Trump Wrecked the State Department Because He Sucks at World Domination

This idiot dictator has no idea American empire works

by ANDREW DOBBS

The Trump White House exploded in scandal last week when press secretary Sean Spicer censored an off-camera press gaggle and excluded several major publications critical of the administration. Many of us have been predicting the end of press briefings altogether, and this is a clear step in that direction.

Yet, despite outrage over the exclusion, the mass media and political class seem not to have noticed that what amounts to Washington’s second most notable and institutional daily press briefing — at the State Department — has been on hiatus for weeks. It’s an indefinite suspension, with no plans to restore it any time soon it seems.

As first reported by The Washington Post, that briefing has been happening every day for over 50 years and its disappearance is an omen of much bigger problems at the Department. Since his confirmation, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has made almost no public statements. He even traveled to two foreign countries without press or cameras and held no public events while in those countries.

The administration’s dismissal of most of the Department’s top staff made a brief media splash in the early days following the Inauguration, but few have noted that State has not filled those positions. Of the 56 State Department and U.N. Mission positions requiring Senate approval, the administration has filled only two — Tillerson and U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley.

All these signs, taken together, signal nothing less than the dismantling of the State Department. It seems Pres. Donald Trump isn’t interested in diplomacy. The destruction of State is yet another sign that the empire is at war with itself — or at least gearing up for such a conflict — and it betrays an ambition for despotism, a gross misunderstanding of the world and a bold desire to destroy the liberal order.

These drives are contradictory and the way that these contradictions resolve themselves will determine the shape, size and speed of the catastrophe to come.

I do not use the word despotism lightly. It’s a malign and autocratic rule concentrated in a single individual. Trump wants to be a despot — a fact obvious to anybody who has honestly assessed his personality. He’s the ultimate spoiled rich kid who managed to kick and scream and throw a tantrum so epic and sustained that we gave him the presidency to try and satisfy him.

Such narcissistic petulance can’t stand competition, and the State Department has always been an independent base of power and prominence in Washington. Trump skipped over party elder statesmen and even high profile surrogates that wanted the job — such as former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani — to give the job to a man with no government experience. A man now hiding from the spotlight altogether.

Trump has broken the position’s prominence to eliminate any risk of it taking attention away from where he wants it. On himself.

This repressive control of State extends into real policy as well. Trump rejected Tillerson’s choice for his Deputy Secretary, Elliot Abrams, an unheard-of step prompted by Abrams “insufficient loyalty” to Trump.

This is a tendency Trump has made a habit. He also didn’t allow his new national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, to bring in his own deputy. This ensures that the principal is isolated and dependent on day-to-day operators primarily loyal to the president and therefore a potential backdoor on their bosses. It’s a classic despot move.

It also ensures that the only candidates who will take the jobs are those without strong relationships in their policy area or who don’t really care about the operations of their department so long as they get a title and some power. Lightweights, dilettantes and opportunists — Trump’s egomaniacal management style concentrates power into these sorts of hands.

All this seems to be in overdrive at the State Department where those 54 unfilled leadership positions leave the political amateur Tillerson isolated with only Trump-approved assistants around him. Let’s hope there’s no major international incidents he might need to navigate any time soon.

This is where the administration’s incompetence begins to show. For all the deep analysis and examination of this regime, it bears remembering that some of their decisions and policies are simply a function of them not knowing what the fuck they are doing. They worship U.S. power but have no idea how it works.

Look, for example, at Trump’s most consequential foreign policy decision to date: the cancellation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Trump killed it as part of his fascist-callback “America First” philosophy, but the TPP was a crucial expression of U.S. imperialist power.

Trade agreements are most certainly not about “free” trade. Their most consistent and important effect is to flood developing countries with subsidized U.S. agricultural products, killing native agriculture and forcing its peasantry into extractive industries and urban factories where U.S. based corporations extract tremendous value from their labor.

All the high tech equipment needed to make all that work are also U.S. exports (or exports from other imperial allies), blocking any industrial development that might move these countries beyond dependence on raw material production. International law then protects these machines and programs with extraordinary “intellectual property” exported from the dominant economies.

Exiled Philippine revolutionary Jose Maria Sison put it best before the legendary 1999 WTO protests in Seattle when he said, “a handful of imperialist states — headed by the U.S. and concentrated in the Group of Seven — control and use an array of the most powerful multilateral agencies, like the IMF, World Bank and WTO, to determine the pattern of investments and trade in the client states and thereby dominate the world, economically and consequently in all other respects.”

But Trump doesn’t understand this. His gets his understanding of trade policies and U.S. intervention in the world from cable T.V. He followed this ignorance and cancelled the TPP because he thinks that this will help put “America First.” It won’t.

If he does somehow understand this, then he risked America’s imperial power for the sake of domestic political popularity. That too would be incompetence with a sheen of demagoguery rising to the top.

Yet for all the incompetence involved, there is also something very conscious going on. Steve Bannon, clearly at this point the regime’s most important visionary, said at the Conservative Political Action Committee last week that his aim is “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” He is set to destroy the liberal order in a way no previous regime has ever had the guts to.

The liberal state is always measuring, monitoring and memorandizing various aspects of life. The more data points it identifies, surveillance it operates and paperwork it generates, the bigger the bureaucracy grows. Bannon wants to destroy it all, root and branch.

Liberalism extended to the international realm created international bureaucracies and Bannon — not to mention Trump — opposes these institutions and the agreements emanating from them. This includes the TPP and NAFTA as well as the E.U., NATO and the U.N.

The State Department played a key role in the development of these institutions, and over the last 60 to 70 years it has spent a great deal of its time and energy maintaining and extending them. To this end, it has developed a sprawling bureaucracy. There is no way for Bannon to carry out his vision without destroying State.

For any conventional right-wing regime, Foggy Bottom would be high-hanging fruit. But Trump and company went straight for it, and if they can shatter the crown jewel of liberal internationalism they can take out anything else.

But there are contradictions at work here. How are they resolved?

First there is that ongoing conflict between the “deep state” and the regime. The CIA is a substantial bureaucracy and while there have been historic rivalries between it and State, it has to prefer diplomats over nothing. It understands that America’s power emanates from the very institutions Trump is undermining.

Trump’s policies are an existential threat to the Agency. Note also that Vice Pres. Mike Pence has contradicted the administration line on NATO, the E.U. and Russia.

U.N. Ambassador Haley — a one-time #NeverTrump Republican much closer to Pence’s politics than Trump’s — seems to agree with him. We will see how long the CIA and its allies can ignore the obvious solution to their problems, or how they’ll go about enacting it.

This trouble is a function of a deeper, more consequential contradiction: the fact that the administration wants an empire while actively undermining the expressions of imperial power. If these were Ron Paul libertarian isolationists who wanted to dismantle the empire altogether then it would make sense to leave the State Department unstaffed, cancel multinational agreements and start backing out of NATO.

But the administration doesn’t want to dismantle the empire. The clearest and most fucked up sign of Trump’s love for American power is his recent comments implying that the U.S. needs to expand its nuclear arsenal. Only a country aimed at world domination would need more than the already overwhelming number of nuclear weapons we maintain, indicating that his assault on international institutions is not a matter of isolationism.

It seems that Trump believes that these institutions are hindrances to our power because they propose to impose that rule of law on U.S. operations. But the U.S. has always played a hypocrite on the international stage — demanding that others submit to rules we break. That Trump can’t see that is a sign of his incompetence.

Again, Trump doesn’t want to destroy the empire. He wants it to change. The alternative to the orderly, liberal, carrot of internationalism is the brute, reactionary stick of militarism. The big problem with this is that the U.S. military is not strong enough to fight everybody or to replace its indirect soft power with immediate hard power.

While our conventional military can’t exert this sort of power, our nukes can. A war of aggression or two and cavalier nuclear brinkmanship and blackmail — shit, maybe even a launch or two — that’s the key to being the boss without having to keep any eggheads around.

It’s the bully’s solution, the way a spoiled little bitch would go. It’s what you get when you give a guy like Trump the keys to the kingdom.

This is the skeleton key that unlocks all this administration’s mysteries: Trump’s ego. It’s why Tillerson got the job, why Trump muzzled him and why he has nobody around to help. It’s why Spicer kept some of the country’s premier news sources out of his gaggle. It’s also an animating and enabling feature for the opportunists who have learned to wield it, with none more skilled or dangerous than Bannon.

But this ego and Bannon’s mission are running headlong into the snares of U.S. imperialism, and there’s a chance they won’t make it through. Trump has shown a world historic capacity for escaping the expected consequences of his decisions, but there are some things more brutal than presidential politics, and he has — consciously or not — decided to fuck with the ugliest of them all.

Time will tell if the daddy’s boy has finally found a scrape he can’t buy or bullshit his way out of. Until then, as always, stay defiant.

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