Susan Glasser is POLITICO’s chief international affairs columnist and host of its new weekly podcast, The Global Politico.

Forget America First or the new nationalism or any of the other isms that have been offered as explanations for Donald Trump’s emerging foreign policy.

Want to really understand Trump’s philosophy of international relations?


Just listen to Sebastian Gorka, the Breitbart propagandist and Hungarian ultranationalist turned White House national security aide. He’s been saying it loud and clear for a couple months now whenever he’s asked about Trump’s foreign policy and how the new president will shake things up globally: “The alpha males are back.”

“Our foreign policy has been a disaster,” Gorka told Fox’s Sean Hannity before the inauguration. “We’ve neglected and abandoned our allies. We’ve emboldened our enemies. The message I have—it’s a very simple one. It’s a bumper sticker, Sean: The era of the Pajama Boy is over January 20th, and the alpha males are back.”

He’s repeated the phrase several times since, and it strikes me as perhaps unintentionally helpful in trying to sort through Trump’s largely unformed and at times outright contradictory foreign policy views.

It can be hard to parse the president otherwise. Is Trump really an anti-free trader who wants to end globalization—or an international businessman-turned-politician who simply wants a “better deal”? Does he seek more aggressive military measures and a tougher approach in the Middle East—or to give up and go home altogether? Will he get the United States into new confrontations with China, Iran, North Korea and others? Or is he actually a peacemaker in waiting, one who can finally work with the wily Russians and get the grand bargain done between the Israelis and the Palestinians that eluded all his predecessors?

At different times, Trump has suggested all of the above—never mind that they are not necessarily compatible. We here in Washington continue to try to understand Trump on our terms; we look for intellectual frameworks and policy architectures and historical worldviews. But Trump has made clear his disdain for American foreign policy as it has been practiced over the past few administrations of Republicans as well as Democrats; his version of national security has much less to do with ideology, and much more to do with what he would call losing rather than winning. It’s about approach, mind-set—and who’s doing it—much more than about what’s being done.

Which is why Gorka’s comments, highlighted again a few days ago in a revealing Washington Post profile, seem so relevant. Trump’s foreign policy, Gorka says, will be a macho foreign policy, when tough guys will once again rule the world and wimpy Democrats (and maybe democrats?) are left on the sidelines.

This, of course, is not an entirely new notion. Author Robert Kagan posited that Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus in attempting to explain the more militarized view of national security that led President George W. Bush to the war in Iraq. In a pre-Trump era of American politics, it was commonplace to argue that Republicans were the martial party and Democrats the diplomacy-minded Venus party. Those debates grew sharp throughout the past eight years, as Barack Obama came to office vowing to pull America out of the destructive Middle East wars pursued by Bush and emphasized “engagement” and, ultimately, dealmaking with American adversaries like Iran and Cuba.

Then came 2016, when Hillary Clinton ran as a more hawkish Democrat than the man she served as secretary of state—but also as the representative of an alliance-loving global elite with a human rights-minded tendency to lecture the world’s tyrants rather than want to do business with them.

Now that he’s president, Trump has taken the gendered politics of foreign policy to a whole different level. As the Alpha Males slogan suggests, it’s both a worldview for Trump and his team—and a philosophy of who and how to get the job done. It helps explain why he’s staffed his national security team and the power positions in his Cabinet with brawny, uniformed military officers—and also his oft-stated regard for various authoritarian strongmen leaders, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

***

“Tough talk is quite easy. Bullying is quite easy,” says Wendy Sherman. “Getting something done in the world is quite complicated.”

“One of the lessons for the alpha males,” adds Michèle Flournoy, “is to actually start with the facts.”

I asked Sherman and Flournoy, two of Washington’s most alpha of Alpha Ladies, to talk about Trump’s macho foreign policy—and what it’s really like to be a woman in the Situation Room—in an interview for this week’s edition of our new podcast, The Global Politico. Flournoy, the top policy official in Obama’s Pentagon, was in line to become the first female secretary of defense had Clinton won the election; Sherman, who served as the chief negotiator of Obama’s Iran deal as his undersecretary of state for political affairs, was mentioned as a possible secretary in a Clinton administration. They were joined by Madeleine Albright, who became the first woman ever to hold the job of secretary of state when Bill Clinton appointed her to the post in his second term.

Trump has taken particular aim at the Iran nuclear deal Sherman negotiated, arguing it was a bad deal, the “worst” ever, and insisting he would blow it up once in office—a campaign pledge that now seems unlikely as even foes of the deal like Israel and many Republicans in Congress instead urge Trump to focus on tough enforcement of its provisions rather than seeking to undo it altogether.

Sherman argues in the interview that without the Iran deal, “you’d probably be at war.”

Flournoy agrees, in an answer that is particularly revealing as to how she and the others choose to interpret Trump’s Alpha Male theory of the world:

“I can tell you as someone who was responsible for oversight of military planning in the Pentagon, had Wendy failed and the negotiations failed, the only option left on the table would have been to use military force to take out that program, and we would have gone [and done that]. That would have started a third war in the broader Middle East. … So let's be fact-based and realistic about the consequences of the policy choices that were made. … Tough talk is easy, but actually advancing American interests in a way that's smart is a lot harder.”

In our conversation, Flournoy, who is now CEO of the bipartisan think tank Center for a New American Security, discusses for the first time publicly her decision not to go work for the Trump administration, after having been asked to serve as deputy to Defense Secretary James Mattis. She says she declined because it would violate her “sense of values” to work for Trump.

“I knew,” Flournoy says of Mattis, “that he needed a deputy who wouldn’t be struggling every other day about whether they could be part of some of the policies that were likely to take shape.”

“I knew,” Flournoy says of Mattis, “that he needed a deputy who wouldn’t be struggling every other day about whether they could be part of some of the policies that were likely to take shape.”

I was struck throughout the wide-ranging conversation by how difficult it still is to analyze Trump’s foreign policy by any of the standard Washington measures; Flournoy, in particular, kept struggling to offer rational, academic even, arguments about why an Alpha Male foreign policy wouldn’t work, citing studies about the benefits of diversity and the like. In explaining the Alpha Maleness of the new administration, Sherman looked to the politics of anger Trump has stirred up and, interestingly, connected the president’s disdain for the regular order of the interagency process that generally helps shape national security policy for an administration to his desire to play the strongman. That interagency process, developed over time by administrations of both parties, she argues, is “the difference between a democrat and an autocrat.”

Albright, meanwhile, articulated the case against Trump’s machismo in more explicitly political terms. I had asked whether Trump had a point in any of his critiques of current American foreign policy after eight years of Obama, and whether and how much they were doing soul-searching, as Democrats, about the state of the world.

“This is not President Obama's fault,” Albright responded. “I could more likely blame President Bush and the Iraq War that I think was one of the really discontinuous activities that made the American people tired” of foreign policy adventures abroad that seemed to bring only expenditures of blood and treasure without achieving their stated aims.

I hope we are not in the world of the alpha males, because they have made an awful lot of mistakes.”

As for the prospects of a Trump reset for foreign policy, Albright brought it back around to the lack of women at the table, pointing out that of the major Cabinet posts, women now hold only two, secretary of education and secretary of transportation—neither with Situation Room responsibilities. There are, she insisted, real-world consequences of having a national security team with too many Y chromosomes.

“I hope we are not in the world of the alpha males, because they have made an awful lot of mistakes,” Albright said. “And they prod each other onto more alphaness.”

***

One of the signature photographs of Barack Obama’s presidency is the Situation Room picture of the president and his top advisers watching the jaw-dropping Special Forces raid that killed Osama bin Laden, with Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state, hand over mouth in perhaps the photo’s most recognizable gesture.

Contrast that with an image from the early Trump days: It shows Trump on his first weekend in office, calling Putin on the phone, surrounded by five burly advisers, all of them men.

The truth is, there were only two women visible in the Obama picture. In Trump’s Oval Office, in the room where it happens, there were none.

So when Sebastian Gorka says, “the alpha males are back,” pay attention. He’s not wrong.

