The Aspen Strategy Group: More Banality Than Evil

Stephen Wertheim had a good piece in the New York Times recently whose headline read “Trump is a Situational Man in a Structural Bind.” That’s a smart way to phrase it, but the irony is that this also precisely describes the elites of the national security state whom Trumpists see as their enemy.

I was thinking about this when I saw that the Pentagon withdrew its participation in the Aspen Strategy Group, a think tank program for liberal internationalists, compromised mostly of former senior government officials. Justifying the move, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson issued a statement that read:

The Department of Defense has no interest in legitimizing an organization that has invited former officials who have been the architects of chaos abroad and failure at home…senior representatives of the Department of Defense will no longer be participating in an event that promotes the evil of globalism, disdain for our great country, and hatred for the president of the United States.

They had me until “evils of globalism.” If the Pentagon could’ve kept out that last sentence, the statement would’ve actually been a reasonable analysis rather than an unhinged screed.