Is Donald Trump actually trying to unwind and reorient American empire?
In case you missed it: In the wake of our exposé of Microsoft’s work supporting Israel’s assault on Gaza, tech workers have organized a letter-writing campaign to pressure the company to back off. If you have a moment, please add your name to the effort here.
Here in Washington, the unmistakable scent of dirty laundry hangs in the air outside the Watergate, and that can only mean one thing: Benjamin Netanyahu is back. The Israeli prime minister arrived on Sunday for pivotal meetings this week with President Donald Trump and his top aides, and was welcomed immediately with not just free laundry services but a congressional request for a new arms package.
Netanyahu meets Monday with Mideast envoy and real-estate tycoon Steve Witkoff, who recently pressured Netanyahu into agreeing to a multistage ceasefire in Gaza. Netanyahu has spent the time since brazenly declaring his intention to blow up the deal and restart his attack, while his allies have launched a PR campaign against Witkoff, accusing him of being a stooge of Qatar.
That campaign has also targeted a number of Trump appointees who count themselves among the growing faction of realists inside the Trump administration. They are trying to reorient U.S. foreign policy away from hegemony—what they call “primacy”—and toward a recognition that we are in a multipolar world where diplomacy should come before armed conflict. The fulcrum for both this camp and for its opponents, the neocons, is war with Iran. Where you stand on the question of war with Iran situates you on the spectrum within the Trump administration, with war opponents so far dominating the fight for position.
Netanyahu, of course, is squarely in the war camp. He will do whatever he can to blow up the ceasefire, and is hoping to win Trump’s approval for that strategy, Amir Tibon reported Sunday in Ha’aretz. He appeared on Breaking Points this morning and fleshed out his reporting, noting that Trump desperately wants a Saudi-Israel normalization deal, which requires the ceasefire to hold.
Tibon added that Netanyahu is likely to tell Trump that he can’t finish the ceasefire deal because he’ll lose his government if he does, with the far right abandoning him. But that’s a lie, Tibon said, as opposition figures have said publicly that if he lost his majority over the completion of the deal, they would give him temporary support for a matter of months to prevent the government from collapsing. Whether that information can get through to Trump is an open question.
We are clearly living through a moment of unusual plasticity. History truly feels up for grabs in a disorienting fashion. It’s not obvious where any of this is headed. Over the last couple years, the French writer Arnaud Bertrand has gained a large following on X by attempting to harness this chaos into some meaning. His framing of the mix of foreign policy moves that we’ve seen so far from Trump fits the category, pushing us to move past a knee-jerk, obvious analysis that may be missing larger structural forces at play. Describing Trump’s tariffs, he wrote recently, “It looks ‘dumb’ (as the WSJ just wrote) if you are still mentally in the old paradigm but it's always a mistake to think that what the US (or any country) does is dumb.”
I want to stop on that point before moving to his next one. It’s a useful reminder for me in particular; I am often immediately inclined to find much of what Trump proposes or does just flat-out stupid. And yet here he is, arguably the most consequential American figure in the past 50 years. Bertrand’s point is that we need to look past the chaos to see the bigger picture. And one is emerging if we care to look.
Take a look at the 25 percent tariffs that Trump threatened to impose on Canada and Mexico, and the 10 percent slapped on China. This morning, Trump backed off the Mexican tariffs, reportedly in exchange for more help at the southern border from Mexico. This afternoon, he backed off the Canadian ones, too. Initially, this looks like the typical Trump cycle of improbable threat to quick concession. But, taking a broader view—considering the tariff threats in the context of his move to abolish USAID while also appointing antiwar, isolationist Republicans to key positions—the tariffs could be more than just a gimmick, but another signal that Trump is backing away from American hegemony and pivoting toward becoming a more regional power. Here’s how Bertrand puts it:
Hegemony was going to end sooner or later, and now the U.S. is basically choosing to end it on its own terms. It is the post-American world order - brought to you by America itself. Even the tariffs on allies, viewed under this angle, make sense, as it redefines the concept of ‘allies’: they don't want—or maybe rather can't afford—vassals anymore, but rather relationships that evolve based on current interests. You can either view it as decline - because it does unquestionably look like the end of the American empire - or as avoiding further decline: controlled withdrawal from imperial commitments in order to focus resources on core national interests rather than being forced into an even messier retreat at a later stage. In any case it is the end of an era. [Emphasis added.]
Seen in a context of strategic retreat, Trump’s belligerence toward Greenland and Canada, for example, appears more like an empire stepping back from the world stage and building trenches closer to home.
Putting an exclamation mark on Bertrand’s assertion was this morning’s news that Trump is naming Darren Beattie to oversee public diplomacy at the State Department. It’s hard to overstate what a significant signal his appointment is. Beattie—a former speechwriter who Semafor described as a “MAGA intellectual”—is an outspoken critic of the warhawk wing of the GOP and his ascension has sent shockwaves through Washington’s neocon think-tank universe. Our Pakistani readers may already know Beattie from the work he’s done at Revolver News exposing the Biden administration’s moves against Imran Khan.
His appointment is as radical as a Democratic president sending Noam Chomsky to run the CIA, though let’s be clear, we are not witnessing a revival of a new socialist international. Trump’s realists are rooted firmly in a right-wing tradition. Beattie, who was fired from the first administration for speaking at a conference alongside white nationalists, sad as recently as October 2024, “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”
That such a remark can be made by a man who may be Pakistan’s best hope for a restoration of dignity and democracy underscores how disorienting all this is. Beattie has also been an outspoken—and often on point—critic of USAID, exposing its role in destabilizing foreign countries.
The attack on USAID—led first by Elon Musk and belatedly blessed by Trump—fits into the frame of strategic retreat as well. Musk, who has said he spent the weekend “feeding it to the woodchipper,” has been framing the fight against USAID in as many different ways as he can think of. Some of it has been done in truly moronic fashion, with Musk calling it “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” The media has also been spinning it, most often describing it as an “humanitarian agency.” In reality USAID, along with its pass-through entity the National Endowment for Democracy, is an omnipresent tool of American soft power. Read Alexander Zaitchik’s piece for Drop Site from just last week on its role in annulling a democratic election in Romania.
Musk’s broad assault on government has no basis in law, as I pointed out recently on my favorite new platform, TikTok. He has no legal authority to go around ending government programs authorized by Congress. But he is, so let’s take a look at what it might mean about where Trump’s foreign policy is headed.
Musk has also framed the takedown of USAID in the context of wasteful foreign spending, but there’s also been some recognition of its real role. Consider this extraordinary post:
Implementing HIV treatment in Africa is quite obviously not terrorism. Musk must be referring—with his new favorite “target” emoji—to the elements of the agency that operate as a stalking horse for American intervention. Dubbing the U.S. foreign policy apparatus as “the most gigantic global terror organization in history” has to rank as what the kids today would call the most based thing any government official has ever said about the U.S. And let’s be fair: anyone who has seriously studied the track record and the body count of American intervention as a whole would have to acknowledge that the rhetoric is, if a bit over the top, not fundamentally indefensible. The many, many millions killed in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, South and Central America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere—either by U.S. proxies or U.S. forces themselves—would certainly give the rhetoric credence if they were here to make their case.
Musk may be making different arguments to different audiences hoping each will land individually, or he may be testing which works best broadly. Mark Ruffalo, for his part, suggested nothing he said meant anything, and that his true North Star, so to speak, is cutting as much government spending as possible so he can spend it on his true fixation, getting to Mars.
But Musk’s anti-imperialist argument is more than just one emoji. On X, El Salvador’s strongman president Nayib Bukele—did you know he’s Palestinian, by the way?—lambasted USAID. “While marketed as support for development, democracy, and human rights, the majority of these funds are funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements,” Bukele wrote. “At best, maybe 10% of the money reaches real projects that help people in need (there are such cases), but the rest is used to fuel dissent, finance protests, and undermine administrations that refuse to align with the globalist agenda.”
I’m the furthest thing from an admirer of the bitcoin bro Bukele, but there’s not much to disagree with in his assessment. (While some of what USAID does is worthy and important, and gutting it will cost lives, the good work it does doesn’t have to live inside an agency whose actual mission is to wield power in the domestic politics of our allies and adversaries alike. It can go on. And, in fact, to the extent the programs are funded and directed by Congress, it is required by law that they do go on.)
My former colleague Glenn Greenwald shared Bukele’s post and added: “USAID, like the National Endowment for Democracy, are well-documented CIA fronts that are designed to manipulate other countries' internal politics for the benefits of DC elites and nobody else in the US. Both agencies have wrought destruction and can't die soon enough.” Musk replied, “They’re not even good at it.”
(Musk has also repeatedly engaged online with Mike Benz who helped popularize the critique of USAID during an appearance on Joe Rogan. Musk actually shared a tweet with a Drop Site article referenced by Benz.)
There’s no room for confusion here: Whatever else he is saying, Musk and company are clearly targeting USAID specifically because of the role it plays in advancing an aggressive American foreign policy that he and his allies want to roll back.
Even Marco Rubio seems along for the ride. In a recent interview, Secretary of State Rubio suggested that the era of American hegemony was a fluke that was now coming to an end. "It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was an anomaly, it was a product of the end of the Cold War,” he said. “But eventually you were going to return back to having a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China, and to some extent Russia."
This is not the old Rubio whose early approach to foreign policy was indistinguishable from neocon warmongering. He still holds that posture toward Cuba in particular—Trump immediately slapped a terror designation back on the island upon coming to power—and toward Venezuela, but broadly he has reoriented himself toward what they all call “America First” foreign policy. (America First as an idea didn’t stop Musk and Trump from complaining today about a South African land-expropriation law.)
Rubio, landing in El Salvador today, said he is now “acting director of USAID,” confirming the agency has been moved under the State Department. He claimed the agency had been “insubordinate” and repeated the off-base critique that USAID does too much charity. So has USAID been sent to the wood chipper? Or is it instead being sculpted into a different kind of weapon? The USAID-backed NGOs that intervened in Romania’s presidential election did so against the candidate of the populist right. Does all this mean an end to USAID intervention or will the new USAID still intervene, but this time on the side of the populist right?
But before we get too carried away, let’s consider some additional context. In 2019, amid a U.S.-backed coup in Bolivia, a nation rich in lithium and other resources needed for the energy transition, Musk infamously posted on Twitter, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” That doesn’t sound like a man deeply invested in the sovereignty of each nation. So is Musk just hoping to shut down the government element of U.S. intervention and privatize it instead, putting it directly in the hands of oligarchs (or one oligarch)?
Musk sending minions with fake lanyards into the bowels of the Treasury Department and then to try to get into classified rooms inside USAID indicates he’s a man bent more on conquest than liberation. We all remember Gramsci’s famous quote at moments like this: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.” But we often forget that he immediately added, “Now is the time of monsters.”
As Bertrand concluded, “This is not to say that the U.S. won't continue to wreak havoc on the world, and in fact we might be seeing it become even more aggressive than before. Because when it previously was (badly, and very hypocritically) trying to maintain some semblance of self-proclaimed ‘rules-based order’, it now doesn't even have to pretend it is under any constraint, not even the constraint of playing nice with allies. It's the end of the U.S. empire, but definitely not the end of the U.S. as a major disruptive force in world affairs.”
Monsters, I think it’s safe to say, are a dangerous thing to forget.
Also at Drop Site today: Over 100 journalists representing a wide range of international media outlets sent a letter to Egyptian authorities requesting access to Gaza through the Rafah border crossing. Since Israel’s war on Gaza began on October 7, 2023, international journalists have been barred by both Israel and Egypt from entering Gaza to report on the war. In addition to Drop Site News, signatories include journalists from major U.S. and European television networks, newspapers, and wire services.
Plus, yesterday we reported that in Sudan, doctors are being forced to operate in shipping containers buried underground. Incredible piece of journalism here.
And our reporting fellow Archit Mehta reports on a draconian new measure being pushed forward by Narendra Modi in India.
Musk and Trump are busy trying to destroy the civil service. Musk has installed 20 something "protegees" of Peter Thiel in OPM and the Treasury, all while firing career employees who are attemptingto do their jobs of protecting sensitive financial and personnel information, so EXCUSE ME if I don'tget all dewy eyed over your pollyanna-ish take that maybe Donnie's a far-sighted foreign policy maven.
And, Beattie's white supremacist and misogynistic comments are one bridge too far. But sure, throw American women and minorities under the bus.
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Well, we can call the emerging foreign policy by different names -- Bertrand's "end of the American empire," Trump's "America First," Bannon's "nationalist populism" (in a convo with Douthat of NYT)... and the old-fashioned term of "isolationist" foreign policy.
What seems to be emerging from the rapid and seemingly chaotic moves of the Trump regime is the following:
a) there's no real taste for war, or spending American tax dollars on war;
b) the tariffs are a typical Trump business-negotiating ploy, and he'll get something out of it, and give some as necessary;
c) there's an acceptance of a multipolar world -- to replace the neocon vision of hegemony -- as articulated by Marco Rubio; and lastly
d) all of the above has the Democrats back on their heels, completely discombobulated and hapless.