Andrew Day ima zanimivo teorijo o Trumpovi enigmatski nekonsistentnosti, in sicer, da se obda s “slabimi policaji”, da bi prestrašil nasprotnike in nato lažje dosegel zmernejše cilje. Vendar tudi, če bi to bilo res, kot kaže Trumpov prvi mandat, imajo privrženci trde linije v njegovem kabinetu (kot sta bila Bolton in Pompeo) številna orodja za subvertiranje golobjih politik, ki jim nasprotujejo. In ironija je, da medtem ko Trump javno krivi globoko državo za oviranje njegove zunanjepolitične agende, pa njegova strategija obkrožanja s trdimi silami pomeni izgradnjo lastne globoke države kar znotraj Bele hiše.

Bomo videli, koliko slabša bo Trumpova zunanja politika od Bidnove (če je to sploh možno).

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When it comes to foreign policy, Donald Trump is an enigma. During presidential campaigns, he blasts neoconservatives for involving America in Forever Wars. After he’s elected president, he hires neocons and other hardliners to work in the White House. Officials who filled key roles in his first administration, and the new appointees slated to do the same in his second, read like a Who’s Who of ultra-hawkism. Different men, same story.

While all sorts of explanations for Trump’s contradictions are possible—he’s all talk, or he’s under donor pressure, or he just likes tough guys—one theory has given some advocates of foreign policy restraint (including yours truly) a measure of solace, namely, that Trump uses the hawks as a means to pursue dovish ends. Evidence for this comes from reports about how Trump in his first term liked to have a warmongering John Bolton by his side, just to scare people. “Bolton can be the bad cop and Trump can be the good cop,” one Trump official explained to Axios in 2019. “Trump believes this to his core.”

But there’s a big problem: The hawks who staffed Trump’s first administration didn’t enable him to advance his peace agenda. Instead, they actively thwarted it. Trump often complains about the “deep state,” the alleged network of intelligence officers and other civil servants who persist across administrations of both parties and stifle the will of presidents. But a closer look at his appointments shows that Trump, in his first administration, created his own cabal of unruly warmongers—and that he’s gearing up to do the same in his second.

In theory, assembling a team of bad cops enhances your leverage. In practice, at least for Trump, this strategy has entailed putting savvy and highly ideological hardliners in charge of important government functions, such as staffing executive agencies and overseeing day-to-day administration. And it has meant that Trump has hawks whispering in his ear, preparing his daily briefs, debating other officials in cabinet meetings—in short, influencing his thinking about international crises.

Bolton is a case in point. Even prior to becoming national security adviser in 2018, the mustached mandarin was a regular fixture in the Trump White House, where he advocated for a hardline Iran policy. In his 2020 White House memoir The Room Where It Happened, Bolton recalls that on multiple occasions in 2017 he had urged Trump to withdraw from the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal and start treating Tehran like an implacable enemy. Bolton writes that he had been so satisfied with these conversations that he wanted to have more and more of them. “I wondered, in fact, if I could do much more if I were actually in the Administration.”

Though Trump had campaigned on killing the deal, during his first year in office he was reluctant to do so, a hesitancy that had been reinforced by the officials around him. It’s safe to say that Bolton helped Trump make up his mind. Bolton became national security adviser in April 2018, and the next month Trump announced he was withdrawing from the agreement. Trump soon grew frustrated with Bolton’s incessant advocacy for hawkish policies, firing him in 2019. But by then, US-Iran relations had grown much more tense, amplifying risks of another Forever War in the Middle East—the kind of war that candidate Trump had promised to avoid.

Bolton mainly offered advice, but hawks in cabinet positions do a lot more than that. They also manage powerful bureaucracies, and they often know much more than the president about how to get results. Mike Pompeo—who served as CIA director and then as secretary of state in Trump’s administration—excelled at working the machinery of state and playing the long game. Pompeo was one of Washington’s fiercest China hawks, but he refrained at first from any overt efforts to pursue his pet agendas on foreign policy, instead laying the groundwork for action later.

The outbreak of Covid gave Pompeo the chance he’d been waiting for. Where Trump previously had tried, albeit inconsistently, to work out a modus vivendi with China that would benefit both superpowers, in 2020 he lifted “the floodgates,” according to Axios, “allowing staff across agencies to push through long-desired actions on China-related issues across the board.” These included new visa restrictions, indictments of Chinese nationals, and the designation of China as a “foreign adversary” by the Department of Energy. Pompeo fast became what Axios called “the public face” of this comprehensive anti-China program, and relations between the world’s two largest economies dramatically deteriorated.

When persuasion or bureaucratic long games aren’t available to the hawk, especially a lower-level one, there is always sabotage. In 2018, long-time diplomat James Jeffrey got an appointment as special envoy for Syria. A former NeverTrumper, Jeffrey believed that countering ISIS, Russia, and Iran required the maintenance of a strong US military presence in Syria—a policy that Trump opposed. After Trump ordered a troop pullout from Syria, Jeffrey and his team slow-walked the withdrawal, going so far as to deceive senior officials about what they were up to. “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops were there,” Jeffrey admitted in an interview with Defense One.

Today, advocates of foreign-policy restraint are encouraged by occasional hints from Trump insiders about how excluding people like Pompeo will lead to better foreign policy in Trump’s second term. But Trump has selected Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of state and Florida Rep. Michael Waltz as national security adviser. Both of these men are bona fide hawks, and they will occupy his administration’s most important foreign policy roles. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, claims to be a “recovering neocon,” but conservative restrainers had preferred former Pentagon hand Elbridge Colby for the position, and many aren’t buying Hegseth’s rebrand.

To be sure, the hardliners may prove less influential or belligerent this time around. Both Rubio and Waltz have toned down their hawkism (on Russia at least), and they’ll almost certainly be better team players than Bolton was. Anti-neocons have also joined the mix, including Vice President-elect J.D. Vance as well as Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence. Trump will also have much more presidential experience under his belt. But, as Trump’s first term should have taught him, hardliners have all sorts of tools for subverting dovish policies that they oppose.

There’s an irony here. While Trump often blames the deep state for obstructing his foreign policy agenda, he may have a bigger problem closer to home. Whatever his intentions, Trump’s strategy of surrounding himself with hardliners means constructing a deep state of his own, right inside the White House.

Vir: Andrew Day, Nonzero