Civil War Inside the White House

From the Tom Woods Letter:

It was bound to happen, but it’s manifesting itself sooner than many people expected:

There’s a war brewing inside Trump circles on foreign policy.

It was obvious that some Trump allies had been uncomfortable about all the antiwar talk, because they do have wars they’d like to wage if given the chance, and because it’s inconsistent with their propagandistic yammering about “American leadership around the world.”

“American leadership around the world,” in case you haven’t been paying attention, means blowing trillions of dollars, destabilizing countries for no good reason, and then, when even worse regimes take power in those places, claiming to be shocked at this outcome, but of course refusing to accept blame because “nobody could have known” such an outcome would occur.

In fact, of course, any damn fool knew those outcomes would occur, which is why people oppose these interventions in the first place.

Just last week, Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, a sound and informed foreign-policy realist, who had been about to take his place as a deputy director of national intelligence — and who, unlike so many of his predecessors, wouldn’t have treated his fellow Americans like they were nine years old and could be spoken to only in bumpersticker slogans — was dropped from consideration.

This came after certifiable nutcases Mark Levin (the man who vociferously defended Barack Obama’s right to attack Libya unilaterally) and Laura Loomer hysterically attacked him on X.

Davis had been critical of Israel’s handling of the situation in Gaza (only one opinion is allowed on that matter, citizen), and had been skeptical of the long neocon list of American enemies — are they really enemies, Davis wonders, and/or do they need to be?

It’s about time we got someone willing to reexamine the tired assumptions that have governed bipartisan foreign-policy thinking for several decades. These haven’t exactly been three decades filled with great strategic victories for the United States, to put it very kindly, so we should all welcome some fresh thinking.

Levin professes to be a free thinker when it comes to domestic policy, but whatever free thinking he does stops there. On foreign policy, dissidents are to be dismissed as cranks and anti-Semites and extremists.

Over at Jacobin, Branko Marcetic summarizes Daniel Davis’ views, none of which seem particularly crazy (unless our baseline for sanity is conformity with the bipartisan foreign-policy consensus):

While backing US military aid to Ukraine, he was also one of the first and loudest voices to prophetically argue that battlefield realities didn’t favor the country and that a negotiated settlement was in its best interests, even if it meant ceding some territory. He has criticized former president Joe Biden for taking steps in the conflict that risk a direct US-Russia war and even nuclear exchange, is a critic of NATO expansion and its role in sparking the war, and has urged against offering membership in the alliance to Ukraine.

On the matter of China and Taiwan, he has argued against fighting a war over the island nation and for a policy of building up US defense to deter a future Chinese attack on US soil instead. He has been in favor of negotiations with North Korea, of pulling US troops out of Africa and Syria, and backed Trump’s controversial pick of Tulsi Gabbard as DNI. He has also backed a cease-fire deal in Gaza that would end Israel’s war there and foster broader peace and stability in the Middle East.

All of these are positions that Trump himself has come around to voicing at various points.

Marcetic identifies “a genuine rift among pro-Trump figures on foreign policy,” and finds that “the more hawkish side has repeatedly used their less hawkish opponents’ skepticism of US policy on Israel — and now, in Davis’s case, even resorting to thinly veiled accusations of antisemitism — as a way to have them blocked or fired, in the hopes of tilting the administration’s foreign policy in a more pro-war direction in all theaters, not just the Middle East.”

This rift is able to develop in the first place because it’s not entirely clear what the Trump “America First” foreign policy really means. It seems to mean something different in Russia/Ukraine than it means in the Middle East, and something again still in Latin America.

I sure hope the good guys win here, or otherwise we’ll be dealing with my least favorite of Woods’s Laws: No matter whom you vote for, you always end up with John McCain.

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