Susan B. Glasser is Politico’s chief international affairs columnist. Her new podcast, The Global Politico, comes out Mondays. Subscribe here. Follow her on Twitter @sbg1.

Late on the evening of February 13, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign after just 24 days on the job. It was the shortest, rockiest tenure of any national security adviser since the post was created in the aftermath of World War II.

Flynn, embroiled in a scandal over his contacts with the Russian ambassador to the United States but whose real sin in the Trump White House seems to have been lying about it to the vice president, went out swinging. In his short and decidedly unapologetic resignation letter, one phrase stood out. It was an honor, he said, to have served “President Trump, who in just three weeks, has reoriented American foreign policy in fundamental ways.”


About that, at least, there was little doubt.

***

Ben Rhodes, President Barack Obama’s aspiring novelist speechwriter turned foreign policy wingman, famously claimed to hate what he called The Blob in a laudatory and much discussed New York Times Magazine profile last year.

By The Blob, Rhodes meant the bipartisan class of foreign policy elites—Washington swamp dwellers like Hillary Clinton, Bob Gates and their assorted Ivy League hangers-on, who backed the 2003 war in Iraq but “now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East,” as the Times put it, and bashed Obama, at least behind closed doors, for not intervening militarily to stop the bloodshed in Syria or contain Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. In Rhodes’ view, and Obama’s, The Blob’s hoary assumptions and hawkish posturing had gotten the United States into too many messes abroad. Overestimating American omnipotence in an increasingly multipolar world, they all too often demanded action when restraint was the wiser course.

Then came Donald Trump.

In just a few weeks as president, Trump managed—or threatened—to blow up many of The Blob’s most cherished beliefs about American power. In doing so, he finally united Democrats and many Republicans, hawks and doves, neocons and Obamians, in a frenzy of worry. Whether left or right, fierce advocates of “soft power” or proponents of the “bomb, bomb, bomb” school of international relations, most of the U.S. foreign policy establishment had spent the hours since noon on January 20 in alternating states of fear, rage, dismay, bewilderment and mental exhaustion. The old distinctions no longer seemed to matter as much; for the moment, at least, they were all The Blob now.

I spoke with many of these swamp creatures as an unsettling Trump settled into the White House, and they were all asking the same questions: Would he destroy the liberal international order? Hand our secrets to the Russians? Ruin NATO? Blunder into another war in the Middle East after he was done firing all the State Department bosses and sending uncooperative national security bureaucrats into exile? Did he have any idea what he was doing?

“Everything I’ve worked for for two decades is being destroyed,” a senior Republican told me—and he was considered one of the Republicans more open to the Trump regime.

“I can’t sleep at night,” said a senior Democrat—and he was still counseling would-be Trump appointees to take the job.



Everything I’ve worked for for two decades is being destroyed,” a senior Republican told me—and he was considered one of the Republicans more open to the Trump regime.



Like the rest of Washington, the besieged foreign policy establishment experienced the first weeks of the Trump reign as an endless cycle of anxious speculation and frenetic emailing. They signed up for encrypted apps—Confide for Republicans, Signal for Democrats, both for journalists—to whisper about the latest outrageous stories from those who remained inside the government. They wrote finger-wagging op-eds and earnest white papers to warn of the threats to our national security from ignoring their expertise.

They debated endlessly whether anyone would, or should, go to work for the new administration under such circumstances: Was there a save-the-world exemption for those who decided to fight the fight from the inside? Or was that merely cover for the fact that there was always an ambitious someone in D.C. willing to take a job, no matter how awful the boss or terrifying the agenda? And of course they speculated, the true favorite sport of Washington: Who was really in or out at the Trump White House? Was Flynn actually running the show? Or was it Steve Bannon, the president’s alt-right Svengali?

In many ways, the outraged foreign policy types in these early Trump days were just like any other subculture in this one-horse town: gossipy and insecure, careerist and insular, prone to creating and then quickly discarding conventional wisdoms and forever struggling to find Big New Ideas in a world that craved them. But while other parts of the city worried about the future of Obamacare or what goodies might be inserted into the tax reform bill, the beleaguered remains of what Harry Truman derided as the “striped pants” set had somewhat more existential fears.

The small world of those whose business it is to care about the world worried about jobs, sure, but when they clucked about the Trump team’s disastrous disregard for the interagency process, they weren’t talking merely about bureaucratic disorder or the failure to observe the polite customs of some antiquated tribe. They knew where the nukes were buried and how serious the Russian hacks actually were, and how hard it was going to be to fight a war in Iraq if we were busy banning all Iraqis from entering our country. And now they were genuinely terrified, for the first time in my lifetime at least, about something as fundamental as America’s place in the world.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” they said over and over. They argued about whether the inward-looking America of the 1920s or the 1930s—or Napoleonic France, for that matter—was the better historical analogy for the dark times ahead. Invocations of the “rules-based international order” had never before caused such teary-eyed nostalgia, even if, as my friend Stephen Sestanovich, Bill Clinton’s ambassador-at-large for the former Soviet Union and a veteran White House hand, noted, we weren’t sure which “rules” we were referring to. A senior senator complained about the “hysteria” among the foreign policy crowd; was it really warranted?

Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump at the latter’s inauguration. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

For its part, the Trump White House claimed to be taking the heat in stride, or even as proof that Trump was living up to his campaign promises. “This is a president who ran against the foreign policy establishment pretty explicitly,” NSC spokesman Michael Anton told me, “so I don’t think that it should surprise anyone that the foreign policy establishment isn’t supportive. It’s a sign he’s following through on what he said he would do.”

Besides, the Trump panic didn’t mean The Blob had been right all along. Just as when David Halberstam had blasted the Best and the Brightest for blundering into Vietnam, there was much to critique about this latest generation of Ivy League technocrats, much to second-guess about the inadequacy of their response to an unraveling world rocked by technological disruption, nationalist backlash and rising authoritarianism. The Republican hawks who brought us the Global War on Terror after 9/11 had stumbled badly, but then again so had the brainy constitutional law professor with his half-fulfilled vow to withdraw America from the Middle East morass.

Still, those critiques seemed a bit beside the point, at least in month one of the Trump era. At least until we all figured out the answer to the question on many a mind: Were we actually going to survive this?

***

I was sitting at lunch on the first workday of President Trump, talking with a former top Obama administration official about Russia and Syria and where it all went wrong. But it was already nearly impossible to spend more than a few minutes on anything other than Trump.

His “American carnage” inauguration speech was still being dissected and the first of thousands of ominous Steve-Bannon-is-really-running-the-country articles was being written. There was already a new conventional wisdom, that the foreign policy battle lines would be drawn between Flynn’s National Security Council in the White House and the saner heads at the Pentagon, where retired Marine General James Mattis had been installed as defense secretary. Never mind that we were all supposedly relying on a guy nicknamed “Mad Dog” to provide the sane leadership, or that it soon seemed that Mattis was not entirely in sync with the Trump White House. As lunch ended, I teased my companion about “the resistance.” But the response was dead serious. Oh yes, he said, we have eyes and ears everywhere.



Of course, the Trump panic didn’t mean The Blob had been right all along. Just as when David Halberstam had blasted the Best and the Brightest for blundering into Vietnam, there was much to critique about this latest generation of Ivy League technocrats.



It wouldn’t take long for the eyes and ears to start reporting back. Inside the White House, Flynn would soon have his first “all hands” NSC staff meeting. The professionals were in an uproar. The president was having a first wave of phone calls with foreign leaders whose quickly leaked contents included yelling at and hanging up on America’s close ally, the prime minister of Australia, and reportedly threatening to invade Mexico. The NSC meeting was not reassuring. K.T. McFarland, the Fox TV news pundit now installed as deputy national security adviser, exhorted the wonky pros and earnest military officers who had spent a lifetime working to land a spot in the Situation Room about Trump’s plan to “Make America Great Again.” Flynn, meanwhile, wondered out loud whether expanding NATO to include countries in the former Soviet Union had been a mistake, a Kremlin talking point that was hardly calming to those who wondered if Trump really planned to cozy up to Moscow.

Over at State, the top career officials overseeing the administration of the department had decided right before the Inauguration that they should remain in their posts despite the radio silence from the new Trump team, but now they, too, were being sacked. I spoke with one senior official who had opted to resign right before; the career types hadn’t seen what was coming, this official said, had no idea just how vengeful the Trump administration would be and in fact were still trying to persuade others to stay—right up until they were fired in Trump’s first week.

Up in New York at the United Nations, new Ambassador Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, had asked a bunch of the career officials to stay on, and they had started giving her briefings on how to talk tough to the Russians about their takeover of Ukrainian territory and other matters, I was told. Then the minders from the Trump “beachhead team” at Foggy Bottom found out about it; no way, they said, overruling Haley: They’re out.

Other new presidents had come into office promising major course corrections and policy shifts, but they had never gone to war against the support staff. This time would be different. Tom Countryman, a career Foreign Service officer with a nonproliferation portfolio, had just finished a meeting in Jordan and was about to head to Vienna when he got the word he was out. He was soon a hero, a public martyr. At his quickly thrown together goodbye party a week later, he gave a rousing speech begging his fellow diplomats to stay on the job. It was all about doing what’s right and love of country: “We still have a duty—you have a duty—to stay and give your best professional guidance with loyalty, to the new administration. Because a foreign policy without professionals is—by definition—an amateur foreign policy.” It was immediately leaked and published in full by Foreign Policy.

It hadn’t needed to be this way. I had spent much of the first week debriefing a dozen senior diplomats and top Obama officials who had been dealing until a few days before with the country’s thorniest national security problems, and I was struck by how willing they were to be critical. It was a reminder that Obama, too, had begun his presidency by vowing to reject the received Washington wisdom—the reflexive do-somethingism of The Blob—and take a dimmer view of foreign adventures, and he really meant it. Several political appointees told me in stark terms that they thought Obama had failed on both Russia and Syria, and many started out by thinking that Trump’s team might have a chance to rethink the foreign policy problems Obama had struggled to make progress on.



We still have a duty—you have a duty—to stay and give your best professional guidance with loyalty, to the new administration. Because a foreign policy without professionals is—by definition—an amateur foreign policy.”



Obama, said one of his former State Department appointees, had “constructed an entire intellectual edifice” around justifying his refusal to take more decisive action in the bloody Syrian civil war, a refusal that went on for years despite the views of virtually all of his advisers and Cabinet secretaries. Another longtime Obama foreign policy hand wondered whether the former president had made a mistake by so alienating Middle East allies like Israel and the Gulf Arabs that they were delighted by Trump’s victory. Several told me they thought it would prove useful to have Trump and Mattis pushing European countries to ante up more for the NATO budget—a cause that Obama had tried and failed to do much about over the previous several years, even as Russia’s attacks on Ukraine alarmed neighbors and sent the alliance scrambling for new troops and weapons to send east.

Many of those with whom I spoke had a palpable sense that the American-led post-Cold War security system that they had spent the past few years defending was on its last legs—even before the arrival of Trump and whatever would come next. “If you look back at the last 25 years, if we’ve made a mistake, it was a well-intentioned one,” an Obama-appointed ambassador to a major post in Europe told me. “American administrations—both Republican and Democrat—we thought the international system was capable of taking on more of a self-sustaining role without being underwritten by American assistance and hard power. But we underestimated. The system was not strong enough to self-sustain even without the underwriting of American power. It needed more juice for longer than we thought.”

As the president calls foreign leaders, his top advisers huddle in the Oval Office. From left: President Trump, chief of staff Reince Priebus, Vice President Mike Pence, White House press secretary Sean Spicer and chief strategist Stephen Bannon. | Drew Angover/Getty Images

A few days in, I went to meet with an early Obama appointee who had since become disillusioned. He saw much in common between the skeptical dovishness of Obama and the grand but vague America Firstism promised by Trump. Both considered the 2003 invasion of Iraq a big mistake and the entanglements of the Middle East a waste of time and money. Both were weary of America footing the bill for the defense of the well-heeled countries of Europe and Asia; both came to office looking for better relations with Russia. “There is a lot of continuity between them,” he insisted. “Both are promoting a minimalist, anti-interventionist foreign policy. Trump says a lot of what Obama thinks—it’s just he says it in a much more crass way.”

But it was much too soon for this kind of second-guessing, and nobody wanted to make the comparison publicly. “You can’t really have an honest conversation about this,” the former Obama appointee said. After all, Trump was in the White House and he was scaring the shit out of everybody.

***

But Washington was still Washington; accommodating to power, no matter how crass or unseemly the new boss might be, was what the city did best.

It was hard not to think of that on Day 14 of Trump, when I happened to meet a friend for breakfast at the Four Seasons in Georgetown, the city’s favorite power-breakfast spot. By the time I arrived just after 8:30 a.m., players from both parties had packed the room, which was in a tizzy over the presence of the bomb-throwing president’s polished daughter Ivanka. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was at one table, perennial powerbroker Vernon Jordan at another, incoming Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross at still another.

Shortly after 9 a.m., everyone fell silent. Ivanka Trump, accompanied by newly minted White House adviser Dina Powell, a former President George W. Bush aide seemingly enjoying her role as ambassador to the establishment, got up from breakfast with Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi to work the room; she smiled and shook hands as Powell directed her.

Eventually, they landed at a power table in front of the window, shaking hands briskly with Tom Nides, former deputy secretary of state under Hillary Clinton; Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s closest foreign policy adviser; and Ben Rhodes, Blob hater and would-be scourge of the foreign policy conventional wisdom. Nides had taken a break from his lucrative gig at Morgan Stanley to help run Clinton’s State Department and tirelessly fundraised for her presidential campaign. Sullivan, Clinton’s State Department aide de camp and top 2016 policy adviser, almost certainly would have been her wunderkind national security adviser barely past his 40th birthday had she won. And then there was Rhodes, who had taken to Twitter with an anti-Trump passion since the inauguration and was writing a memoir. Like everyone else in the room, they were there to talk Trump, and specifically how to take on his blow-it-up view of existing American foreign policy.

Then Ivanka came by, and the rest of the power breakfasters seemed to shut up collectively, as if to eavesdrop on her as she smiled and nodded while being introduced to the Democratic threesome.

“This is the resistance,” Nides joked.

“Good luck with that,” she replied lightheartedly.



That’s one of the dilemmas in terms of their relationship with The Blob. They need us to advise them how to actually do things and, when locked out, they do things incompetently, exposing themselves. Then if they do consult us, then they worry about the leaks and conspiracies.”



It was oddly reassuring to watch. Trump might have been upending everything we thought we knew about American politics, but perhaps The Blob would still find a way to matter after all.

But of course the era of chummy good feelings was over before it began. Back at the White House, Trump was furious about the leaked phone calls and a wave of damaging new stories about the NSC meltdown. “The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington?” he tweeted. As the courts threw out his immigration executive order, the president seemed to get even angrier. And every day more explosive stories came out from the eyes and ears inside his government. “They’re paranoid for a reason,” said the former Obama official who first told me about the “eyes and ears.”

But now Trump and Co. were not just furious, but determined to root them out—reviewing White House staffers’ emails in search of the leaks, freezing out professional staffers from some NSC meetings, pushing out more State Department lifers. And that department seemed ever more marginalized. New Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was even rebuffed in picking his own deputy. He wanted Elliott Abrams, often criticized by parts of The Blob as a neocon who strongly backed the Iraq War, but Trump refused, in an embarrassing public rebuke. In private, Abrams told others he was sure some Trump advisers had confused him with Eliot Cohen, a leading conservative anti-Trumper who had issued a stirring public denunciation of the administration.

The Resistance didn’t seem like so much of a joke anymore. “That’s one of the dilemmas in terms of their relationship with The Blob,” the former Obama official said. “They need us to advise them how to actually do things, and, when locked out, they do things incompetently, exposing themselves. Then if they do consult us, then they worry about the leaks and conspiracies.”

The Blob was definitely not in charge anymore. But it had excellent sources.