I CAN GRUMBLE OVER OUR CONDUCT OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS BUT AT TIMES I WEEP FOR AMERICA

I would like to step back and take in a surrounding view of recent events. In America today, and in fact during most or our history, there are two very different worlds, only remotely connected, each consumed with their respective challenges and crises. One is the world of foreign affairs and our closely knitted national security, the other the domestic turmoil that under our present circumstances churns every day in America and affects every one of us to one degree or another.

My professional life has been spent in the world of intelligence and national security, from a 22 year old ensign in the Navy to 30 years in the CIA and another twenty years consulting on intelligence issues in the private sector and for the government. In our contemporary foreign affairs there have always been drama and death, episodic existential threats to Israel, for three years a grotesque, grinding Russian war on Ukraine, and since 2023 slaughter in Israel and Gaza, horribly mired now in its latest chapter by a humanitarian catastrophe of death, starvation and suffering. The United States carried out a historic attack in Iran and opened a debate on the wisdom and authority of that military operation and the longer term consequences. The past several days have seen confusing assessments of the degree of damage done to the Iranian nuclear program now coalesce into one of significant damage.

One positive feature of the past few weeks has been the improvement in our relationship with Europe and NATO, for several reasons. First and foremost among them is Mr. Trump’s more amenable approach—chemistry if you like—to and with the NATO leaders. This is almost exclusively because of their agreement to substantially increase their respective national budget allocations to their own defense. This has long been a sore spot for the US; Bob Gates and other secretaries of defense had all tried to raise those levels but without much success. The secret sauce, as it turned out, was the bold if crass rupture in our relationship that Mr. Trump provoked by setting NATO adrift. Frightened by the prospect of an absent US with Russia on the march and the Middle East in its perennial state of low-grade warfare, the Europeans lurched into a 21st Century defense crouch and agreed to spend more, a lot more. It seems likely that nothing else would have brought them around as effectively as Trump’s pointedly ungraceful coup de grace.

But as the affairs of state continue to tumble one way then another, always keeping us under the protection of our strong military at the ramparts, my great sadness is reserved for us here at home. Putting aside for the moment my professional passions for national security, I weep for the great harm being done to us across a broad front by the Trump administration. I have written about it before here, angrily, and now that anger is tempered with deep, deep sorrow. I think it can be said without dispute that we seem to be upside down: we are taking funding from middle and lower income Americans, poor and sick Americans, and from our future, giving it to the ultra wealthy. It is unrolling without the slightest objection on moral grounds from any members of Trump’s party, with occasional efforts to worsen the imbalance. More money for donors and corporate America may fund the growth of the oligarchical/industrial class, but does not compute in any egalitarian society. The government is cutting hundreds of programs that grant aid to educational, technical and medical research, unscrewing the nuts and bolts that hold the USG together and, well, you know the rest. All this opprobrium demeans the health and diversity of the American society that we used to treasure.

But the administration’s conduct via Homeland Security and ICE’s draft of federalized law enforcement as they round up working immigrants is the deepest cut to American decency, morality. I feel anguish that we would do this, sweeping up hundreds of hard working men and women by a gaggle of masked, unbadged, mute, heavily armed and brutal thugs, launched by a Secretary of Homeland Security who shot and killed Cricket, her hard to train puppy, in a gravel pit in South Dakota. As it turns out, this act tells us a good deal. It may have signaled that she holds the wicked kind of weltanschauung that would have eased her path to slavish implementation of Trump’s cruel immigration policies. Noem and her subordinates are only some—but a powerful and scary lot they are—of the host of selfish and unqualified people to whom our president has largely entrusted the care and safety of the nation.

If there are regrets among any of those Americans who voted for Mr. Trump, they are free to step up and swallow a large slice of crow pie for the ignominy which they have wrought upon us. Shouldn’t they instead have been thinking about America in terms of how to ‘crown thy good with brotherhood’?