If one sign of a crumbling empire is incompetent leadership, then this week’s spectacular security breach is further evidence of the decline in American hegemony accelerated by Donald Trump’s presidency. Top officials including vice-president JD Vance, secretary of defence Pete Hegseth, and national security adviser Mike Waltz discussed the bombing of Houthi rebels in Yemen – including specific military details of the attack – in a group chat on an unsecure public app, Signal. Moreover, they inadvertently included a civilian – Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg – in the chat.
The ineptitude on display was so staggering that Goldberg at first assumed the group chat must be a hoax. However, a scandal of this kind is inevitable when top officials are appointed based on their loyalty rather than their qualifications. Hegseth, best known as a commentator on Fox News, is probably the least experienced secretary of defence in US history. His confirmation hearings raised numerous doubts about his character and judgment, including allegations of sexual assault and domestic abuse, and details of drunken exploits. Hegseth promised to quit drinking if confirmed, which is hardly an approved part of a 12-step programme for overcoming addiction.
Only with people such as Hegseth at the helm could you get what might be the most significant inadvertent security breach in US history. Most security leaks don’t happen by accident. They are the result of whistleblowers who have courageously exposed the secret workings of the American national security state. Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency was spying on American civilians. Chelsea Manning leaked documents shedding light on US activities during the so-called war on terror, and Daniel Ellsberg publicised the long history of US involvement in Vietnam. While these whistleblowers consciously sought to undermine American imperialism, Trump officials have done so through sheer bungling. But their actions are of a piece with his America First policies that are undermining the US’s claim to world leadership.
Indeed, the transcript of the Signal group chat illuminates the internal dynamics of foreign-policy making in the Trump administration, providing the kind of evidence that usually emerges only decades later, when dug up by a historian in some archive. Some of the key features of the discussion about bombing Houthi targets would be familiar to anyone who has studied US policy since the cold war. First, the stated reason for the attacks is economic: what Hegseth described as “Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest”. His concern was the high shipping costs caused by Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea.
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Second, there is little hesitation in relying on military rather than diplomatic solutions and no discussion of the deadly costs of such action on those targeted for bombing. And, finally, there is an overriding concern for public relations and domestic politics. “Messaging is going to be tough,” Hegseth concluded, “because nobody knows who the Houthis are” so they would need to stress that “1) Biden failed & 2) [the Houthis are] Iran funded”.
[ Signal controversy: The texted messages on Yemen attackOpens in new window ]
What does represent a Trumpist departure are the expressions of contempt for Europe. Vance argued against the strike, claiming that it would mainly benefit “European trade” passing through the Suez Canal rather than American trade. Even while arguing for the attack, Hegseth replied: “I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. It’s PATHETIC.” The officials then discussed how they could “levy” Europeans for the cost of an attack that they were carrying out without consulting them.
The US once viewed European countries as key allies and saw European economic strength as necessary to its own, allowing many Europeans to experience American empire as a benign pax Americana. But that is no longer true under Trump’s America First policy. While the US reluctantly acted as a global hegemon to protect world trade in this particular instance – Waltz wrote “it will have to be the United States that opens these shipping lanes” – it may no longer do so in the future. Indeed, it seems clear that the attack would not have happened under a president Vance, who represents the America First faction within the Trump administration, as opposed to more traditional Republican figures such as Waltz.
This scandal seems to have woken congressional Democrats out of their stupor. Yet while they should do everything possible to highlight the incompetence of Trump officials, they should not fall into the trap of knee-jerk defence of the American national security state. While it is surely the case that war plans should be kept secret, what is notably missing in the US today is a broader public discussion about American foreign policy. There was considerable public debate when Thomas Jefferson declared war against the Barbary corsairs, the first US military action outside the Americas, also in the name of free shipping. But ever since the US dropped atomic bombs on Japan – weapons that only a few Americans knew existed – American military policy has been shrouded from the view of the public and its congressional representatives. The result has been a degradation of democracy that paved the way for Trump’s authoritarianism.
There needs to be more discussion about why the US is attacking the Houthis in the first place, which is part of its failed Middle East policy centred around implacable support for Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Houthis are currently attacking US and UK ships in support of the Palestinian cause, but their hostility is also rooted in US support for the brutal war against them led by Saudi Arabia.
Defending the national security state would also be a political mistake for Democrats. It is not just that this scandal is the kind of issue that might seem more important to Washington insiders than to ordinary American voters, who are more likely to be motivated by bread-and-butter concerns. But it is also that the US foreign policy establishment is unpopular, discredited after the “forever wars” in Afghanistan in Iraq.
Trump and Vance have understood this fact better than most Democrats. Democrats need to oppose the incompetence of the Trump administration and its America First policies. But they must do so without making their calling card the claim that they would make more capable administrators of a fading American Empire.
Daniel Geary is Mark Pigott professor in US History at Trinity College Dublin
