The Thinker VI
The Unbearable Lightness of Strategy
Washington is holding its collective breath. Any day now (or perhaps in a few months) the Trump administration is expected to release a slew of strategy documents: the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy, and the Global Posture Review. Across the capital and beyond, reporters sharpen their pencils and analysts polish their talking points, as if these documents might finally reveal what the administration truly thinks about the world.
They won’t, of course. Everyone knows that. But in Washington, pretending otherwise is practically a sacred ritual.
Each new administration’s strategy dump supposedly brings its moment of revelation. The arrival of the documents triggers an entire choreography: embargoed briefings, instant reactions, panels titled “Decoding the New Strategic Vision.” Think-tank calendars fill; editors commission op-eds.
The Thinker will watch it unfold with a mixture of detachment and dread. He knows these texts will not define policy. They are bureaucratic theatre for an audience desperate for order amid what is only chaos. Still, he too will have to read, interpret, and comment. He has deadlines to meet and mouths to feed.
The documents will be what they always are: a dense blend of slogans and generalities, leavened with a dog whistle or two. America will deter, compete, and prevail. Its leadership is indispensable, its values eternal, its adversaries opportunistic but containable. The prose will hum with vague purpose but propose nothing specific.
The Illusion of Strategy
In real life, the Trump administration does not bother with even the pretense of strategy. Its foreign policy is improvisation tempered by corruption — a shifting mix of instinct, grievance, and spectacle. In private, everyone admits the obvious: Trump’s real national strategy is whatever happens to interest Trump at the moment.
How do you write that into a strategy document? One might pity the poor Trump strategists laboring away in the bowels of the Pentagon and the State Department. In the time between the approval of a strategy document proclaiming the priority of the Western Hemisphere and when the hard copies returns from the printer, Trump will have deployed troops to Damascus or invaded Nigeria. Indeed, the scuttlebutt in Washington is that the documents are overdue because their authors keep waiting for the Trumpian dust to settle and it never does.
They shouldn’t worry so much. The documents exist to dress up his impulses in the language of statecraft. The strategy papers are not frameworks for action but props designed to reassure the bureaucracy, the public, and foreign governments that someone, somewhere, has a long-term plan.
To be fair, this charade did not begin with Trump. Even before Trump elevated his id to government policy, America wrapped its often base instincts in the glossy language of strategy. Containment rationalised a series of improvised responses; détente dignified strategic exhaustion; “peace through strength” turned swagger into doctrine;and the “pivot to Asia” dressed up a passive-aggressive break-up note to Europe as geopolitical enlightenment. Even the best strategists retrofitted ideas to actions already taken.
Previous administrations had a somewhat greater will toward coherence and consistency, but their strategies, too, often served more as moral reassurance than operational guidance.
But as usual, the Trump team has, on a foundation of pre-existing stupidity, built a towering absurdity. The administration creates strategy the way reality TV produces storylines: to entertain rather than to reveal. Consistency is of little interest to an administration whose base has the foreign policy memory of a gnat. Coherence is just an SAT word understood only by eggheads and democrats.
The Show Must Go On
Nonetheless, within hours of the documents’ release, Washington’s analytical machinery will spin into motion. Commentators will tweet threads about “continuity and change.” Zoom panels will discuss “the new American strategic priority.”
The Thinker is not immune even if he is aware. He is trapped, after all. These are the solemn strategic pronouncements of the most powerful government in the world. To ignore the documents would be unprofessional; to mock them would be unserious.
Editors expect gravitas; funders expect insight; audiences expect analysis. So, he highlights phrases, draws arrows, and searches for meaning that isn’t there. “America First,” he muses, could imply a neo-Monroe doctrine designed to impose American will on the Western Hemisphere. “Unconstrained power projection” might point toward the Indo-Pacific (or maybe Greenland). Each platitude becomes a puzzle to decode.
These efforts accord the documents a depth that they do not even aspire to. But the market for meaning can tolerate anything but emptiness.
He drafts his opening paragraph even before the strategy documents appear: “The new Trumpian strategy reflects the American shift from liberal hegemony to pseudo-ethnic nationalism.” It sounds thoughtful, credible, and conveniently vacuous. Another paragraph follows on “rebalancing commitments” and “deterrence through resilience.” He can substitute the actual meaningless phrases from the strategies into his Madlibs later.
He even knows how the essay will end: with a sober reminder that America still needs strategy, however imperfect. Readers will nod; editors will excerpt his lines; diplomats will cable his caution back to their capitals.
After his piece appears, he will accept speaking roles on panels with titles like “The Return of Hard Power” or “A New Era of Competitive Deterrence.” On stage, under harsh lighting, he will deliver a careful verdict: “While the strategy lacks details, it signals a desire to re-establish deterrence through strength and unpredictability.” The audience will applaud. The moderator will thank him for his nuance.
And somewhere deep inside of him, a piece of his soul will die. Luckily, it is not a piece he is using.
He knows that his analysis confers legitimacy, that by pretending that this incoherent jabber makes sense he helps sustain the illusion that the system still functions. But he also knows that, without that illusion, his entire profession might collapse into silence.
The Thinker, condemned to read these documents as if they mean something, is part of the spectacle — a flying monkey maintaining faith in the false wizard behind the curtain. He serves as both victim and accomplice: a monument to the strange compulsion of a capital that has nothing left to think about, yet cannot stop thinking.
The strategy documents do serve a purpose, but it is clearly not to make strategy. It is to meet, however cynically, the insatiable human need for order and predictability. Alas, there is ample evidence these days that the world contains little of either. But for god’s sakes, don’t tell the people that.