The Fear and Weakness at the Heart of Trump’s Strategy

JUSTIN VOGT

Kori Schake, welcome to The Foreign Affairs Interview.

KORI SCHAKE

It is such a privilege to be on the interview.

JUSTIN VOGT

Well, we’re really happy to have you. I wanted to start today by talking about something that’s been in the news last week and this week, and which I think you’ll be able to bring a lot of insight to bear on, and that is the National Security Strategy that the Trump administration released last week. Like so much about this presidency, I think it’s fair to say that it’s unusual in its tone and its substance. It’s unlike any of the other NSS documents I’ve read, including the Trump administration’s first one, which had some idiosyncrasies, but was a sort of, I think, more recognizable example of this genre, and this one not so much.

We sometimes joke here, the editors at FA, that these documents, they read a little bit like first drafts of Foreign Affairs essays. We sort of want to tell the writers, “Okay, it needs a sharper introduction. You need to address some counter arguments, get rid of these bullet points. We need a little more detail in the prescriptions.”

KORI SCHAKE

As the recipient of many of those directives from Foreign Affairs editors, I can attest that it improves the article and the National Security Strategy would’ve been much better if forced to go through the Foreign Affairs review process.

JUSTIN VOGT

Did you ever work on one of these during your time in government? You served in the George W. Bush administration. Were you involved in the drafting of one of these?

KORI SCHAKE

Only very, very marginally in the 2002 NSS, but very marginally.

JUSTIN VOGT

And maybe you could shed some light anyway on what’s the typical process here. What produces a document like this?

KORI SCHAKE

Yeah. So it’s required by law for the White House to produce a national security strategy, and mostly they’re bad. I think the worst one of all time is the last one of the Clinton administration, which just put every ornament on the Christmas tree. Most of them are not actual strategies. Most of them are, as this NSS rightly criticizes—most of them lack prioritization, most of them are just wishlists. But what makes that so richly ironic, with this Trump administration NSS, is that they rightly identify the weaknesses of prior National Security Strategies, and then they replicate those weaknesses.

I think the best one of all time is Eisenhower’s from 1954. It’s the one that, in my read, is the most clear-eyed about what’s happening in the world and the one that has the strongest sense of what actually produces American power. I mean, it says that the purpose of the military establishment of the United States is to hold security in place while the advantages of American culture and the American economy win the Cold War.

JUSTIN VOGT

So means and ends.

KORI SCHAKE

Yeah. It’s such an affirmative and such an integrated sense of what makes the United States strong and safe and prosperous.

JUSTIN VOGT

What do we know about who wrote this particular one, this new Trump NSS? There’s a lot of different factions within this administration. And I think oftentimes what people do when they read these is they try to understand which faction is representing which point of view. And I think in this particular administration, that’s often difficult to do. What’s your sense of what this reflects about the kind of struggle within the administration over these ideas?

KORI SCHAKE

It’s a great question. I think it’s indicative that nobody’s rushing to take credit for this National Security Strategy, when typically everybody tries to pretend they were the lead author on it. So I think it is a subtle acknowledgement by whoever wrote it that it’s not great work. My guess, given that the National Security Council staff doesn’t really have strategic planners anymore, I mean, my guess is probably Mike Anton and the policy planning folks at State had the pen on it.

JUSTIN VOGT

Anton was until recently the head of policy planning at State, right?

KORI SCHAKE

Yeah, because I don’t see a nexus on the NSC that might’ve produced it, but there’s just not a lot of transparency in this administration, so it’s quite hard to say.

JUSTIN VOGT

Let’s get to the substance of it. One of the things I thought was interesting about it is that it defines what a strategy is. It says, and I’m quoting here, it “is a concrete, realistic plan that explains the essential connection between ends and means.” And then it goes on to say a strategy “begins from an accurate assessment of what is desired and what tools are available and can realistically be created to achieve the desired outcomes.”

KORI SCHAKE

That’s actually not right. Where a strategy begins is with an accurate assessment of the environment, right?

JUSTIN VOGT

Interesting.

KORI SCHAKE

And so they skip a crucial step, which is a description of, “What are we looking at in the world? What are we concerned about? What are the problems we need to manage?” And then you proceed to, “What are the means we can bring to bear?” And what a strategy should do is orchestrate those means to minimize your vulnerabilities and maximize your ability to achieve your objectives.

JUSTIN VOGT

That’s interesting. So it’s almost as if they’re skipping right to, “Where are we going?” before saying, “Where are we?” And that’s actually, that’s an interesting point. I wonder, though, if you stick with just sort of ends and means and a connection—the ends in this document seem fairly clear to me. In fact, there is literally a kind of wishlist. I think there’s about ten paragraphs in a row toward the start that just begin with the words, “We want”—kind of reminded me of a Christmas list, almost. So there, maybe we could start by just talking about, how would you describe in broad strokes the ends that this strategy envisions?

KORI SCHAKE

My sense is that it is designed to produce an international order where the United States is unshackled from either anybody else’s concerns or international institutions that have legitimated American power in the eyes of others. I think the biggest problem with this as a strategy is that it assumes that the United States can be a terrible ally and a terrible international citizen, and yet other countries, for their own interests, are going to help us achieve what we want in the world? And I think it just doesn’t work that way.

They don’t seem to understand that what is unique about the moment of American dominance is no other dominant power in history has had as much voluntary assistance in achieving its aims as the United States has had. And that’s a function of how we have exercised our power: not ringing every ounce of leverage out of every negotiation, caring about small and middle states’ concerns and shielding them from predatory great powers, embedding our power and voluntarily limiting it in institutional practices that produce not just legitimacy by other powers, but voluntary assistance.

JUSTIN VOGT

This hearkens back to this great piece that you wrote for Foreign Affairs in our July/August issue, and you really elaborated on this argument at that time. You wrote, “The Trump team has taken an approach predicated on a pair of faulty assumptions: that other countries, international organizations, businesses, and civil society organizations have no alternative to capitulation in the face of U.S. demands and that even if alternatives emerge, the United States could remain predominant without its allies.”

So this is sort of the next part of what you’re saying, is that it takes for granted that there’s all this voluntary assistance, and it also kind of takes for granted that people are not going to have any kind of plan B. These faulty assumptions, the two that you mentioned there, I’m wondering—we’re almost a year in now—what’s the best evidence so far that those assumptions are, in fact, faulty and that they’re not correct? In other words, if you had to point to evidence to say, “You see how this is playing out,” what would you point to?

KORI SCHAKE

Well, I guess the first evidence I would produce is that America’s allies are hedging against American power. I mean, Japan and South Korea are considering a three-way trade arrangement with China in order to hedge against the US weaponization evident with Trump tariffs. Europeans, who have been comfortably sheltering under the American defense umbrella, are now scrambling to figure out how to build a defense industry that isn’t connected to American defense firms because they so fear the American government doing to them what it did to Ukraine: turning off intelligence sharing, turning off weapons deliveries.

And I guess the third piece of evidence I would produce is that some of America’s closest allies in intelligence sharing, Britain and the Netherlands, are restricting the intelligence they will share with the United States because they disapprove of U.S. operations in the Caribbean, in the case of Britain, or in the case of the Netherlands, they keep finding information they shared with us turning up in Russian channels. And so the untrustworthiness of the United States is making us blinder and it’s making us less capable.

China has 230 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States. If you think we’re going to fight a war with China where all of us need to rely on our industrial capacity to replace broken and destroyed things, we’ll be lucky to get to the economy of scale we need with all of our allies. And the Trump administration strategy is basically a declaration of war against our closest friends on the assumption that we are in closer alignment with our actual adversaries, the countries—China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran—who are working to undercut American power. It’s lunacy.

JUSTIN VOGT

You wrote this pretty blistering critique of the document for Foreign Policy, and at one point you wrote, I’m quoting here, that “the only war that the Trump administration wants to fight is a culture war.” What do you mean by that?

KORI SCHAKE

So the Trump National Security Strategy doesn’t list either China or Russia as predatory powers. It doesn’t acknowledge Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. And even when it delicately tiptoes up to identifying Chinese economic policies that are damaging to the United States, the administration that campaigned on the Obama team being unwilling to name China is unwilling to name China. But the people they do go after are America’s closest friends.

Reading this strategy, you would think that the United States was under siege from Europe, as opposed to free societies that have a lesser risk tolerance than the United States, attempting to preserve what they value about their countries. This National Security Strategy vouchsafes criticism of China or Russia, but it considers the Netherlands or France as a major threat to the United States, and the need to undercut those friendly governments in order to elect more Christian nationalists. It’s crazy. It’s so self-defeating.

JUSTIN VOGT

Do you think it casts a place like the Netherlands as a threat or as a kind of cost, which is a little bit different, right? I mean, to me, when I read it, it’s a little bit more familiar sort of critique of free riding, but you seem to think that it’s actually, it’s recasting them as something else.

KORI SCHAKE

Yeah, I actually do. It’s a really interesting distinction you make between cost and risk. As I read this National Security Strategy, it sounds fearful to me. It’s empty chest-thumping without a strategy to produce the kind of military they say we need, to produce an international trading order that opens markets for American businesses and levels the playing field.

The very things they say they want, they just stipulate. They don’t demonstrate how you’re ever going to get there. In a weird way, it connects to the first Trump term for me, because remember the eight-point plan about the Iranian nuclear program that Secretary Pompeo thundered out? Again, it was, “We need these eight things.” And there was no plan to produce those eight things. And I feel like this strategy repeats that mistake. It says, “Here are our strengths. Here’s what we want in the world: glitter, unicorns, magic ending.” And that’s not strategy.

JUSTIN VOGT

I think it’s fair to say that part of your critique of this, and of Trump more broadly that you’ve been making for years now, is that there’s the failure to see all the good reasons why traditional postwar U.S. foreign policy, and even post–Cold War U.S. policy, took the shape that it did, right? That the kind of Trump view ignores all of the benefits that those traditions and the institutions that grew around them produced. I guess I have two questions for you. I’ll ask you the first one, which is, if that’s true, why does it seem like so many Americans agree with Trump about that and kind of disagree with the post–Cold War foreign policy establishment? If it so kind of obviously makes this error, why does it seem so persuasive?

KORI SCHAKE

Because the last four presidents haven’t spent time and effort bringing Americans along, right? I mean, how many times did President Obama, President Trump, or President Biden explain to Americans why we were in Afghanistan? The only time I can think of—President Biden did—was in the aftermath of the attack on Israel, and then he paired Afghanistan with it. So my mom doesn’t spend her time and effort the way we do, nor should she, because if you and I are doing our jobs right, she doesn’t need to.

And the United States has won the geopolitical lottery. We have Canada and Mexico as next-door neighbors and oceans on the other side. We produce our own raw materials. Our market is largely a self-licking ice cream cone. Only 11 percent of American GDP comes from trade. So we will be the last to feel the erosion of a beneficial international order. And the last several presidents have had ambitious plans that they didn’t expend the political capital to bring people along on. And so people haven’t come along on.

But what Trump is doing is lighting that international order on fire in a way it’s going to take a generation to repair. And remember, the men who built this international order weren’t leftist college professors sitting around the faculty lounge. They were the people who had fought World War I and World War II and saw the damage of an unstable order and the advantages that would accrue to underwriting security in crucial regions in ways that facilitated prosperity at a very low cost to the United States.

JUSTIN VOGT

I think I would push back a little bit—and see what you think about this on the idea. I mean, part of what you’re saying, it sounds like, “Well, there was sort of a messaging failure, right? We just didn’t explain to people why we were in Afghanistan.” A lot of Americans say, “No, no, I understand why we were there. I just think it was a terrible idea and we did it really poorly. And so it’s not that it wasn’t explained to me. I understand it.” What’s wrong with that point of view?

KORI SCHAKE

So I don’t think it’s just a messaging problem, but I think it is—if you’re going to put American troops in harm’s way for 23 years, the president has a responsibility to win the political argument about it. And just saying, “The American military is so far removed from American society, I don’t have to expend my political capital this way,” creates cynicism on both sides of the equation.

And so I’m not saying it’s just a messaging problem. I think it’s an ethical failure to commit the United States internationally, whether it’s on trade ... I mean, I don’t think we have a global failure of the trading order. I think what we have is we permitted China into the global trading order without requiring it to follow the rules. That’s what collapses the global trading order. Which is not to say there weren’t pressures as early as the Doha Round, but why didn’t any administration fix that? And why didn’t they explain that this is a China problem; it’s not a global trading problem?

JUSTIN VOGT

Trump critics, critics of Trump’s approach to foreign policy and politics in general, I think, have a good line that they often use. They say Trump’s MAGA idea, to make America great again, the problem with it is, well, when was America great, exactly? You want to go back to something, but when was it?

And I kind of want to ask you a version of that question based on the critique you’ve been making. I think that you and many other people who are foreign policy professionals with a lot of experience are watching what’s happening, and there’s sort of this idea that we want to make American foreign policy, let’s say, good again, by restoring some of the postwar traditions and norms and institutions that have eroded, not just under Trump, but in general in the past few decades.

But I guess that I think it would be fair to ask sort of the same question of you, which is when was the last time that American foreign policy was great—or good, in your view? In other words, when was the period in which all the things that we might point to—alliances and trade and a strong military and a preference for supporting democracies—when were all those things kind of operating and producing really good results for the American people?

KORI SCHAKE

So I think almost the entirety of the post-1945 period, that’s true, right? It’s true in the Carter administration. It’s true in the Reagan administration. It’s true in the Nixon administration. It’s true in the Eisenhower administration. It’s true in the Clinton administration. It’s true in the Obama administration. It’s true in the Bush administrations. The system mostly has worked incredibly advantageously to Americans and we’ve had the luxury of just pretending it’s like the operating system on our computers. We don’t have to do maintenance or regular upgrades. That magically the service provider’s going to do that, but we’re the service provider.

JUSTIN VOGT

I want to talk about some of the ideas from your most recent book and how they relate to the news. Yeah. That book is called The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States. And this is, of course, a topic that’s been in the news almost constantly, really throughout Trump’s second term, right from the get-go. His defense secretary—or secretary of war, to use the administration’s phrase—Pete Hegseth has overseen this purge of senior military officers. Trump and Hegseth have talked about using the U.S. military to do law enforcement basically in American cities. There was this gathering of the uniformed brass for this sort of strange spectacle where Hegseth kind of lectured them about ridding the military of wokeness and DEI and basically told them to get on board with Trump’s political agenda or resign.

But recently, I think this civil-military debate has kind of focused more narrowly, in a very interesting way, actually, on the strikes that the Pentagon has been carrying out in the Caribbean and in the eastern Pacific that are targeting boats that are allegedly transporting drugs bound for the United States. Can you tell me, from your point of view, why are these strikes in particular troubling to so many people who really know about this and how do they fit into this context of this broader debate about civil military relations we’ve been having now for the past nine or ten months?

KORI SCHAKE

Yeah, well, there’s nothing like the state-sanctioned use of violence to focus people’s attention. I think that’s why the strikes in the Caribbean, and the administration failing to explain itself, and Congress only quite recently beginning to demand the right of oversight of the use of force—so I think that’s what’s focused attention. I worry, though, that we are telescoping down to judging the decision-making of the military, and there are three higher levels of accountability that we ought to be demanding.

First, under what authorization is the president doing this? Has Congress, in its role as the authorizer for the use of military force, where do they fit into this? Have they been informed? Have they approved? Is there a formal process, as the Constitution requires? And third, the civilian secretary of defense, what orders did he issue? What was the command climate he created, and the expectations? We’re about to grill the military and let the civilians off the hook. And I think the arrow should be pointing the other direction because, I mean, what is most fundamental to civil-military relations in the United States is the constitutional, legal, policy, and ethical subordination of the United States military to the civilian leadership.

And what is destabilizing the relationship, to the extent that it’s destabilized, is the behavior of the civilians, not the behavior of the military. And it’s not just the Trump administration. Senator Tuberville holding up hundreds of military promotions for things that the military had no control over. The politicization that everybody’s trying to pull the military into their side of the political argument. And that doesn’t actually change public attitudes, but what it will do is demolish public confidence in our military. It corrodes the support for the institution by the American public.

JUSTIN VOGT

It’s such a strange reversal, right? Because in your book, and the history of this, usually the concern is in the other direction, right? That the military, either a rogue leader or some movement within the military will seek to overstep that boundary, like a MacArthur figure or someone like that, whereas now the concern runs in the other direction.

KORI SCHAKE

The firing of MacArthur is the canonical civil-military case for a reason, right? He’s the only example in modern America of a military leader insubordinate to the civilian leadership.

JUSTIN VOGT

Maybe for our listeners and many abroad, maybe you could just quickly recapitulate: why was MacArthur fired?

KORI SCHAKE

Sure. So General MacArthur was the commander of the UN force fighting on the Korean Peninsula to reestablish the sovereignty of South Korea. And he chose to do that in a way that violated the president’s principal objective, which was that this should remain a regional war, not a global challenge to the Cold War order. And so the president wanted no decisions that were going to draw either China or the Soviet Union into the war.

And General MacArthur, not only by his conduct of the war, did draw them in, but he also was overtly politicking to be the Republican nominee for president and sending accounts contrary to the president’s to the Republican minority leadership in Congress. And when ordered to cease doing so, he did not cease doing so, and that’s what got him fired. To quote Harry Truman, “I didn’t fire MacArthur because he was stupid. If I did that, I would have to fire two-thirds of the generals in the army. I fired him because he was insubordinate to the president of the United States,” and Truman had a constitutional responsibility.

He also did it in a very smart way that won the political argument, because what MacArthur was doing was suggesting that the civilian leadership ought to have to adopt his strategy for fighting the war. And ever since George Washington, the rule in American civil-military relations is that the political leadership sets the strategy and the resourcing, and the military figures out to the best of their ability how to try and accomplish the political objectives with the resources they have.

JUSTIN VOGT

You mentioned that everybody is kind of trying to draw the military into their political argument. One of the interesting things that happened in regard to—well, I’m not sure if it’s in regard to the boat strike, but in regard to this broader debate—there was a video of a number of Democratic congresspeople who had served in the armed forces or in the intelligence agencies—this came out last month—sort of speaking directly to service members and reminding them that they had a duty to not obey illegal orders.

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JUSTIN VOGT

And of course Trump was furious about this and accused these congresspeople of treason. What did you make of that video?

KORI SCHAKE

So the first thing I would say is nothing justifies the president inciting political violence against elected politicians. I mean, Senator Slotkin had a bomb threat at her home after the president’s statements. That’s dangerous. Somebody’s going to get hurt and the president should stop doing it. It’s unbecoming the office and it’s going to destroy the peaceful debate that our country relies on.

I do wish that the six Democrats had either recruited some fellow politicians from across the party, that is, some Republicans, into it. Or if they have a specific concern, I wish they had laid that bare, because for a man or woman in uniform to refuse to obey an order, they will be court-martialed, and the burden of proof on that military man or woman will be to prove that the order was illegal.

Another way to do this is Congress to exercise its constitutional Article I responsibilities of oversight and declarations of war or authorizations for the use of military force. I feel like, again, it’s the politicians trying to shift onto the military responsibilities that in the American system are civilian in nature. The military cannot save us from the politicians we elect. Only the politicians we elect can do that.

JUSTIN VOGT

There’s a lot of concern about the independence of various parts of the executive branch, the DOJ, Federal Reserve, for example. Compared to those institutions, how well protected is the independence of the military? If military leaders believe that a line has been crossed, not just within a legal order, but for example, with the purges of military officers, what recourse do they have? If you’re like a three-star general, say, and you’re alarmed by what’s going on, aside from resigning and speaking out, what can you do?

KORI SCHAKE

Well, built into the system is the accountability of Congress, right? Every senior officer that is subject to confirmation by the Senate is required by the Armed Services Committee to commit that if they ever disagree with the president’s policy, they will come to Congress.

So Samuel Huntington, in his book, The Soldier and the State, considered this a failure of professionalism for the military and advocated that we needed to stop giving the military a congressional option, which is so fundamentally antidemocratic, which is one of the several reasons I hate Sam Huntington’s book so much.

So there are avenues. There’s the professional, tell your superiors you think they’re making a mistake. There’s go to Congress. There is, of course, as everybody in Washington knows, the journalistic bellwether. And there is trying to persuade the civilian leadership that they’re wrong on that.

So the military doesn’t lack means, but you used one example, which is the firing. And I think the American military is actually doing a terrific job under enormous pressure. The system is supposed to work such that the president can fire any senior military officer he wants to, and they clean out their offices and become veterans instead of active duty servicemen or women. It really matters that the political leadership does get to vet and call the military leadership until they get people that they trust. You know who the first American president to vet military appointments by political party was, Justin?

JUSTIN VOGT

No.

KORI SCHAKE

Thomas Jefferson.

JUSTIN VOGT

Say more. What [were] the circumstances of that and how do we see echoes of it?

KORI SCHAKE

So all of the military leadership of the time in 1800 were the military sons of George Washington. They were all federalists and Jefferson didn’t want them impeding his policies, and so he cashiered almost all of them. And the person he picked to be the senior general in the army, James Wilkinson—Theodore Roosevelt called him the biggest scoundrel in American history. He was part of the Aaron Burr plot. He turned on Burr to save himself. It was said of James Wilkinson that he never won a battle or lost a court-martial. He was a Spanish agent the entire 12 years he was chief of the army. So Jefferson didn’t do a particularly good job vetting his preferred candidates, but it’s not uncommon.

I mean, President Obama asked Admiral Mullen about a list of appointees, “Are these our generals?” So Trump’s not the first to do it, but choosing senior officers by their presumed politics is just not a good idea. You should actually let the profession produce people who are good at it. But the fit at the top of the pyramid—one of my criticisms of two chairmans ago, Mark Milley, is that by speaking so openly to the press, he collapsed confidence that you can trust military people to be in the room when you’re making difficult policy analyses. And having that trust actually really matters in the American system.

JUSTIN VOGT

We’ve asked this a lot about various institutions in American government and American life during the Trump era. How permanent do you think the damage to these traditions or to the civil-military relation will be? Is this something that we’ll look back on and say, “Well, this was very particular to this particular president and the people around him,” or are these going to be more lasting scars?

KORI SCHAKE

It’s a great question. And I think civil-military relations are actually holding up amazingly well. I can’t think of a moment in time where the civilian political leadership put this much politicization pressure on the military. The last time I can think of—the only time I can think of—it was this severe, was during the constitutional crisis of 1866 and 1867. And what is striking is how apparent the professionalization of our military is.

I mean, you mentioned the debacle of that Quantico meeting, and those 400-and-some military leaders did it exactly right. They had a responsibility to show up because their civilian leadership called them. They had a responsibility not to participate in the political circus and they sat there stonefaced and not participating, exactly as they should have.

So what is really striking is how strong the norms and the professional culture of our military is navigating this moment, but a military emerges organically from the society that creates it and we’re going to reach a breaking point at some point. I mean, if Trump and Hegseth start appointing into those 18 roles they fired people from, officers of a much more political bent, it could change very fast.

JUSTIN VOGT

So that’s the thing that we should be looking for as an indicator. Kori, thank you so much. This has been really, really illuminating as always. We’re really happy to publish you and happy to have you on the podcast.

KORI SCHAKE

I so appreciate you giving me the opportunity, my friend. Thank you for this smart conversation.