How do you create a foreign policy manifesto for a US president who leads from the gut?<\/p>\n
The initial draft fell to Michael Anton, a Maga firebrand whom officials have called the lead author behind the US\u2019s radical new national security strategy (NSS). The document shocked US allies, warning that immigration to Europe would cause \u201ccivilizational erasure<\/a>\u201d, reviving the Monroe doctrine in the western hemisphere, and downgrading the US\u2019s responsibility for great power competition with China and Russia.<\/p>\n Anton, the former director of policy planning at the state department, had previously gained widespread attention in 2016 when he compared the impending elections to a hijacked airliner in which conservatives must radically shake up US politics<\/a> and reject the pro-immigration stances that were the \u201cmark of a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201c2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die,\u201d he wrote under a pseudonym. \u201cTo compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.\u201d<\/p>\n It is no surprise, then, that the recent NSS, usually a ponderous document weighed down by carefully measured bureaucratic-speak, landed like a bombshell<\/a>. While it survived a tortured bureaucratic process from the state department to Trump\u2019s senior advissrs and was released to little fanfare last week, some of the recommendations were radical enough to cause European leaders to say that the US\u2019s Euroscepticism had now become \u201cofficial doctrine\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cI think what\u2019s clear is that Maga is trying to be a revolutionary movement,\u201d said Max Bergmann, the director of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. \u201cIt\u2019s trying to completely upend postwar US foreign policy<\/a> and and really change the direction of the country.\u201d<\/p>\n The thinking pushed against decades of bipartisan foreign policy orthodoxythat saw European institutions, including Nato and the European Union, as allies in a great power competition with authoritarian countries like Russia and China. The new document sees the greatest threat coming from immigration \u2013 and suggests that the US should court illiberal allies in Europe.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is sort of like a divorce,\u201d Bergmann said of the European reaction. \u201cThey don\u2019t want the marriage to end. They\u2019re looking for signs that the United States is still interested in them \u2026 and this was sort of confirmation that it\u2019s over.\u201d<\/p>\n Skeptics have said that the NSS rarely dictates policy, that it is not attached to any budgets, and questioned whether Donald Trump had even read the 33-page essay.<\/p>\n Traditionally, the NSS is the result of a convoluted interagency process that leads to a \u201ccut-and-paste job\u201d, according to Daniel Hamilton, a former state department official and professor at Johns Hopkins University.<\/p>\n \u201cMy guess is he\u2019s never read this thing and never will,\u201d said John Bolton, a former national security adviser to Trump during his first term who has since become a prominent critic of the president. \u201cHe didn\u2019t read the national security strategy in the first term, and nobody ever paid any attention to it.\u201d<\/p>\n But in a subsequent interview with Politico, Trump echoed the strategy\u2019s criticisms of mass migration<\/a>, indicating that even if he does not have time for a policy document, its horror at multiculturalism is closely aligned with his thinking.<\/p>\n \u201cIf it keeps going the way it\u2019s going \u2026 many of those countries will not be viable countries any longer,\u201d Trump said. \u201cTheir immigration policy is a disaster. What they\u2019re doing with immigration is a disaster.\u201d<\/p>\n National security strategies, which have been made public by US administrations since the mid-1980s, have often served as a sparring ring for different visions for US foreign policy, with rival officials injecting language to reflect their key interests.<\/p>\n Under Trump, the White House has significantly slashed staff at key national security apparatuses as part of its effort to streamline government and cull a disloyal bureaucratic \u201cdeep state\u201d \u2013 including at the national security council, the main forum that would traditionally coordinate US national security policy.<\/p>\n The result is a document that is less polished, but also one that will be more difficult to implement, said observers.<\/p>\n