America First
It is always interesting to observe what news stories get national traction and which conveniently disappear from the national conversation and consciousness despite their wide-ranging implications. In a sane world, the news story looming over the nation at this point would be not be the ridiculous impeachment show trial going on in the Senate, but perhaps a story that mattered.
I've written previously on the Afghanistan Papers, the trove of government documents released by the Washington Post that revealed our military has almost no idea what it is doing in Afghanistan, its nation-building mission has fueled corruption, terrorists, and the drug trade, and our government has been lying to the American public about these facts from essentially 2001.
Instead of that story leading to a reevaluation of our assumptions about projecting American power and values around the world, the disastrous project of trying to bring liberal democracy to the Middle East, and perhaps lending credence to the wisdom of Trump's original "America First" vision, the nation has been subjected to months of nonsense about impeachment and Ukraine, the latest attempt by the Establishment bureaucracy within our government to overturn the election.
In truth, this has been going on since the beginning of the Trump Presidency. According to a soon to be released book, only six months into President Trump's term his secretary of Defense, former Marine General Jim Mattis, as well as other cabinet officials, decided it was their urgent duty to rein in the outsider president's "America First" agenda, and his stated intention of ending our Middle East conflicts.
Trump, suspicious of NATO, and eager to bring troops home from Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and countless deployments and bases across the globe, needed to be taught a lesson, literally and figuratively. That lesson was that the President does not set policy, the Establishment sets policy. The voters, by extension, would be reminded that no matter who you vote for, that Establishment never loses an election.
So, in July of 2017, they decided to sit the president down for a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, comprised of the top leadership from all branches of the military. Convening in the briefing room of the Joint Chiefs, then Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, along with economic advisor Gary Cohn and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson would provide a "tutorial" for the president on how he was supposed to think about foreign policy and America's global commitments.
From the Washington Post:
"[Mattis, Tillerson, and Cohn] had grown alarmed by gaping holes in Trump’s knowledge of history, especially the key alliances forged following World War II. Trump had dismissed allies as worthless, cozied up to authoritarian regimes in Russia and elsewhere, and advocated withdrawing troops from strategic outposts and active theaters alike.
Trump organized his unorthodox worldview under the simplistic banner of “America First,” but Mattis, Tillerson, and Cohn feared his proposals were rash, barely considered, and a danger to America’s superpower standing. They also felt that many of Trump’s impulsive ideas stemmed from his lack of familiarity with U.S. history and, even, where countries were located. To have a useful discussion with him, the trio agreed, they had to create a basic knowledge, a shared language."
Trump was elected in part because he actually questioned the conduct of the decades long stalemates in our Middle East wars, as well as the purpose of America's bases scattered around the world in friendly and unfriendly nations alike. The self-appointed "experts who believed their duty was to protect the country by restraining his more dangerous impulses", according to the Washington Post, might have started by taking a sober look at their own track record, which was laid bare in disastrous detail in the Afghanistan Papers by none other than the Washington Post itself.
Instead, with the President barely beginning his term they spent nearly two hours lecturing the President on how the “The post-war international rules-based order is the greatest gift of the greatest generation" and how "U.S. deployments fended off the threats of terror cells, nuclear blasts, and destabilizing enemies in places including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, the Korea Peninsula, and Syria." Instead of attempting to understand the President's point of view and why he was elected, the foreign policy establishment viewed its role as that of a super-sovereign: They "needed to educate, to teach, to help him understand the reason and basis for a lot of these things", according to one official.
Of course, Trump did not take kindly to being talked down to by his own staff, as if his job were to carry out the policies of the Pentagon and State Department bureaucracies, and not the other way around. Two hours of this would be more than any person could be expected to endure. So, eventually Trump had enough and lit into them:
“I wouldn’t go to war with you people,” Trump told the assembled brass.
Addressing the room, the commander in chief barked, “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”
For a president known for verbiage he euphemistically called “locker room talk,” this was the gravest insult he could have delivered to these people, in this sacred space.
Shudder! In the sacred space of the Pentagon "Tank", the hallowed meeting room of the Joint Chiefs of Staff! While there should always be respect for the uniform, the very premise of such meeting is evidence that all of these generals were well out of line, and had already forgotten the chain of command, or to put it bluntly, felt emboldened to try to railroad the president because they viewed him as illegitimate and a threat to the status quo, which until then had been reliably propelling their careers and handsomely lining their pockets (The acting Chief of Staff at the time, General Joseph Dunford, has just been elected to the Board of Lockheed Martin, and General Mattis enjoys a similar sinecure at General Dynamics, both among the world's largest military contractors who certainly have been doing a hell of a business since 2001).
None of the "assembled brass" in that room had the right to be lecturing anyone about foreign policy, not after the decades of debacle the U.S. has suffered and continues to suffer in the Middle East. If there was ever a time to rethink the old foreign policy orthodoxy about U.S. power projection, or even show a measure of humility about America's ability to impose its will in the Middle East and around the world, it was at the dawn of his presidency. Rethinking our foreign entanglements was part of his mandate.
Tillerson and the Generals can act dismayed at their dressing down by Trump and his derogatory talk, but if they disagreed with his worldview, they never should have accepted their cabinet positions. Despite all the lofty talk about service, it was only after Trump made it clear he would not be their puppet that these officials decided he was irredeemable and there was no future in the Administration.
Later, Mattis would put his regard for the chain of command and duty to the Constitution on full display when he outright ignored or undermined direct orders from the President because they ran counter to the D.C. policy consensus. Recall that when the President ordered the military deployed to the border to prevent a coordinated incursion of thousands of illegal aliens in a caravan, Mattis sent, temporarily, about a third of the troop numbers requested, unarmed, and in a support role only. Likewise, he ignored and then slow-walked the President’s transgender troop ban. Mattis, like many in government, draped himself in the mantle of duty and honor, but served only the agenda of the permanent Washington bureaucracy.
And more to the point, while it may have been inappropriate to refer to the assembled military "brass" as dopes, it's worth remembering that the same month that "Mad Dog" Mattis, a Marine's Marine, was sworn in as Secretary of Defense, he resigned from the Board of Directors of a little company called Theranos. For years he was made the dope by its twenty-something CEO Elizabeth Holmes to lobby on behalf of her fraudulent tech company, remaining on the board well after the revelations came out in the Wall Street Journal that her blood testing machines were dangerously useless. His credibility as a judge of character is worth about as much as Theranos stock today. With generals like these, it is little wonder the U.S. mission was going sideways in Afghanistan for two decades.
Trump's real sin was not lacunae of knowledge but getting elected and applying a modicum of common sense with an "America First" platform.
Of course, Washington sets its own agenda, and that is the lesson he needed to be taught. He's still being taught that lesson, which is why a special counsel was appointed to harass the President for most of his first term, until the Muller investigation slowly petered out in the low, soft, senile mutterings of an old G-man long past his prime. The current impeachment proceeding is a continuation of the same disgraceful phenomenon.
