All of Trump’s Men

Three and a half months after being elected, President Donald Trump finally took the Oath of Office on a freezing cold day on January 20 to become the 47th President of the United States.

Trump gave a stirring, principled and rousing yet dignified inaugural address that delighted and galvanized his scores of millions of followers and pledged to end wars around the world and prevent them breaking out. However, the 78-year-old president is already off to an appalling start that looks certain to doom his genuine hopes and desires for world peace. And he did it to himself.

There is no doubt about Trump’s genuine desire to end the awful endless war in Ukraine that his appalling predecessor Joe Biden provoked, fanned and prolonged over the past three endless years. Trump is also personally sincere in his desire to improve and reset relations with Russia. It is appalling and contemptible – both adjectives that remorselessly define Joe Biden’s conduct in everything – that the outgoing President of the United States refused to discuss any issue with his Russian counterpart for nearly four years.

By contrast, Trump has made clear he views as a priority re-establishing personal discussions with Putin. He even invited Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng to attend his inauguration, a courtesy and diplomatic opening move that the abusive, insulting, blustering fake-macho, tiny Biden was incapable of ever offering. And Han, a trusted adviser to President Xi Jinping, has already held talks with new US Vice President J.D. Vance.

Trump has now returned to the Oval Office he was forced to vacate in highly dubious election circumstances four years ago. Like Ronald Reagan 44 years ago, Trump sweeps triumphantly into office after forcing a release of hostages in the Middle East that for more than a year eluded his worthless and despised predecessor Biden. The same humiliating failure faced Reagan’s predecessor President Jimmy Carter, who just died at the age of 100 – and nobody misses him – failed to either negotiate or rescue 52 US hostages held by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolutionary new government in Tehran. Iran freed them even as Reagan took power.

Similarly, Trump forced through at long last a deal whereby Israel at last terminated its 16-month endless bombardment of Gaza that killed at least 44,000 people and probably far more and released more than 1,000 Hamas fighters in return for the eventual freeing of around 30 Israeli hostages captured during the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023. Such a deal was beyond Biden, his secretary of state Antony Blinken and his national security adviser Jake Sullivan to the very end.

So far so good.

However, Trump has named and looks certain to appoint his own top policymaking and advisory trinity on foreign affairs, national security and military issues. They are veteran Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida as secretary of state, Fox News host and commentator Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, and Florida Congressman Mike Waltz as his national security adviser.

Rubio and Waltz at least have extensive hands-on experience in following Washington foreign policy and the US defense bureaucracy. However, they are both old establishment figures, especially Rubio. Neither of them has ever shown the slightest capability for negotiation, compromise, patience or serious interactions with other nations that is at the heart of all successful diplomatic and strategic defense dealings. Both of them rather are classic neocons who have always mindlessly swallowed the lethal Kool-Aid of American triumphalism and the myth of universal, unrestricted power that has deluded Washington’s leaders, pundits, and policymakers alike in the fateful 34 years since the end of the Cold War. The realities of today’s multipolar world in which the United States has already been eclipsed in so many crucial fields are quite beyond them.

Hegseth is even worse. He is a quintessential example of the superficial, slick talking, gung-ho ex-military man who has successfully repackaged himself as a media tough guy who could have been played by Clint Eastwood or Harrison Ford. He is Colonel Oliver North of the Iran-Contra Scandal on steroids. Hegseth, in other words, is a Hollywood celluloid fantasy of what a “real man” would do as head of the globe spanning but woefully over extended US armed forces. In other words, yet another empty, blustering clown. That was the key to his success on Fox News, which the whole world now knows is the super-highway into President Trump’s brain.

You can tell the nature of a King by the kind of advisers he chooses to surround himself with, as Aesop in his Fables and the Book of Proverbs in the Bible wisely tells us. Judged by this ancient, repeatedly proven standard, the prospects for any significant reduction of tensions with Russia and China are very poor indeed, whatever the new president has said or consciously even sincerely wishes to achieve.

All three of his top foreign policy and national security officials are lifelong passionate believers in American triumphalism. They all believe in the direct simplistic use of dictates, bullying, and military force. All of them are piss-ignorant of the most elementary lessons and applications of strategy, leveraging economic power, and the protection and accumulation of genuine industrial capability in the modern world. They all think in simplistic fake-macho soundbites. It’s The American Way. All of them believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the United States is still the Top Dog and Top Gun in the world. All of them believe that History has ended, and the American Model and example of democracy is the only realistic future for the rest of the world, as Francis Fukuyama fraudulently claimed in his famous 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. All of them still swallow the Lethal Kool Aid of the late columnist Charles Krauthammer’s Absurd Big Lie that America’s Unipolar Moment could and would defy history, reality, and all common sense and last forever.

Also, not one of Trump’s new, chosen Big Three defense and diplomatic policy makers has ever expressed any recognition at all of the inevitable and inexorable rise of other power centers around the world. The great American historian Samuel P. Huntington presciently warned them of this in his work “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.” There, Huntington emphasized the need to tolerate, coexist with, and understand other civilizations and political systems.

It must again be stressed, the posts of secretary of state, national security adviser, and secretary of defense weld simultaneously enormous direct influence on the President of the United States, and they simultaneously provide their holders with the power to fill the top levels of the federal bureaucracy with thousands of policymakers in their own image.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, working under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the George W. Bush administration and with Rumsfeld’s full support, flooded the Pentagon with incompetent, ignorant, manic neocon policymakers and haters of all aspects of Arab and Muslim society, life, and thought. Hillary Clinton, President Barack Obama’s first secretary of state, similarly flooded the Department of State with her own chosen hordes of crazed, ignorant, yes-men and yes-women ideologues obsessed with imposing her own demented conceptions of gender social engineering and the micromanaging of domestic political processes in the most obscure and remote societies around the world.

It was under Hillary Clinton that the extraordinary clown Michael McFaul became probably the most ludicrous ambassador ever sent by one thermonuclear powered state to another when he became her personally chosen and indulgently favored ambassador to Moscow in 2012 where he obsessed with writing abusive public twitter messages about the President of Russia. It was also Hillary Clinton as secretary of state who launched Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, complete mediocrities and embarrassing failures at every military misadventure and diplomatic policy they ever made, on their long, slow, plodding rise through the federal bureaucracy to the Commanding Heights of secretary of state and national security adviser under Joe Biden over the past four years.

From the 700,000 needless Ukrainian deaths – not to mention all the Russian ones – and the at least 44,000 recorded deaths in Gaza and the humiliating collapse of the US 20-year misadventure in Afghanistan, the whole world now knows how that turned out. There is no reason whatsoever to experience anything better from Rubio, Hegseth and Waltz.

Of course, far better choices were easily available to Trump had he chosen to avail himself of them. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky would have made an outstanding secretary of state. He would have instantly commanded a credibility and dignity in both Moscow and Beijing that would have jump-started America’s global diplomacy with the rising superpowers beyond 100,000 words of empty verbiage from Rubio.

Trump did indeed appoint former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii as Director of National Intelligence. But her mandate is far too vague and the ambitions imposed upon her are far too vague and ill-defined to allow her to do any good at all, through no fault of her own. Gabbard has been denied what Rubio, Waltz, and Kellogg are all going to instantly enjoy and abuse – direct total power over a crucial department of the federal bureaucracy and national security apparatus. Gabbard should instantly have been named as secretary of defense instead of the clownish media-bite Punch-and-Judy puppet Pete Hegseth. She is a military veteran herself held in high standing, and in her years in Congress she repeatedly expressed and revealed a deep understanding of the Pentagon’s limitless labyrinths of policy making and procurement processes. She had the perfect credentials to serve as an outstanding secretary of defense. Therefore, of course, Trump never appointed her.

Trump also had access to retired US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor. Macgregor’s experience and credentials are not just outstanding to be national security adviser: They are also extraordinary. Macgregor commanded the greatest US tank battle victory since World War II, the annihilation of Iraq’s Republican Guard armored forces at the Battle of 73 Easting in the 1991 Gulf War. Since then, he has established himself as America’s Charles De Gaulle – an outstanding military historian and analyst who has repeatedly foreseen, predicted, and explained the impact of drones and precision-guided smart munitions on the modern battlefield and how these and other advances have completely transformed the conduct of war. Trump was even aware of Macgregor since the colonel used to appear regularly as a commentator on Fox News. He even briefly appointed Macgregor – far too late in the day – to be a senior Pentagon adviser right at the end of his first term as president. Now Trump needs Macgregor more than ever. So, he has not raised a fingernail to elevate him.

“A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. This every sister of the Bene Gesserit knows,” Frank Herbert wrote at the beginning of his science-fiction masterpiece “Dune.” However, President Trump is clearly no Sister of the Bene Gesserit. He has casually ensured that the delicate balance between War and Peace, Survival and Destruction has been smashed even before he took office. The President sincerely wants peace. But by his appalling top three military and diplomatic appointments, he has already fanned the awful flames of war.