Benjamin Wittes
The Situation on Friday recounted my first ride in a driverless car—a ride, it turns out, that coincided with the release by the White House of Trump’s National Security Strategy. I’ll let the reader decide whether it was a coincidence or a metaphor, and if the latter, a metaphor for what.
The National Security Strategy is a very strange document—strange in what it includes, strange in what it leaves out, strange in its bombastic personalization of policy to President Trump, strange in displaying a certain meta-quality, and strange in its all-but-overt racism. Needless, perhaps, to say, this does not read like the national security strategies of any prior administration.
The meta-quality gives the racism a weirdly-organized sheen. The document spends the first seven of its 33 pages explaining what a strategy is, why previous American national security strategies have all sucked, what the United States (meaning the Trump administration) wants from the rest of the world, and what means are at its disposal to get what it wants. The document spends time justifying the proposition that it can’t focus on everything and has to prioritize—though it actually does bounce from subject to subject a great deal in a fashion that does not reflect rigorous prioritization.
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