By David K. Shipler
“Pay no attention to that man behind the
curtain.”
Watching
the United States on the world stage today is like suffering from double
vision. President Donald Trump strides, postures, and dramatically decrees.
Then his subordinates stay approximately where they were before.
Trump
credits Vladimir Putin’s denials that Russia interfered in the 2016 election,
and then the Justice Department indicts a bunch of Russians for doing precisely
that. Trump announces a sudden withdrawal of 2,000 American troops from Syria,
and then his national security adviser, John Bolton, says they’re staying there
to fight ISIS and defend our Kurdish allies.
It’s not that Trump has no
influence over his own foreign policy. It’s that he has no policy. He has only
impulses and whims—not all of which are necessarily bad. But since he detests
veteran professionals who have been working on these problems for decades, and since
he has let Bolton strip the National Security Council bare, Trump’s tweets are
unsupported by any process of deliberation or execution that might actually
translate into action on the ground.
Although the president is
excoriated for this incompetence, it could someday save us from an impetuous
war that he thinks up after watching Sean Hannity. Inertia, the tendency of a
body to continue traveling at the same speed in the same direction, is
fundamental in government. Whether you’re a right-wing conspiracy theorist who
calls it the “deep state,” or a center-to-left citizen who laments the paucity
of “adults in the room,” your nation’s well-being these days is protected by
the difficulty of turning the ship of state on a dime, as Trump repeatedly
tries to do.
It would be interesting to know—and
in some future year we might find out—whether the generals and admirals have
developed a secret method of resistance to this demented commander-in-chief’s
rash orders. There have been reports of their slow-walking certain commands
that can be bogged down in logistics and bureaucracy. But what if Trump wakes
up early one morning, gets incensed by something on Fox and Friends, and calls
in the officer with the nuclear football to obliterate a country that has
ticked him off? Is there any subversive understanding in the military about how
to defy such an order? If so, would it be treason? Probably, but it might also
save the country.
