But what’s really weird is that this passage is from an article in American Affairs, a new journal seemingly designed to attack “ossified intellectual orthodoxies.” It’s pretty pro-Trump. Furthermore, the author of the article is Michael Anton, who now holds Ben Rhodes’s old position at the National Security Council and was the author of the much-circulated pro-Trump “The Flight 93 Election” essay during the campaign.

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If Anton is supposed to be the intellectual heavyweight of the Trump White House, then it’s possible that the Trump White House hasn’t thought through its grand strategy terribly well. This is an essay that bashes neoconservatives with glee but approvingly quotes the bandwagoning logic of Osama bin Laden — twice! As a realist, Stephen Walt should be sympathetic to Anton’s critique of the liberal international order. Writing in Foreign Policy, Walt is not sympathetic:

One thing is clear: Anton has mastered the template for conservative jeremiads about U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy. First, employ an authoritative but conversational style that suggests these issues are really pretty simple and only a fool or a knave would fail to understand them. Second, keep the analysis at 40,000 feet, avoid nitty-gritty policy details, and employ appealing alliterative concepts, such as Anton’s trinity of “prestige, prosperity, and peace.” Third, leaven the essay with selective historical examples and put in some well-chosen references to classical Greeks, Romans or other long-dead political philosophers to give the piece a shiny intellectual veneer. Lastly, treat your targets with a degree of contempt and suggest they are unpatriotic, incompetent, naive, intellectually lazy, or all of the above.

Anton is not the only senior Trump official who seems to suffer from some deficiencies in strategic thinking. Consider John Kelly, the secretary of Homeland Security. In a conversation with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Monday, he confirmed a Reuters report that he was considering separating women and children who cross the border illegally:

Now as repellent as this idea is, I get what Kelly is thinking: If he can broadcast a strategy like this to those mothers thinking of crossing the border illegally, maybe he can deter a lot of that illegal immigration in the first place. In other words, by seeming cruel and heartless at the outset, he doesn’t actually have to be cruel and heartless down the road.

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There are just two problems with this, however. The first is that illegal immigration inflows were already pretty low, so it’s not obvious that this strategy will act as a powerful deterrent.

The second is that it’s not clear that Kelly can make a credible threat.* At some point, a family with small children will cross the border, and then Kelly will have to follow through on his threat. All it will take is one heartbreaking video of a family being torn apart for the media to question the wisdom of such a policy. Even if Kelly tries to hold fast, the optics of this will look awful for the administration.

If the Trump administration has a grand strategy, it can be boiled down to “the alpha males are back.” Alpha males don’t believe in any preexisting policy consensus, they believe in denigrating out-of-touch elites! And action!! Label the threat as “radical Islamic terrorism” and the problem is already almost solved! Macho statements of resolve are supposed to intimidate America’s adversaries into submission.

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Sometimes tough talk works. But it works a whole lot better when the speaker can follow through on their tough talk. And so far, on Iran, North Korea, and China, this administration has done the opposite of that.

It’s almost as if the tough talk alone is supposed to be the strategy. Except that each time this administration has to backtrack or back down from a hollow threat, the weaker it looks to the rest of the world. It’s almost as if this administration doesn’t really have any idea that a proper grand strategy requires a country to follow through on its words.