Wrong About Everything
The expert class engineered failure at home and abroad, then blamed American power itself. They were wrong every time.
Since its inception the Progressive worldview has insisted on misunderstanding, willfully or otherwise, what governs man. Going all the way back to the 19th century’s “Utopian Socialists” and flowing on through Karl Marx’s historical materialism to Engels’ scientific socialism and so on to the present day, the philosophy undergirding much of the intellectual thought on the left has assumed a predictability in man and his actions, as well as a directability and, crucially, a perfectibility.
We see this in most of the great social initiatives of the 20th century. From Johnson’s Great Society with its emphasis on using federal power to somehow “even the playing field” through economic interventions and affirmative action programs to more recent pushes to reshape the educational and employment landscapes through Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, the left’s answer to all problems tends to be top-down mandates to “fix” things. Take your experts, get them to craft policy, throw public money at it and trust that our problem is as good as solved.
But as we’ve seen things never seem to work out like this. Policies are crafted, money is thrown, experts are paid and things get worse in an endless loop. Man, as it turns out, doesn’t act in nature as he does on our spreadsheets.
This worldview doesn’t stay contained to the world of domestic policy. The same people who believe they can mold their domestic economy and society into an ideal form naturally believe that the same can be done on an international scale as well. Often we find that even those on the political right, who would look with scorn at a command economy within their own borders, are drawn into the belief that outside of these borders things can be made to be orderly and tidy and sensible if only the right people and the right ideas could be put into place.
Much of the latter half of the 20th century has been marked by these projects, implemented by administrations of both parties, which try to plug “experts” from the State Department, or USAID, or some area specific think tanks in to “fix” problems in other lands, with results that more often than not have been dismal and embarrassing in their failures. Using Afghanistan as a case in point, The Military Times sums up the Pentagon’s independent inspector general for Afghanistan’s final report on what went wrong in America’s efforts to rebuild the country after the American invasion as:
[T]he U.S. tr[ying] to create a country nearly from whole cloth and in its own image, underestimating how long that would take, and continuously reinventing what success looked like when the reconstruction failed to meet the most recent metric.
The Military Times goes on to quote The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction as concluding that:
The U.S. government also clumsily forced Western technocratic models onto Afghan economic institutions; trained security forces in advanced weapon systems they could not understand, much less maintain; imposed formal rule of law on a country that addressed 80 to 90 percent of its disputes through informal means; and often struggled to understand or mitigate the cultural and social barriers to supporting women and girls
The military did its job. They won our battles. Saddam Hussein was toppled within weeks, the Taliban collapsed within months. The American people have been led to believe that it was our military that failed “the mission”, when it was our bureaucratic corps of “experts” who should have their chops bloodied.
The American “expert” class in the State Department, at USAID, and elsewhere in government spent the better part of two decades trying to construct Middle Eastern and Asian countries that fit our own image, only to watch their top-down “command” society efforts collapse around them. In the end Iraq and Afghanistan were social engineering failures, not military ones.
The repeated failures at post-war nation building have, though, been laid squarely at the feet of our military. After their grand schemes failed, schemes built on the idea of the perfectibility of man as an interchangeable widget, the expert class threw in the towel on the entire project of American global interventionism.
“Interventionism doesn’t work” they said, “We’ve learned there are no military solutions, we can’t be the world’s policeman.” From the left and increasingly from the right, the worldview became dominant. But American force did its job. American force worked. It was the philosophical conceits under which nation building had been undertaken that were a failure.
Rather than try to understand what had gone wrong, the foreign policy expert class threw up their hands and declared the job impossible, tarring as discredited the very idea that America could exert positive force on the world since their preferred method had failed. The political right absorbed this lesson uncritically, adopting the establishment's conclusion without questioning its premise.
We now find ourselves with significant portions of both domestic political spheres who take it as granted that American intervention on the global stage can only bring about disaster and ruin… Disaster and ruin for the foreign nations, as the left would have it, or disaster and ruin for ourselves as those on the right would.
Donald Trump did not accept this consensus. Regardless of one’s thoughts about him otherwise, it’s difficult to deny that our President is an optimist when it comes to America’s place on the international stage. He was forged in a Cold War world, where there are good guys and there are bad guys and we know we’re not the bad guys. Not content to merely steward America’s decline into irrelevancy as he believed his predecessors had done, he set about throwing around America’s weight and hauling the West kicking and screaming into global relevancy once again. America has always been powerful. Trump hasn’t changed that.
What he’s changed is America’s willingness to use that power again, unhindered by the dour words of the foreign policy “expert” class. In Venezuela, rather than play the diplomatic game as it had been played for decades, Trump chose to cut the head off of the snake by whisking Maduro from his home and into American custody to face justice for his crimes against his own people and against ours. In Iran, rather than content himself with playing the usual political posturing as had been done for decades before him, Trump chose to cut the Gordian Knot by treating the Islamic Republic’s regime as the enemy of America that it has so frequently and loudly announced itself to be.
The difference between this administration and its predecessors is what happens after the force is applied. The Bush administration toppled Saddam in three weeks and then spent twenty years trying to construct what came next. Trump toppled Maduro and went home. In Iran, the president has been explicit: he has told the Iranian people to “seize control of your destiny” and “take over your government.” The White House has said openly that what follows is in the hands of Iranians, not American reconstruction teams. The force is the same. The conceit that we should manage what comes after is gone.
Trump is reasserting America’s place as the world’s foremost guarantor of peace through strength, not the illusion of peace through hollow words and quiet submission to “diplomatic realities” or “international law.” And our European allies have begun to take note: French President Emmanuel Macron has begun to talk tough, saying in a recent speech:
To be free, one must be feared. To be feared, one must be powerful.
And in Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz stated grimly that "the international order based on 'rights and rules' is currently being destroyed," continuing:
I’m afraid we have to put it in even harsher terms: This order, as flawed as it has been even in its heyday, no longer exists… Our military, political, economic, and technological potential is huge, but we haven’t tapped it to the necessary extent for a very long time. So the most important thing is to flick the switch in our minds now. We have to understand that in the era of big powers, our freedom is no longer a given. It is at stake. We will need to show firmness and determination to assert this freedom
As Walter Russell Mead put it on X: "Trump has won the ideological battle with Europe. If a generation of Europeans hadn't blinded themselves to this hard but necessary truth, the world, the EU and the transatlantic relationship would be better off."
But while Trump's return to a more forceful policy has begun to stiffen the backbones of our European allies, it has been met with much wailing and gnashing of teeth by the foreign policy think-tank set… And perhaps for good reason. Should Trump succeed here, the moral and literal cowardice of their preferred policies will be laid bare for all to see, putting into jeopardy their comfortable sinecures at NGOs and their side gigs sponging tens of thousands in speakers' fees from American colleges and universities every year.
Vast swaths of people in the academic and foreign policy community have staked their reputations and livelihoods on the idea that America as a force for good in the world — a force that can be willing and able to use its force for good — is antiquated and dead. One needs only look at their fury and their panic at seeing their entire argument being put to the toughest of tests, the test of reality.
They've been wrong about what we can achieve at home through top-down directives from atop their ivory towers. They've been wrong about what occupation can construct abroad. And now they face the possibility if not the probability that their prescriptions for what ails global affairs have been just as misguided, and for the same reason: The world doesn't work in reality like it does on paper.
People are unpredictable, and now as always strength and a willingness to use it trumps honeyed words every time. The "expert class," with their usually self-awarded claims of expertise, have failed to either forecast world events or to adequately grapple with them when they occur. Should Trump succeed where they all have failed, the irrelevance that follows will have been well earned.
At the end of the day we live in a real world, a world with now over 8 billion independent actors spread out across it and operating as its moving parts. What time has taught us is that when it comes to inputs and outcomes there is no magic recipe to make things so, no matter how many graphs and charts we have on hand showing that it will be so.
You can't design outcomes, either at home or abroad, because you can't see into the mind and the soul of every person operating in either sphere. There are levers that can be pushed and pulled… A helping hand in times of trouble, a closed fist in times of strife… but policy in the real world must acknowledge and use both to succeed.
As Theodore Roosevelt said, America's policy should be to "speak softly and carry a big stick," but for too long we've had nothing but soft words and no stick to back them up. We are learning, right now, that America's power works as advertised.