Is National Security #Resistance Over?
During Trump 1.0, many national security technocrats unironically conceived of themselves as part of a #NeverTrump resistance. Where are they this time?
Eight years passes in a flash.
It really feels like only yesterday my old social milieu—the technocratic class of foreign policy wonks—had a collective meltdown over Trump beating Hillary Clinton. Most of them were measuring the drapes of their new offices in Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon, assured of their political appointments as a reward for time spent as loyal servants of the state and/or the Democratic Party machinery.
By the time of Trump’s inauguration, I had become somewhat distant from my foreign policy tribe—physically and metaphorically. My stint in the think tank world1 left me disgusted by the way the system works. And yet, Trump’s 2016 win was jarring and disorienting for me, too.
So jarring, in fact, that in the ensuing years of Trump 1.0, my project of ruthlessly critiquing the Trump administration’s foreign policy disasters temporarily brought me closer than ever to the Washington wonks who conceived of themselves as Trump’s determined opposition.
They spoke and wrote of #NeverTrump. They literally had “secret” meetings, which I joined whenever I flew into town. They unironically self-identified as #TheResistance. That picture at the top of this post is real—they saw their opposition to Trump as a modern-day Fallada Project.
These days, however, I don’t detect nearly the same energy among the foreign policy class. They were trained to serve, not resist. And the #Resistance movement likely crested with Alexander Vindman anyway, the NSC staffer who testified against Trump in 2019. Vindman became a hero among liberals, and then became a living satire by appearing on Curb Your Enthusiasm as a poster boy for the deep-state resisters.2
Vindman’s meteoric rise, and the entire Biden presidency to follow, embodied a post-Trumpian self-satisfaction that makes going back, if you will, impossible. The resistance imaginary wasn’t all good—much of it was conservative in the literal sense of preserving American global dominance. And yet, as much as I’d like the technocratic class to go back to resistance mode with the gusto of 2017, doing so would require a degree of self-reflection that clashes with their class interests as white-collar servants to oligarchy, complicit in a foreign policy of death. Resistance vibes came out of a specific moment when even capital and mainstream media had not accommodated the reality of a Trump presidency, or what it said about America. I fear that moment has passed.
The real rupture, the thing that has dampened fighting enthusiasm among dutiful opponents of fascism, is the power structure of the Democratic Party and the national security state—which are separate but converge. Too many of Trump’s policies became Biden’s policies—all of them, really. Biden himself called Trump a fascist, then welcomed him to the White House as soon as a plurality of Americans voted for him. And most gutting of all, the US security state has played a vital role in unrepentantly perpetuating a genocide that an entire generation of Americans has been able to watch on social media in real-time.
As Naomi Klein lamented:
Israel has blown a massive hole in our moral universe. You could rephrase that as Biden and Blinken and Sullivan and the foreign policy bureaucracy—not Israel alone.