Stephen Miller has a free hand to pump out his racist policies; Trump regularly says blatantly offensive things that are way past a dog whistle; and one-time insurgents at the Heritage Foundation and other MAGA institutions are muscling out people who aren't comfortable with openly embracing bigotry. The groypers are running today's Republican Party. At the same time, Trump's Iran war has opened divisions within the administration, and the leaks are coming fast and furiously. Plus: the gullible people who think their bribes will keep them safe from Trump, Rod Dreher's falling out with JD Vance, the ties between the Tates and the White House should be a bigger scandal, Mitch McConnell may be doing the most Mitch McConnell thing of all, and how Cincinnatians fought back against DHS to protect a local chaplain.
Zeteo’s AsawinSuebsaeng joins guest host Will Sommer.
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(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)
DONALD TRUMP HAS BEEN TRYING for months now to shrink the number of Americans who can vote. So far his efforts have been in vain, but this might be the week he succeeds.
The SAVE Act that Trump is pushing is not simply a voter ID bill. It’s part of his administration’s larger drive to make government interactions as frustrating, time-consuming, and clunky as possible—with the end goal of netting financial or political gain for Trump, his family, his friends, and his enablers.
For instance, the SAVE Act would require would-be voters to present a birth certificate or passport to prove their citizenship. People who don’t have such documents would have to figure out how to get and pay for them. That could include, among others, those born at home or in other countries, and anyone who has changed their name—such as the vast majority of married women.
As someone who recently spent weeks trying to locate birth certificates and other documents for parents born nearly a century ago, I can relate. Notably, every step of every process has been easier because I didn’t change my name when I got married.
Still, I needed two birth certificates and so did my brothers and father. That’s because he changed our family name when we were kids. My mother would have needed three, for her birth name, her married name, and her new married name. If the SAVE Act had been in place, those documents would have been required to prove her citizenship and re-register to vote each time she changed her name or the five times she moved.
And trust me, she would have wanted to make sure she could vote. You might call voting my family’s religion. My mother voted in 2024 and listened to political news until just a few weeks before she died this month at nearly 97.
All of which is to say, the SAVE Act is deceptively complicated and would guarantee fewer voters if it passed. The only questions are how many voters and which party would be hurt more. Trump & co. seem certain it would help Republicans, and that’s completely possible.
On the other hand, are lower-income, less-educated voters less likely to have passports? Which party’s women are more likely to change their names when they marry? Will rural voters be close enough to the right offices to get the right documents? Which age group will be more motivated?
Nobody knows for sure, but it seems at least possible that the SAVE Act—which has passed the House and could come up for a Senate vote soon—would keep some prospective Republican voters at home. What’s certain is that the broader project—of continually adding weight to the administrative burden in ways that penalize people who struggle with it and give up—has a bright future in this administration.
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The latest headline to set me off was this one from Nathan Tankus’s “Notes on the Crises” newsletter: “BREAKING: HUD is Planning on Hobbling Federal Financial Assistance for Housing by Burying it in Paperwork.” The idea is to “create enormous and duplicative reporting requirement burdens and subject HUD grants to unprecedented centralized control by the federal government.” The collateral damage, beyond high costs and potentially erroneous AI fraud findings, could include exposure of sensitive personal information.
There are plenty more examples of this sort of thing. Last year’s big tax-and-spending law (the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”) added work as a condition of Medicaid and nutrition aid, with onerous reporting requirements that guaranteed many actual workers would quit trying and lose benefits. The GOP goal was to save hundreds of billions of dollars.
And it’s working, in a way. The New York Times recently wrote up Arizona as a cautionary preview of the law’s crackdown on SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The state feared that errors could trigger new financial penalties stiff enough to shut down its whole program. So it cut staff to save money and increased paperwork for applicants to try to minimize errors.
The upshot is that some 440,000 people—half the state’s caseload—lost their food aid, though many were still eligible for it, and services collapsed. The opening horror story alone, about a grandmother raising three teenagers, recounts several months waiting for a renewal, a hundred phone calls no one answered, the case closed over a mistaken document, no time to fix it because of the state’s delay, and, now, four months into an appeal.
The Medicaid requirements don’t kick in until 2027, after the midterm elections. It’s a strategic choice that’s hopefully fooling few people. Most people on Medicaid already work and we know from research and real life that work requirements push people off coverage in droves. That puts their health, productivity, and the hospitals they use at risk. Most administrations would think that’s a bad thing. But not this one. Its view of paperwork and conditions is the more, the better, and real-life consequences be damned.
The former Soviet republic of Estonia jumped into my brain when I saw that housing headline. I blame a book I helped edit eleven years ago about digital government.
Estonia was the first European country to adopt online voting, William D. Eggers wrote in that 2016 book, Delivering on Digital. Estonian citizens “can register a new company online and, in less time than it takes to finish a cup of coffee, start conducting business.” Every citizen has “a unique online identity” for interacting with their government. They never have to fill out the same information twice, they control who can view their data, and public officials can go to jail if they view it without permission. Oh, and “it takes only five minutes to file Estonian taxes online.”
That’s now down to three minutes, according to the Estonian agency that promotes innovation in government. The agency’s website also boasts that all public services in the country are available online 24/7, providing “a hassle-free environment for businesses and residents alike.”1
It is true that Estonia is small, with a population of just 1.3 million, which makes it somewhat easier to roll out certain high-tech government services. In addition, Estonia had the advantage of standing up a newly independent government in the 1990s as the internet and personal computers took off.
The size and scale of the United States make everything more complicated and expensive, especially replacing cumbersome legacy systems with more efficient and secure technology. But that doesn’t account for Trump and his teams reversing gains that have been made in some areas, while adding paperwork and regulations openly intended to reduce access to government programs. The goal isn’t programs that work well, it’s to save money for their priorities—military interventions, tax breaks for rich people and corporations, and immigration dragnets, deportations, and detentions.
Our self-owns are real and beyond depressing. Estonians have been able to pay taxes online since 2000. The United States was just getting there last year with IRS Direct File, a Biden-era pilot program that consumers adored. The free program saved users substantial time and money, but Trump killed it after lobbying by tax-prep and software companies.
On top of that, by mid-2025, Elon Musk’s disastrous, Trump-approved DOGE crew had forced out 31 percent of the auditors needed to ensure the richest people and corporations in America, with the most sophisticated ways to evade taxes, weren’t nudged or hounded to pay up. A year later, Musk became the world’s first trillionaire—and the IRS, unable to cope with its workload after getting rid of 28,000 employees last year, received accelerated hiring authority to quickly bring on 8,000 people.
But the cutbacks had already helped protect tax evaders and tax preparers. To Trump and his tech and MAGA cronies, “reinventing government” means maximizing profit for themselves and people like them, while making it maximally punitive and exhausting for everyone else.
Don Moynihan and Pamela Herd, writing in the “Can We Still Govern?” newsletter, had a darkly funny take last fall on administrative burdens in the private and public sectors. They boosted the idea of “Admin Night” parties for people to gather and do their paperwork, floated the problem as ripe for collective action—a “politics of burden reduction”—and suggested giving credit “to politicians who commit to making things work better.”
Trump and his allies are not those people, and this won’t take off while he’s president. But close your eyes and think of Estonia. If they can do it, surely we can, too.
(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)
Hey fam: Get your questions for the next mailbag show in today, please? Leave them in the comments here. As always, my ask is that you take a minute to read the questions others have left. Upvote the ones you like best. And if you have follow-on questions, thread them as a reply to the existing questions.
1. Abdication
Last week I wrote that, as a political matter, Trump’s best option on Iran is to simply walk away:
What Trump should do is walk away. Swallow the loss, regroup, “liberate” Cuba, get into an online slap fight with the Spanish national team. Whatever. Take the L and all of the geostrategic consequences that come with it.
Some readers responded by saying that Trump can’t, because Iran won’t let him. Nick Catoggio wrote an interesting column about how walking away from Iran would be, for Trump, like declaring bankruptcy. Meaning: In theory, an attractive option.
But Catoggio concluded that it’s not possible:
[T]he president would happily choose the bankruptcy option, I’m sure, if only the Iranians would offer it to him. By signing last month’s humiliating peace agreement, he showed that he’s willing to accept the public embarrassment of admitting that a project he championed has failed, as bankruptcy requires. But bankruptcy is supposed to release him from the financial obligations created by that project, which in this case would mean oil commerce returning to prewar levels in the strait before November’s midterms. And the Iranians simply refuse to do that.
I’m not certain this is true? Today I want to interrogate whether or not Trump could abdicate America’s position in Iran. Could he really just . . . walk away?
In this newsletter I always try to help you see around corners. And now here’s a tip for how you can see around this paywall: We’re offering a two-week free trial of Bulwark+. If you’ve ever considered membership, give it a try now. And if you do sign up, pop me a note in the comments—I’d love to hear from you.
Andrew Egger and Bill Kristol went live to cover Trump’s claim that the late Lindsey Graham wanted him to make a deal with Iran, the Republican holdouts who could derail Todd Blanche’s confirmation to be AG, and why Trump is now pushing RFK Jr. to find a connection between autism and vaccines.
One of the smartest things Donald Trump’s political team has done this year has been to yank the leash of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., because all his anti-vaccine growling and snapping was understandably making Americans jumpy. But as the Wall Street Journal reports today, that strategic shift has left one important person grumpy: Trump himself. He has repeatedly asked Kennedy this year why he hasn’t prioritized finding a connection between vaccines and autism, and has told aides his secretary “will be a failure if he doesn’t make progress on the issue.” Happy Tuesday.
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Be Alarmed. Very Alarmed.
by William Kristol
Can you believe it? How many times have we said that—sometimes plaintively, sometimes mockingly, sometimes indignantly, sometimes angrily, sometimes mournfully—over the last decade?
It’s a reasonable sentiment. Incredulity, surprise, shock, horror—these are normal and healthy reactions to Trumpism. In particular, they’re normal American reactions to Trumpism. It wasn’t supposed to happen here or now. Yes, we’ve had problems and challenges and difficulties here, but we’d weathered them, or at least were dealing with them. If you were a conservative, you were confident that America and Americans were still exceptional. If you were a liberal, you were confident that the arc of history bent towards justice. Either way, excessive confidence tended to produce a kind of complacency. It couldn’t really happen here.
Well, it’s happening. The assault on our political liberties and our civic decency, on our polity and on our society, is happening. The pace and degree at which it’s moved is hard to believe. But our surprise is a product of a complacency that we haven’t yet quite shed.
If you’re reading this newsletter, chances are you’re not the complacent type. Neither are we. Join our pro-democracy community.
The 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln understood that this might happen, way back in 1838, when he delivered his great address on “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions” before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. All seemed well in a free and prosperous and growing America, and Lincoln begins where his audience is, by trying to capture or echo that sentiment.
In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American People, find our account running, under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the governmentof a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings.
It’s great to be an inheritor of blessings. But, Lincoln suggests, blessings can blind us to dangers. And so we need to focus not on our inheritance but on our task.
We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them—they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors. Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; ’tis ours only, to transmit these, the former, unprofaned by the foot of an invader; the latter, undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation, to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.
And, Lincoln suggests in the rest of his speech, his contemporaries weren’t yet sufficiently focused on our task. And he reminded them that they certainly couldn’t take the successful completion of that task for granted. “I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us.” In the relatively calm and peaceful circumstances of 1838, Lincoln saw failure ahead. And failure came.
We’re not in the situation of the young Lincoln. We’re closer to the one he faced two decades later. Our failure is, obviously, far less dramatic than the failure the nation faced in the late 1850s. But our failure is one for which we have less of an excuse. We in the twenty-first century didn’t have to figure out how to deal with the nightmare of slavery. We just had to improve on a reasonably stable and successful order at home and in the world, one bequeathed to us by our ancestors.
We haven’t done that. Quite the contrary. Ten years of Trumpism mark not only a failure to preserve that order, but the infliction of real harm done to it. As we look around at the state of our institutions laboriously built up—a comparatively fair system of justice at home, a relatively honest federal government, an attempt to live up to our heritage as a nation of immigrants, and an international order that was comparatively stable and friendly to the forces of freedom—it’s hard to believe how much damage has been done in the past decade. With a dramatic acceleration, of course, in the past eighteen months.
It is hard for many of us—and I include myself in this number—to believe that this is the situation we face. But it’s time to believe it.Only then might we rise to the occasion.
Elbridge Colby and the Art of Defending the Indefensible… Trump’s impulsive foreign policy of grudges, threats, and contempt for allies is a self-defeating mess. His suave sophist struggles to spin it as strategically sound, writes JOSEPH STIEB.
Taking a Wrecking Ball to the Military… Not only has our lousy commander-in-chief allowed the country’s missile inventory to be dramatically depleted, but Hegseth’s politicized hiring and firing of officers has come home to roost and is doing real damage to the military as an institution. JOHN HEILEMANN joins BILL KRISTOL on the flagship podcast.
ONE WEIRD TRICK TO FEDERALIZE ELECTIONS: Donald Trump’s been dealt some stinging losses at the Supreme Court lately, but hope springs eternal. Yesterday, the president asked SCOTUS to lift a lower court’s stay on a sweeping elections executive order he issued in March, which would require states to compile lists of eligible voters based on federal data, forbid the Postal Service from mailing ballots to people not on those lists, and withhold federal funding from states that don’t play ball. WaPo has more:
Nearly two dozen states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration soon after the order was issued, arguing that it was unlawful and its true goal was voter suppression. They said the lists were likely to miss many eligible voters.
“The President’s latest attempt to interfere with the States’ administration of their elections is as unprecedented as it is unconstitutional,” the states wrote in their lawsuit. “Under our Constitution, the President has no authority to restrict voter eligibility or mail voting to lists of voters pre-authorized by the federal government.” . . .
The Supreme Court gave the states until Monday to respond to the administration’s appeal. The justices could rule after the administration responds to the states’ filing.
Trump, who continues to view his Save America Act as his highest domestic priority this year, has long viewed this executive order as his fallback option. “There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” the president wrote on Truth Social the week the bill passed the House in February. “The people of our Country are insisting on Citizenship, and no Mail-In Ballots. . . . If we can’t get it through Congress, there are legal reasons why this SCAM is not permitted. I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order.”
WHO ARE YOU CALLING AN OGRE?: Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary is shaping up to be one of the ugliest of the year, as the contest between Rep. Haley Stevens and epidemiologist Abdul El-Sayed becomes a proxy war between the old-school Democratic party and its left-wing insurgents, including the Democratic Socialists of America. Yesterday, the fight intensified after Politico obtained audio of El-Sayed using colorful rhetoric while talking about using primaries to push the party to the left: “You put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message, and all of a sudden starts to sound a lot different.”
The remark scandalized a number of prominent Democrats (and Stevens supporters), with Rep. Hillary Scholten tutting that “violent, vulgar threats have no place in a democratic electoral contest,” especially at a moment “with political violence on the rise.” Others took a different tack: Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden tweeted that “calling your female opponent an ogre you want to put on a pike is not beating the rap that this race has some serious sexism.”
This is a bit silly: El-Sayed was transparently talking figuratively about primary wins, not threatening violence, and in context it seemed clear that the “ogre” he meant wasn’t Stevens, but Sen. John Fetterman (D?-Pa.). We’re personally a little more concerned about the actual content of the remark and the strategy it lays out for channeling anti-establishment sentiment into shoving the party hard to the left. Seems bad!
CRACKER BARREL BLUES: Faithful Morning Shots readers will recall our coverage last summer of the unfortunate rebrand of the old-timey casual-dining chain Cracker Barrel—a doomed attempt to lure some non-retirees back to the restaurant by simplifying the logo and slapping on a coat of Millennial Gray paint that instead kicked off a giant MAGA backlash over the changes’ supposed “wokeness.” (“We must break the Barrel,” proclaimed activist Chris Rufo, with a typical lack of irony.)
Cracker Barrel immediately backed off the change. And yesterday, the critics got another scalp: The company announced that CEO Julie Masino, who presided over the abortive facelift, will step down next month. The top job now goes to former Bloomin’ Brands executive David Deno, who will inherit the thankless job of trying to find new customers to backfill its dying ones without re-infuriating the rest of their customers by changing anything. It just goes to show: Not all rebrands are as smooth, painless, and universally appreciated as The Bulwark’s has been.1
(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty Images, Shutterstock)
IT’S ONE OF THE WORST JOBS IN WASHINGTON: Elbridge Colby, the under secretary of defense for policy, is tasked with explaining Donald Trump’s erratic foreign policy to the public. But you could just as easily say he volunteered to launder Trump’s bellicose, bizarre acts by finding an intellectual coherence that isn’t there.
The 46-year-old grandson of former CIA Director William Colby and graduate of Harvard and Yale is a born-and-bred courtier to the powerful. He boosted lies about the 2020 election and spent the subsequent four years angling for a position in the next Republican administration. He seems to have convinced himself that Trump would be a vehicle for executing his grand vision of focusing American foreign policy on China while distancing the United States from, in his view, parasitic European allies and a hopelessly troubled Middle East.
Within right-wing foreign policy circles, Colby, a so-called “flexible realist,” is not beloved. Before taking up his role in the Defense Department, Colby drew the ire of many Republican Iran hawks by downplaying the severity of the threat posed by Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon. He asked, rightly, how they proposed to “launch major strikes on Iran” and avoid a protracted war, “especially if Iran retaliates against U.S. forces and other allies and partners?” (He issued that challenge about two and a half years before Operation Midnight Hammer, in which the administration in which he serves launched a major bombing campaign against Iran’s nuclear weapons program, causing severe damage without provoking a major response.) In a now-comical set of tweets designed to grab Trump’s attention in December 2024, he declared that “the new GOP led by @realDonaldTrump is focused on: ending wars and avoiding new ones.”
Despite these projections, Trump has initiated a major campaign against the Houthis in the spring of 2025, the snatch-and-grab of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in January 2026, and the Iran war that is now in its fifth month. And now he is now gazing hungrily at Cuba—all while paying little attention to China. Trump has landed Colby in the uncomfortable position of having to publicly defend a war that contradicts virtually everything he has written or said in his career.
Even so, we shouldn’t see Colby as an outlier in MAGA foreign policy. He fits comfortably within many of the America First precepts and performs a valuable function for the administration: crafting intellectual scaffolding for Trump’s instinct-driven approach to the world. Colby represents the America First foreign policy impulse gone legit. But however you gussy it up, that impulse remains unilateralist, nationalistic, militaristic, and utterly shortsighted.
Trump keeps finding new ways to lose friends and alienate allies. Don’t miss any of our coverage of the chaos and craziness: Join Bulwark+ today with two weeks on us.
Colby’s views on U.S. alliances illustrate the dangerous shallowness of his intellectualized Trumpism. In a recent interview with Ross Douthat, his Harvard pal and later Washington, D.C. roommate,Colby squirmed his way through a defense of Trump’s unprecedented hostility to American allies. Along with the requisite sycophancies (“the president is a master negotiator—he comes from New York”), Colby claimed that our allies had come to “take the United States for granted.” It was time to “keep them sufficiently on their toes so that they do their part” by, for instance, reducing U.S. commitments to the defense of Ukraine. Indeed, behind the scenes, Colby drove the decision to withhold arms shipments to Ukraine in 2025.
Douthat pressed Colby on the gap between a theoretical burden-sharing strategy—essentially blustering to make European allies pony up—and Trump’s actual behavior, pointing to Trump’s jokes about making Canada the 51st state and his repeated threats to seize Greenland from Denmark. Colby dodged, saying that Trump intended to reassert the Monroe Doctrine by prodding allies to spend more on defense. Such a strained claim reveals Colby’s assertion that “President Trump . . . is the savior of NATO” to be utterly risible.
COLBY’S MAIN MOVE IS TO dress up hostility to allies in the guise of common sense. “Is it cruel to ask the Germans or the Japanese or the French to spend as much as the Americans spend?” he asked. “I don’t think that’s cruel, I think that’s fair.” (Denmark, for its part, spent a slightly higher percentage of its GDP on defense than the United States did last year.) He claims merely to be trying to “price the partnership and relationship with the United States” in a more transactional way on the assumption that allies have been free-riding on U.S. power for decades.
But the fact is, Colby’s hostility to European allies goes beyond free-riding; the America Firster depicts a unified Europe as a threat to the United States, possibly a greater threat than Russia. As he wrote in his 2021 book on great power conflict, “the most plausible alternative to Russia as an aspiring hegemon in Europe is likely the European Union,” so “the United States is therefore better off if Europe is not a highly unified superstate.” The 2025 National Security Strategy, which Colby had a role in producing, is overtly hostile to the European Union, describing the EU as one of many “transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty” and leading Europe into “civilizational erasure.”
Colby dubiously points to the recent spike in European defense spending as a result of tough love from Trump. Obviously, the rearmament drive of these countries is driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. NATO members’ military spending jumped between 2022 and 2024 because these nations realized the gravity of the Russian threat. (If the Trump administration were serious about NATO spending commitments, it would hold the harangues and committing to actively resisting Russian aggression as NATO members take on greater responsibility for defense.)
Military spending aside, Colby’s thinking on alliances is myopic and counterproductive. The worst of all worlds, he combines a bean-counter’s stinginess (likening U.S. alliances to “an accounting firm” in his interview with Douthat), populist resentment about getting “ripped off,” and a nationalistic hostility to cooperation.
Colby and Trump are heedlessly shredding our alliances, but the United States invests in allies precisely because it makes strategic sense to do so. Faith in liberal democracy has turned many U.S. alliances into genuine friendships. But the main reason the United States backs treaty allies like the thirty-one other members of NATO as well as Japan, South Korea, Australia, and others is because it has essential interests in these parts of the world that are best served by alliance cooperation. This investment began with the deepening integration of the U.S. economy with Europe and East Asia in the aftermath of World War II (and the imperative of resisting Soviet expansionism) and has remained tied to these places even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, if not more so in the age of globalization.
For more than eight decades now, the United States has guaranteed the freedom of trade at sea, deterred aggressive powers like China and Russia, and encouraged the security and economic integration of its allies. We have done these things primarily because it is in our interest to do so. The United States simply cannot protect its essential interests without allies and partners who trust its intentions and are willing to, say, host tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers on their soil along with nuclear weapons and air and naval bases. As a so-called flexible realist, Colby claims to be concerned with power, yet he cannot see that U.S. investment in alliances has magnified its economic and military power well beyond what it can achieve through a miserly “America First” approach.
Trump, Colby, and Vice President JD Vance are all obsessed with the idea that America’s allies are “ripping us off.” If anything, the opposite is often true. While the United States has taken the lead in crises like the Gulf War and Bosnia, it has also pulled NATO allies into ill-considered wars. This includes over a thousand soldiers from allied countries who died in Afghanistan. These dead included forty-three soldiers from Denmark, a country that Trump has repeatedly threatened and denigrated since retaking office.
“We’ve never needed them,” said Trump about NATO at the World Economic Forum. Colby may be able to defend U.S. retrenchment from some areas of the world, but he simply cannot defend poisoning the well so recklessly with allies who have sacrificed for us.
HOW DO WE MAKE SENSE of Colby’s efforts to saw off any United States relationship with Europe? It derives from the flawed way he sees America and its place in the world.
Colby wants the United States to remain a superpower, but he fundamentally misunderstands the foundations of our power. Addressing the Conference of Defense Ministers in Peru in early July, he asserted that the United States is unlike “most historical empires” in that it does not need “colonies and dependencies to be a great power,” waving away centuries of U.S. interference in Latin America and the half-century in which the United States governed the Philippines as a colony. The United States is “an empire of liberty unto ourselves,” he boasted—“an enormous country, by far the world’s most powerful state.”
This combination of arrogance and faulty history suggests Colby is an isolationist, but this isn’t right. Rather, he’s a fervent believer in great power competition (especially with China, against whom he wants to build an “anti-hegemonic coalition” of Asian nations). In the brutal struggle between nations, Colby insists the United States pursue only its purest national interests; anything less would be suicidal. What he misses, though, is that competing with strategic rivals is best done through robust alliances, not alone. There are two primary reasons for this: China, for one, does not really have allies, besides the erratic despotism of North Korea. While it has close relationships with nations like Pakistan, and has been aligning more with Russia of late, it lacks anything like America’s robust alliance networks. America’s partnerships, most of which are based in both interest and real affinity, are a massive advantage for the United States that the current administration is squandering.
Second, Colby fails to grasp that alliances do more than simply add to America’s power: they legitimize it. A little international relations theory is helpful here. Academics debate whether countries respond primarily to power or to threat. Power is a raw metric compiled by measurements of GDP, population size, military capabilities, and so on. Power might say how many tanks and missiles a state is able to field, of what quality, and how much money it can put behind producing more. Threat, however, is a more interpretive concept, combining these objective measurements with subjective assessments of intent and character to tell other nations how a mighty state is likely to use its power. A perennial challenge for the world’s strongest nations has been how to augment their power without appearing so threatening to other nations that they rally together to stop them. Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler, Hirohito, and the Soviet Union were all in various ways undone by this dilemma.
As the United States emerged from World War II as a genuine superpower, it resolved—or at least mitigated—this problem by binding itself to allies through institutions like NATO, the United Nations, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and various human rights conventions. Unlike the coercive empire of the Soviets, American statesmen pulled off the astounding accomplishment of attracting allies and trade partners in a consensual manner. It bolstered this success, for a time, after the Cold War when many of the nations of Eastern Europe flocked to join NATO and/or the EU as well as other global economic bodies. In fact, the strategy was so successful that many of NATO’s post–Cold War members had to overcome American reluctance before they could join the alliance.
These institutions, as well as meaningful American rhetoric about liberty and democracy, gave less powerful nations reassurance about U.S. intentions, as well as a say in how the United States used its immense power. Despite being the undisputed global superpower after the Cold War, for a time the United States defied the historical trend, gaining friends and allies rather than sparking fear and resistance.
This legitimacy generated relative good faith internationally about American use of force. So, when the United States flexed its might in the Persian Gulf in 1990 and 1991, in Bosnia during the mid-1990s, and in Afghanistan after September 11th, it did so with a strong claim to the legitimacy of its actions. Of course, the United States did not do this consistently, especially in the ill-fated Iraq War.
As we’ve seen in Iran and Venezuela, Trump consciously rejects the concepts of consultation and reassurance. He made no effort to consult U.S. allies and instead Leeroy-Jenkinsed his way into a failure in Iran. Thanks to the caprice of Trump and the eagerness of hangers-on like Colby to devalue U.S. alliances, the world now has good reason to see U.S. power as threatening. The end result is an overall delegitimizing of the United States as a global actor.
Colby is blasé about this meaningful decline in American legitimacy and power. As he told Douthat, “I think it’s an idle claim to say that countries are going to go elsewhere. Where are they going to go?” Colby’s question, illustrative of his reductive understanding of power, misses the real benefits of alliances. Yes, it’s unlikely NATO members, Japan, Australia, and other U.S. partners will flock to Russia or China, but there is a high risk that they will simply de-invest in the alliance with the United States (becoming less likely to help America out on anything) and instead form other, more stable blocs and networks. In a moment of remarkable obliviousness about the Iran War, Colby says to Douthat: “I’ve seen international leaders complain about the economic consequences. Well, A, you can help out, or B, take it up with Tehran.” The question he doesn’t ask is: Why should they assist an administration that berates them and burns every bridge on a problem it created?
It’s tempting to look at Colby with his pedigree and education and treat him as someone who “knows better.” But this is a comforting illusion. Colby has glommed onto Trump because he is pathologically resentful of U.S. allies, indifferent to the fate of democracy, and eager to dismantle the pillars of U.S. global influence that were painstakingly erected by bipartisan leaders over eight decades. He and Trump deserve each other.
Joseph Stieb is an assistant professor of U.S. military and diplomatic history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Regime Change Consensus: Iraq in American Politics, 1990-2003 and a forthcoming book titled Root Causes: Terrorism and the American Right from the ’60s to Trump.
Mitch McConnell says he's "still working hard" to get back to the Senate, but the only proof of life we've gotten is two photos and a statement from his physician. JVL and Andrew Egger break down why the timeline doesn't add up, why a five-minute call with a reporter could end all the speculation, and why the new photo is sending conspiracy theorists into overdrive.
(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP, Shutterstock)
RIGHT-WING ACTIVIST LAURA LOOMER has been on a surprise whirlwind tour of Ukraine to drum up positive press about the country, meeting soldiers, visiting bomb sites, and even sitting for a friendly interview with Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky.
All of this has her erstwhile allies in the traditionally anti-Ukraine MAGA movement wondering: What is Loomer up to and, more importantly, who’s paying her off?
“You’ve got to ask yourself what in the name of sweet holy hell is going on here?” asked right-wing commenter David Freiheit, who goes by the name “Viva Frei.”
Alex Jones, who once frequently hosted Loomer on InfoWars, quipped that Loomer should stay out of global politics and go back to eating dog food. Loomer retorted that Jones should pay the Sandy Hook families the money he owes them.
But if Loomer’s embrace of the Ukrainian war effort hasn’t impressed the MAGAverse, it has earned positive mentions from one key figure: Donald Trump. The president reposted a video of Loomer interviewing Zelensky with the caption: “Very Good!!!”
Loomer herself has acknowledged that she has made a complete 180 when it comes to Zelensky and Ukraine.
“I’ll admit, I’ve said some pretty terrible things about Ukraine, and terrible things about you as well!” she told Zelensky during their interview.
All of which has further confused former allies and longtime Loomerologists. As someone who’s devoted a good portion of his professional life to mulling over Loomer’s unique psychology, I too have been curious. What should we make of it? I have a few theories.
I know, I know, paywalls are frustrating. But there’s a pain-free way to get around this one: Sign up for a FREE trial of Bulwark+. You can read the rest of my reporting on Laura Loomer’s puzzling pivot, and you can spend the next two weeks enjoying our other locked content and participating in the comments sections. Give it a try!
Not only has our lousy commander-in-chief allowed the country's missile inventory to be dramatically depleted, Hegseth's politicized hiring and firing of officers has come home to roost and is doing real damage to the military as an institution. Meanwhile, Zelensky says he'll show Trump proof that Russia is helping Iran in the war, and Laura Loomer has done an about-face and now says she's on Ukraine’s side. Plus, the wet, hot DSA summer hits its peak in the Michigan Senate race, Bibi is going to try to save his hide, and Republicans in swing districts have been given the all-clear to distance themselves from Trump.
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