Ending pretending not to pretend

The old alliances are indeed dead. There's no going back to them.

I have a lot of my mind, so excuse the brain dump here. The last few days have been…confusing…but clarifying. First, I am not over my hurt and harm to our military and intelligence families that our nation’s most senior leaders perpetrated, in showing how little they care about following rules regarding sensitive, nay, operational, materials. I don’t care if it’s technically “Controlled Unclassified Information” (CUI) or whatever specific office is charged to handle that designation. I care that our SECDEF casually shared OPSEC on a U.S. military operation in progress, to a fairly large group on an unauthorized, uncertified platform, using a personal smartphone (or if he used a government phone, he used an app that is not permitted to run on it).

Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speak to the press about the border crisis in Eagle Pass, Texas, March 5, 2025. (DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Madelyn Keech). Image via Wikimedia Commons.

If this is the example of care and due diligence that this government is expected to exercise under the hands of President Donald Trump’s hand picked cabinet and pseudo super czar Elon Musk, we are all in trouble if the people working in government follow their lead. I still think someone should be fired, specifically Pete Hegseth, but I will take NATSEC Advisor Mike Waltz, since is was his fault a reporter got included in the chat. Actually, I’m willing to just accept a “Mea Culpa” and a promise not to use Signal again, but I doubt any of that will happen. It’s simply more politically convenient to go on trolling and blaming everyone, “the libs,” and the Democrats, and Joe Biden, than it is to tell the truth about anything.

I will be quick with the rest of my comments, because I spent a lot of time trying to get Grok to do a Studio Ghibli version of Hegseth, Waltz, Susie Wiles and Vice President J.D. Vance playing pickle ball. It didn’t turn out like I wanted. Just so you know, the jeu du jour over at X and Grok is taking various photos or situations and doing them in Studio Ghibli style, like “Howl’s Moving Castle.” If you’re a reader and you know what I’m talking about, let me know in the comments.

Jonah Goldberg (who is not Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic who was in the Signal chat) had a take on the whole Signal affair that’s based on “The Godfather.” He’s come to believe that Trump’s foreign policy is a real-life version of the Cosa Nostra, complete with dons, families, and hits. I can’t say he’s completely wrong about this, given that the fictional film mob are all about power, respect and a veneer of legitimacy covering a remorseless criminal enterprise. But then again, you wouldn’t see the mob taking out a group of pirates to open legitimate sea lanes to navigation, unless there was some piece of the action in it for them.

His biggest problem with “Signalgate” isn’t the problems I’ve covered the last few days, as much as it’s telling our allies what we really think of them in private. I think his argument has a few defects, the main one being it leads to some circular references. J.D. Vance, when he texted “I just hate bailing Europe out again,” was telling it like he saw it. Hegseth answered, “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.” That’s not good for “Europe” to read from the horse’s mouths.

But neither Vance nor Hegseth knew their remarks were being carefully copied, or would be shared by The Atlantic. So the internal dynamics through the eye-hole presented by Jeffrey Goldberg might be what they really think, but may just be jocular jockeying for who can shove their nose the furthest up the nether end of Trump’s alimentary canal. We don’t know because the context of the remarks are limited to a “small group” chat on a specific topic.

(Let me make one observation here. It’s good that Trump himself doesn’t participate in online group chats, or, from what I understand, emails, for that matter. Trump uses smartphones to publicly share stuff on social media. He—correctly—understands that what is put online will eventually be public, and will be preserved for posterity. If Trump doesn’t want people to know or hear what he’s thinking, he has his private conversations personally, and in private. This is a good policy and has likely served Trump well over his many years working this way.)

One circular reference in Jonah’s argument is that it’s not good to let those outside “the family” know what you’re thinking. It’s also not good to add outsiders to your virtual chat groups. But Vance and Hegseth had no knowledge that was done, and neither did Waltz or any of them, until it all spilled out. Also, our allies pretty much know what Trump’s team generally thinks. J.D. Vance has not been shy telling them in person. In his first term, Trump himself let the Europeans know how “PATHETIC” he considered their “free-loading.”

Many people who otherwise support Trump are carrying water for him, trying to pretend that he’s only pretending to operate like a mafia don.

In fact, Trump is making investments in a new “Pax Americana,” but not the one America has led for the past 80 years since WWII. In the past, we’ve cajoled, convinced, and bought our allies to fight with us, or at least stand with us, against the Soviet threat, against international communism, and titularly at least, against tyrannical dictatorships (except when they benefitted us, like the Shah of Iran).

Trump’s version of “Pax Americana” is best framed in Hegseth’s text remarks back to Vance.

VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.

But Mike [Waltz] is correct, we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this. Nobody else even close. Question is timing. I feel like now is as good a time as any, given POTUS directive to reopen shipping lanes. I think we should go; but POTUS still retains 24 hours of decision space.

In Trump’s “Pax Americana,” the Europeans have to pay their way and defend themselves against their own threats. Also, the Japanese, South Koreans, Australians, and Canadians. But America leads because we can force our will by military and economic might upon any of our “allies.” The traditional definition of an ally is a nation that you can count on in a crisis. In Trump’s vision, an ally is a temporary designation for a specific purpose. He doesn’t believe in permanent alliances, hence NATO is trash, because it’s invested in its own existence beyond its initial purpose.

This might be mafia-thinking, but not necessarily. It’s also the view that “total war” is beyond just military action. Carl von Clausewitz said that “war is merely the continuation of policy by other means.” I doubt Trump has read von Clausewitz, but he believes in the premise. Keeping shipping lanes open is an imperative because America can benefit from Europe’s prosperity, or we can exact a toll from the Houthis and their Iranian sponsors—or destroy them.

Beyond that specific case, Jonah’s argument is circular also because the Houthis, and the failure to eliminate them over the last 10 years of the Yemeni civil war, has largely been an American-led problem. The U.S. paid the Saudis with billions in weapons sales, logistics, intelligence, maintenance and training, in conjunction with the UAE, in order to fight the Houthis in Yemen, beginning in 2015. That was part of President Obama’s export of American-style democracy to the Arab world (which turned out badly).

That war drove the Houthis in the arms of the Iranians. The Saudi military, which is still largely a haven for entitled rich families, was ineffective against the Houthis, who operated like desert rats and bedouins. The war killed over 20,000 in Yemen. President Trump ended our aerial refueling efforts in 2018, and in 2021 Biden ended all “offensive” support to the Saudis in Yemen. By the time the Houthis began blowing up ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, we had already set the events in motion leading to the current situation.

Now it’s America’s task to destroy the Houthi missile threat and capabilities to disrupt shipping through the Suez, not to mention stopping them from lobbing ballistic missiles at Israel on behalf of Iran. As much as the rhetoric on a particular chat session was shocking to read, our European friends weren’t shocked by it. This was always going to be our mess to clean up.

The real end to this situation will need to be negotiations with Iran. That will likely come, and the Europeans won’t be part of it, like they’re not part of the negotiations between Russia and the U.S. over the status of Ukraine. The Saudis are hosting those talks.

Trump is not pretending to think that Europeans have been “free-loading” on the U.S. for years. Of course, that was the whole premise of our “Pax Americana,” that we supported our alliances with money, and with troops, and with security guarantees. It’s no secret that Trump feels that the old way is no good. It’s no secret that Trump’s coterie vies for his approval. It’s not surprising that J.D. Vance, whose ability to be a chameleon on any particular issue is not in question, would set the tone of a group chat about dealing with the Houthis to center it around Trump’s beliefs.

I don’t think any of this signals new things to our allies in Europe. What it does signal is that our ability to pretend to be pretending doesn’t work anymore, because with the Trump 47 administration, due diligence is dead. I wrote about that in 2022:

That’s what scares me. When due diligence is dead, we are left with either magical thinking, or bullying. It should be pretty obvious to everyone that neither of those options is useful or wanted. But here we are.

Indeed. We can’t pretend to be pretending anymore. Jonah and I agree here; he wrote:

But now foreign politicians can’t pretend otherwise, and neither can American ones. Everyone’s maneuvering room, politically, has shrunk. European governments are furious and outraged over the contents of the group chat. No doubt adversary governments are tickled and using this to their advantage.

Maybe. But our foreign friends are also furious about the automobile tariffs and aluminum tariffs, and the threat of “far larger” tariffs that Trump is making. He’s done pretending. He wants to end the old alliances, and form new ones, but the new ones are all ad-hoc, as long as America gets a slice of the action.

What scares me is that once complete, this cannot be undone. It’s like Obama’s “Arab Spring,” or Bush’s “nation building.” There’s no way to go back to the old once the old is dead. More than anything else, other than the stupidity of smart people who have no expectation to act smart, the message of Signalgate is that everyone is done pretending to pretend that our current government cares about the old alliances.

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