke corporations,”

If Trump defeats Harris in November, Miller has vowed an overhaul of U.S. immigration policy.

In an essay in Foreign Affairs published in June, Robert O’Brien sketched out the contours of a future Trump foreign policy: “A Trumpian restoration of peace through strength.” China is the primary focus, as O’Brien calls for a muscular posture in the Indo-Pacific, including the deployment of the entire Marine Corps to the region and for a U.S. aircraft carrier to be transferred from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

O’Brien also advocated for the United States to resume nuclear weapons testing, not carried out since 1992. “Washington must test new nuclear weapons for reliability and safety in the real world for the first time since 1992—not just by using computer models,” O’Brien wrote.

Kash Patel …

Mike Pompeo still maintains close ties with Trump and his inner circle, and many Republican insiders believe he would be a top contender for a senior administration role, such as secretary of defense, if Trump is reelected.

In Trump’s circle, Pompeo is among the most outspoken advocates of Ukraine. He visited Kyiv in early April and told Fox News that arming Ukraine was the “least costly way to move forward.” Many European officials believe that the appointment of Pompeo to a senior cabinet position would be a good thing for Ukraine and NATO, and bad news for Russia.

An ardent hawk, he was also a primary driver of Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and architect of the former president’s muscular approach to China that now largely has bipartisan backing.

Obviously, Foreign Policy has its own preferences and views, which skew Neoconnish. Take those thumbnails with a grain of salt, but note the clues. Follow the link for more than the thumbnails.

Now, here’s a very relevant transcript of a discussion from yesterday between Danny Davis and Matt Hoh. The transcript is of the last 15+ minutes of the video, and focuses on Keith Kellog’s views on the good guys and bad guys in the Middle East. It features video excerpts of a Kellog interview on CNN that Davis and Hoh find “eye rolling”. They go on to critique the current state of US foreign policy governance:

Massive Attack on Ukraine / Zelensky Wants UnRestricted Fire-Power

DD: I don't want to let you go without looking at another retired General, General Kellogg, former National Security Adviser to the Vice President, Pence, during the previous administration. He went on today to talk about Israel and Hezbollah and he wanted to talk a little bit about what the problem is in the Middle East and who's actually to blame and what we should do about it. I want to show you three different parts of that clip and get your quick response to each one of those, because it's a head scratcher or an eye roller. So here's the first one--watch this:

KK: You know I have to go back, when you think about what's happened there, is really the United States hasn't played a major role there in kind of "deescalating" the situation, because President Biden hasn't done a lot of talking to Netanyahu. Vice President Harris hasn't done very much. I mean, she actually stiffed Netanyahu when he came here to the Joint Session of Congress, when he spoke. And you've got Blinken going over there on his ninth trip--no ceasefire. And you got the National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan headed to China instead of going to the Middle East. Now I know CQ Brown's going to be there, the Chairman if the Joint Chief of Staff, but you kind of got to focus in on what's going to happen there and prevent something happening into the future. And they haven't done it. But the Israelis have done it. So the Israelis have actually reset deterrence in the region, and I think it's smart. And I think it's put Hezbollah on their back foot and it's clearly put the Iranians on the back foot, in that they haven't done anything at all.

DD: So first of all, has what Israel did last night with the strike on Hezbollah in Lebanon, did that put Iran on its back foot and are they now going to rethink whether they should retaliate for what happened in their capital?

[Davis and Hoh openly laugh at Kellog.]

MH: No, absolutely not. I mean this idea that somehow this preemptive strike stopped Hezbollah--Hezbollah launched like 350 Katyusha rockets and a whole bunch of drones, some of which might have hit Israel's equivalent of the NSA. We can't believe anything Israelis say, of course. We just don't know. But this idea that this has reestablished deterrence and somehow this is going to cause the Iranians to back off? It's just madness. It's as untrue as this idea that somehow Biden hasn't done enough to support Israel. Which is funny because it comes on the same day that we saw figures coming out of Israel, through the Times of Israel, that say that there have been more than five hundred 747 and C-17 flights of munitions, equipment, supplies, and 107 ships. You guys know how big a ship is? Actually it comes out that since October 7th the US has sent 50,000 tons--50,000 tons!--of military supplies to Israel. That includes 14,000 2,000 pound bombs. Kellogg says Biden hasn't done enough to "deescalate" the situation, but he doesn't mean it in the sense that a normal, rational, honest, person would mean it. What he's done has been to escalate.

DD: Next thing he said was, fortunately he makes it simple for all of us to understand. This is really not a problem. There's good guys and there's bad guys and all we got to do is be on the side of the good guys, and this is not going to be a problem. Watch this:

KK: The problem you get is if something like this extends. It makes it harder to put back in the box, to make it go. Put it into a situation which is sustainable, and peace in the region, and that is because technically we kind of backed away and we said, 'A pox on both sides of the house.' Wrong. The way you handle that is you tell the entire region, you tell the world, we are behind the Israelis. Full stop. There's a good side and a bad side. And we need to do it. Because we haven't done it, we've created a seam, a gap, and adversaries look for seams and gaps and they've basically done that. So they say, 'Okay, we can attack because the United States is not going to come back hard.' I think you have to reset the fight, you have to tell everybody in the region who we're for and who we're not for, and we really haven't done that. So it's going to take a bit to put it back in the box, because Hezbollah is going to keep attacking, Iran's going to keep supporting the attackers in Hezbollah.

DD: That last part there, Matt--we haven't said who the good guys, who the bad guys are, we need to really do that. I don't know how much harder we could get than that!

[More hearty laughter]

MH: Yeah the countries in the region don't know whose side we're on. We're sending mixed messages. For folks who are watching, I think it's really important to take away from everything we said, the scariest thing is what you just heard. This is what a national security adviser to the president of United States looks like. Kellogg was Pence's National Security Advisor, he was a chief of staff of the National Security Council. This is what a modern American NSA National Security Adviser looks like. They are political, there is not one shred of professionalism of competence, of actual honest analysis in anything they say. Everything they say is geared through a partisan American political lens, meant to achieve some type of political, institutional, or individual gain, and that's the reality. Jake Sullivan is no different in this. That was a good exposure. How can you have a man who as a National Security Adviser frame the situation in the Middle East in the way he just framed it unless he is just a complete political grifter.

DD: And you could certainly say that Secretary of State Blinken is, in some ways, worse in some of the things he says. But you have Blinken, you have Austin, you have here Kellogg who just said the US should be unequivocally, full stop, behind whatever Israel wants to do, and no consideration to the Palestinians--five million people in the West Bank and Gaza who aren't even in his calculation. And that's why, when he says good guys - bad guys, he eliminates [the Palestinians] as even an entity. That's one of the big so-called disputes on the American side, and he wants to just eliminate that—don't even worry about them! Let's go all in with Israel, no matter what, and I personally found that morally repugnant!

MH: It is. It's scaremongering. You know, there was a social scientist in the 50s named C. Wright Mills. He called it "the higher immorality"--this idea that the moral rules as we understand them don't apply to the elite and that the American public accepts that and allows for it. This higher immorality--that people like Kellogg, people like Blinken, they can say whatever they want, they don't have to adhere to actually what reality is, because they are among the elite and the elite are forgiven for any trespasses on anything that we would be held accountable for--you see this idea, you have a man who is possibly the next National Security Adviser in a Trump Administration, on the biggest Cable News Network in the United States, just saying things that are patently untrue, things that are false, things that are just so different from what the reality is and, oh, it's all part of the show folks! Just let it proceed. So the idea that you have in the Oval Office, Doug McGregor could go in there, John Mearsheimer, Jeff Sachs--you know all these folks that you have come on, who really understand things and could really give really great objective advice that is strong, because you look back at these people's records and you say, 'Man, that guy was right about that and that and that,'--it wouldn't matter it because the Empire puts a filter in place. In the filter are people like Kellogg who are, again, political grifters. Yeah, he was a three star general at one point, but I bet anything he sucked. You know, I gotta say, you know it was all about himself, all about doing climbing the career ladder, those kind of things. I know he was decorated in Vietnam, he was special forces in Cambodia, I know all that but, still, you look at this and you say, How could someone say something so completely divorced from reality?

DD: Okay, and here's the problem. What I'm about to play takes it to a whole new level of disconnect from reality. Watch this:

KK: I think the Hamas fight is virtually over. I think Israel has kind of solved that problem. Look, when the leader of Hamas has said, 'If we have peace discussions and we have a ceasefire I want to make sure that I'm not a target.' Sinwar: 'Nope, you started that fight, you're at risk right now.' But I think that fight is virtually over. Now the Israelis can pivot to Hezbollah.

DD: So, good news, man! The Hamas war is effectively over! What planet is he on? What is he talking about? That thing is not even close to being over!

MH: Right. And I think he honestly does believe that it started October 7th. I think he honestly, in his mind, thinks there is no antecedent history or anything, this all started with no history, started October 7th. And I think there are people, believe it or not--because I know the folks who watch this aren't like that, folks who watch this show study history, you follow current events, you take this stuff seriously--but there are a lot of people, I mean ... That's what I would say to people asking about Washington DC. What's so surprising about it is how ahistorical the knowledge is. And I'd say this to people asking about Afghanistan and Iraq, and I would say, you know what's going to shock you is the number of American diplomats and military officers who actually read a book about Iraq or a book about Afghanistan before they went over there. Single digit percentage. That just becomes cumbersome, it's inconvenient. And then if you're again a political grifter like General Kellogg, it becomes very troublesome to the narrative that you're trying to to to throw out there.

DD: Yeah, it's hard for me to fathom how we get to a point like this. I haven't read that work you're talking about. I might be interested in going to find it, but that there is this almost acceptance among the regular people of a behavior and a commentary and the lies and distortions at the upper levels that would never be tolerated at a normal human level when the consequences of that could be so catastrophic. I fear that--for example, with the Afghan fiasco that you and I have been beating our heads about since 2009, about how absurd it is and how it was destined for a loss and all the consequence and all the people in Afghanistan that paid with such a terrible price, how predictable the end was, etc.--but when the predictable end came, and you had the Petraeus and even the Lindsey Grahams and all these other people who say it was everybody else's fault except their own, even though they advocated for it, there was no real cost to the United States. it's like, another embarrassment, another Vietnam, okay. And that didn't cost us anything here, either. So we just keep going on, but one of these days it's going to cost us something. Right now it's costing the Palestinian people just an egregious, egregious cost. It's even costing the Israeli people a lot because this war is continuing to go on. He is dead wrong when he says this is about over. They have created so many more enemies in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank than ever existed prior to October 7th, because of what the Israelis have done. So if they think that it's almost over they're in for a very rude surprise. But I just don't know, and I'd like your view in the last comment here--is there any hope that we're going to get to a point to where we're going to finally recognize that there is this duplicity from up here to down there that needs to be ended?

MH: I don't know, Danny I don't know. C. Wright Mills he wrote this, I think he coined the phrase in The Causes Of World War Three [1958]. The other book of his that I recommend people read is The Power Elite [1956]. He wrote those in like 55, 56, around that time frame. I want to thank my friend Jonathan, actually, who's a big fan of your show, because he reminded me of that phrase, "the higher immorality," a couple weeks ago when we were texting each other, so it's been percolating in my head and I finally had an opportunity to use it here. In the sense of, does it take cataclysm, does it take disaster for us? I mean, look at how Europe was, with itself its wars of the 19th century that then led directly to World War I, that then then led to World War II. It took all of that tragedy, all of that horror, all that destruction, to bring about a Europe that was somewhat peaceable [laughs] for several decades. Is the same thing going to be required of us? We have a place in the United States where we don't feel these things, we feel like it's it's not to affect us, and this is what our leaders bank on. This is what those in charge of the Empire really really cling to, the idea that we have buffers. Otto von Bismark said, the United States has good neighbors to its north and south and fish to its East and West. Lincoln said this as well--we're protected by these two giant oceans. So this idea that we have buffers. And then, of course, we ve talked about this: the buffer with the Ukraine war is Finland, it's Poland, it's Romania. So if things even get so bad to the point that Russia starts using tactical nuclear weapons or anything like that, where are they going to use them first? First, they're not going to use them on us! They're gonna use them on the Finns, on the Poles, or the or the Latvians or the Romanians, and at that point then we can turn the dial down. Then we can deescalate, because they're our buffer. And I wish the Europeans understood that more--you are our buffer. So what we're doing is we're walking right into the long game of who the Empire's adversaries are. Their long game.

So if you look at this idea of what Hezbollah is doing, what Iran is doing, what the Yemenis are doing in support of the Palestinians--but also to bring harm to Israel--it's a long-term strategy. Israel is bleeding out right now. Their economy is just, every day it's hemorrhaging. Their tourism is shut down. Foreign investment is dried up. Domestic investment is being shipped out. One of their their four decent ports is completely closed off. We could go on. They got 200 thousand internal refugees in a population of 8 million! You've got, what, several hundred thousand reservists called up in a population of 8 million. You've had 40,000 Israeli businesses go out of business since October 7th.

DD: Oh wow, I didn't know that.

MH: And then you look at what's happening on the political side [in Israel], right? Why would Iran launch a huge attack right now? Why would Hezbollah send anything more than 300 Katyusha rockets over the border--they don't need to! You know, next Tuesday send 800 rockets and then, you know, on September 15th launch a few ballistic missiles. It's interesting that Hezbollah was quick to point that out, actually, that they didn't use any of their ballistic missiles in their attack the other day. They only used their Katyushas, which as everyone knows,

DD: are like bottle rockets. [Laughter]

MH: And some drones. So they're like, 'String this thing out, and let the Israelis devolve and crack apart internally.' I don't even know if Netanyahu's out of that bunker. Netanyahu's spent most of the last two, three weeks in a bunker. So it's this longterm game, you know, balancing it with, okay, the Americans. Israel's whole card here is the Americans, and are the Americans really going to back an attack on Iran and are the Israelis really stupid enough to invade Lebanon for the third time in 40 months [sic = years]? And even if they did, what would be the consequences for them? Because you saw how disastrous both those things [previous invasions of Lebanon] were. So you look at that and you say, 'God, our political leadership--it just doesn't care about its own people, but it's grossly inept.'