Thomas Wright’s analysis of Marco Rubio’s Munich Security Conference speech for The Atlantic assembles all the evidence of deliberate policy realignment and then concludes instead that the administration doesn’t understand.
The headline says it all:
Marco Rubio Doesn’t Get It.
Wright catalogs the simple pattern. The administration wants to readmit Russia to the G7. It invited Russia and China to join Trump’s Board of Peace. Rubio devoted his entire speech to lecturing allies about their shortcomings while refusing to name adversaries. Undersecretary Colby gave a major speech in South Korea without mentioning North Korea. The administration dismisses the rules-based order as “cloud castle abstractions.”
Phew. There’s more, but you get the gist.
Wright frames everything as diagnostic failure, as if Rubio misunderstands, is in denial, offers a flawed diagnosis. The purposeful and malicious acts of the administration are supposed to be seen as bumbling, naive, confused about threat models.
This analytical comfort zone soothes mainstream foreign policy wonks, yet makes their commentary useless. The Trump administration isn’t failing to understand that Russia, China, and North Korea are working together. It isn’t accidentally alienating allies while empowering adversaries. The pattern isn’t a diagnosis error any more than a cross was accidentally lit on fire or a journalist accidentally lynched.
It’s the MAGA plan.
Wright literally describes Rubio choosing not to mention Russia or China as “what he chose not to say” and still lands on incompetence rather than chosen intent. Wright also pulls out a Harry Potter metaphor:
…the threat cannot be named.
Guess who actually can’t name what he’s looking at?
The Harry Potter reference lands with an irony Wright doesn’t intend. J.K. Rowling doesn’t misunderstand trans people. She’s made a choice and committed to it. Just like this administration hasn’t failed to notice the authoritarian alignment.
Trump has chosen a side, like Ronald Reagan’s many dictators in his pocket, and committed to it. The “they don’t get it” framing from critics functions as a mechanism that avoids confronting the actual deliberate nature of the position.
Reagan knew what Habre was up to. Reagan knew he unlocked genocide around the world.
Wright’s factual material about European rearmament and Ukraine aid contributions is table stakes. Non-U.S. NATO defense spending rose $190 billion under Biden. Europe has outspent the U.S. on Ukraine aid. The EU tightened asylum policy and began de-risking from China. All that was before Trump returned. There are hundreds of useful correctives like these to the administration’s usual batshit narratives. Trump rescuing Europe? GTFO.
But factual strength serves a fundamentally defensive argument: the liberal order was working and these guys are just dumb when they screw it up.
That framing is exceptionally weak. It does two things wrong simultaneously. It avoids asking why those institutions failed to prevent the conditions that made this political moment possible. And it provides the administration cover by treating conscious choices as unaccountable, which drives straight back to the first question.
You don’t accidentally invite your supposed strategic adversaries to join your peace board. You don’t accidentally refuse to name threats in every major policy speech. You don’t accidentally propose readmitting the country that invaded a European ally to the club of democracies. Pattern recognition at this point isn’t even analysis.
It’s just observation of evil.
Wright is a former Biden NSC senior director for strategic planning. The Atlantic doesn’t seem to notice, or perhaps care anymore, what shapes their entire frame. The piece reads like an institutional self-assessment where the institution still wants to grade itself passing. No mea culpa? The liberal order worked? The allies performed? The problem is that the new team doesn’t appreciate what they inherited?
No. The new team is carefully hooking up gasoline to the global sprinkler system. They know.
The new team isn’t confused. They know that spreading confusion is their tool, and they know exactly what they inherited and how they’re dismantling it on purpose. Until mainstream analysis can say that plainly, it will keep producing essays that document symptoms ad infinitum without diagnosing the disease.
The threat cannot be named yet, given how Wright thinks.
