Who’s Running American Defense Policy?

4 comments

1. Submission Statement: *In Trump’s current administration, irrational tariffs and brutal immigration enforcement are the two big ideas. Both have foreign-policy ramifications, but they are being pursued by Trump and his team primarily as domestic political issues. Everything else is on the periphery of the White House’s vision:* [*Pakistan and India*](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/india-pakistan-trump-rubio/682723/)*,* [*nuclear weapons*](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/08/nuclear-command-control-football-iran/683256/)*, the Middle East (or nuclear weapons and the Middle East), the Ukraine war. All of these get Trump’s temporary attention in the form of a quick evaluation of their utility to Trump personally, and then they’re dumped back outside the door of the Oval Office.*

2. Who’s running anything?

3. There is a defense policy ??

4. Vladimir Putin? 🤔

   >Meanwhile, the president has decided to review AUKUS, the 2021 security pact between the United States, Australia, and Great Britain, a move that caught U.S. diplomats (and their colleagues in Canberra and London) off guard and has generated concern about the future of the arrangement. Technically, the president didn’t decide to review it, but rather his handpicked secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, did. Well, it wasn’t him, either; apparently, the review was ordered by someone you’ve likely never heard of: Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, a career-long Beltway denizen who initiated the process on his own.

   Elbridge Colby is currently receiving much public praise from the Kremlin’s propagandists on Russian State television…I wonder why

Comments are closed.