Americans Do Not Want or Need a Revolution in our National Security State
We need reform, not revolution.
Before you dive into today’s article, I wanted to announce our next Zoom meet-up. On December 18, at 12:00 PST, I will be doing a live Zoom session with my paid subscribers to discuss changes that have occurred in geopolitics over the past year, as well as changes awaiting us in the future. It is an “Ask Me Anything” session!
Donald Trump decisively won the 2024 U.S. presidential election. He swept all the battleground states and made significant gains throughout the country, both in rural and urban counties. Given his legal problems and two impeachments, Trump’s victory last month constituted a historic political comeback.
President-elect Trump and many of his closest advisors have characterized this win as a “mandate” for radical change. Some in Trump’s orbit, including most notably his new favorite and omnipresent political advisor, Elon Musk, have asserted that the second Trump term “won’t be business as usual. This is going to be a revolution." Ironically, the Republican Party used to be considered a conservative party. Today, they do not seem to want to conserve anything. Instead, similar to other revolutionaries from global history, their main focus is to destroy the current governing procedures, or what they called the “deep state.” Several of Trump’s nominees for top jobs are particularly focused on waging a war against those responsible for our national security, including the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community. For Trump’s Leninist entourage, alleged “Woke” generals and “rogue” intelligence officers are their enemies, not China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has used colorful imagery to describe the new administration’s revolutionary mission against American enemies from within. In his book, The War on Warriors, he wrote that “America today is in a cold civil war” because “we allowed America’s domestic enemies at home to gobble up cultural, political and spiritual territory.” To some of us, this might sound absurd, but he is not alone. On the campaign trail, Trump himself warned repeatedly about the enemy from within.
There are significant problems with this assumption about a mandate for revolution. First, the American people do not want a revolution. They want cheaper eggs. Trump won decisively, but not in a landslide victory. Reagan’s reelection in 1984 was a landslide victory; he won every state except Minnesota and Washington D.C., securing nearly 17 million more votes in the popular vote than his opponent. Trump secured 49.9 percent of the vote and won by around 2,500,000 votes (2,418,567 votes, to be exact) in the Electoral College. Nearly half of the country (48.3 percent) did not vote for him or his revolution mandate. And even those who did, as exit polls show, were largely motivated by economic issues. If Trump does pursue revolutionary change, most Americans will not support him.
Second, Trump’s attempts to destroy the state will be met with resistance. If Trump and his team attempt to pursue revolutionary change, they will be met with resistance, not only by the so-called “deep state” (I prefer to call it the “professional state”) but because of the American constitution and the rule of law. Revolutions mostly occur against autocratic regimes; they rarely occur in democratic countries. Democracies have procedures, laws, norms, traditions, and institutional checks and balances against radical change. Our constitution was set up that way: checks and balances between the three branches of government, as well as between the federal government and the states. To be sure, Trump has majorities in the House and Senate, as well as a sympathetic Supreme Court. But he does not have loyalists running all our states; he does not control the media and civil society; and he will not be able to ignore our laws when trying to purge the state. And his majorities in the House and Senate are thin, with the majority in the House unlikely to last more than two years. In January 2027, Speaker Jeffries will emerge as an additional check to destructive change.
Third, and most importantly, the United States today cannot afford to wage a civil war against alleged enemies from within. We have real national security threats to address from abroad, including, first and foremost, China, but also Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Launching a four-year revolutionary assault on our national security institutions, such as the Pentagon and the CIA, is exactly what our adversaries want. We will be distracted. We will become weaker. There could not be a greater gift to Beijing or Moscow.
That said, to make us better prepared to contain and deter our adversaries, we do need disruption—positive disruption—within our national security institutions today. The way the Pentagon acquires weapons needs to change. The kinds of weapons procured need to be radically changed, moving away from traditional, big platforms like aircraft carriers and manned fighter jets and toward smaller boats, aircraft, and underwater vehicles, especially unmanned vehicles. If he or she wants to be a positive disrupter, the new Secretary of Defense should call on the Pentagon to learn from the war in Ukraine about the increasing utility of drones instead of starting witch-hunts for alleged “woke” soldiers or launching campaigns against our women warriors. If he or she wants to be a positive disrupter, the next Director of National Intelligence could call for the faster adoption of artificial intelligence in our intelligence collection instead of chasing phantom enemies from within. And if he wants to be a positive disrupter, the next Secretary of State should encourage diplomats to focus more on engaging in the ideological struggle against the world’s autocrats through innovations in public diplomacy instead of wasting priceless time and resources on fighting DEI programs. And no one is for government waste or bureaucratic lethargy. Making our national security state more effective and efficient in addressing our current era of great power competition is a cause that everyone could get behind. But that’s a mission of reform, not revolution.
Do you have any sense of whether the sanctions on Russia will change after January? I'm concerned they will be lifted but have not read/heard anything on this (but I could have missed it). Thanks.
Bravo Michael! Now, judging by the plans of US President-elect Trump and Musk, these two men not only have no humanitarian education, but want they are turning American democracy into their own satrapy following the example of Putin’s Russia. Plato’s famous paradox may work here: in a democracy, it is impossible to deny the people the right to surrender their power and sovereignty to a tyrant.
This is a dangerous challenge for American democracy, and it must respond to it. Otherwise, it will turn into a satrapy - like the collapsed USSR and today’s Russia...
The servilisation of society and the state begins with the seizure of arbitrary power, with Bonapartism. The head of state, at his discretion, creates and liquidates state executive bodies without any procedure of discussion in parliament. Arbitrarily appoints ministers and other heads of executive bodies without consulting parliament or with its servile acquiescence. Heads of state bodies dismiss officials in them at their discretion, sometimes dismissing the entire staff of employees of the state body. This practice was started in the Russian Empire by its last Tsar Nicholas II. In 1899, without discussion at the State Council, he amended the Statute on Civil Service and gave ministers and heads of departments the right to dismiss officials from service without the right to appeal in court and reinstatement through the courts. With this, he cancelled the norms of the first Russian constitutional act, adopted and signed by the Zemsky Sobor of representatives of all estates and cities - the Soborny Ulozhenie of 1649, approved by Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, and turned the state into a satrapy.
The term ‘satrapy’ applies to those countries in which the head of state, modelled on ancient Persia under the Achaemenid dynasty (6th-4th centuries B.C.), appoints functional (ministers) and regional leaders at his discretion and with rights also of arbitrary power and tax collection. Now, in Russia this is how Putin actually appoints his satraps to rule the regions and ministries in Russia.
Satrapies usually end badly, disintegrating, starting with Ancient Persia and Tsarist Russia. Then Nicholas II, having taken the Liaodong Peninsula from Japan in 1898, launched the Russo-Japanese War, whose defeat and economic crisis led to the First Russian Revolution of 1905. In 1914, Nicholas II began a general military mobilisation, in response to which Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August 1914, leading to the revolution in February 1917, his abdication, and in 1918, the execution of the former Tsar, along with his family and servants, by the Bolsheviks. Prof.Nikolay Kazantsev J.S.D.