The multipolar era in the White House

The leaked Signal chats are a good reminder: when it comes to foreign policy, the Trump administration is not a unitary actor

"This [is] not about the Houthis." — Pete Hegseth, hours before America bombed the Houthis

An introductory note: This will be a home for periodic writing that is too long for Twitter and too niche or off-topic for my day job. Much of it will focus on the Middle East, but I hope to venture a bit further afield as well.

By now we are almost a week into Signalgate, the Trump administration’s “who among us hasn’t accidentally added a journalist to a group chat full of classified attack plans” scandal. The commentary in Washington has focused primarily on the blunder itself. I want to look at something different: what the scandal reveals about Trump’s approach to the Middle East.

I went to Washington a few weeks ago for meetings, and one of my takeaways was that his regional policy is a bunch of competing poles with no center. The debate over Yemen bears that out. When it comes to foreign policy, the Trump administration is not a unitary actor.

In 2023 the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, came up with a helpful taxonomy of foreign-policy views in Trump’s Republican party. It divided them into three feuding tribes:

• The hawks (or “primacists”, to use a more neutral term), who think America should aspire to remain a globe-bestriding superpower;

• Their opposite number, the isolationists (or “restrainers”), who want America to limit its foreign military commitments and focus on its near abroad;

• In the middle, the “rebalancers”, who argue for reducing the American role in Europe and the Middle East in order to prioritize Asia.

When it comes to the Middle East, the latter two camps seem to collapse into one. Both want a diminished American role in the region: different reasons, same result.

The isolationist camp has been skeptical of Waltz, a longtime hawk who claims to have undergone a recent conversion. Signalgate was a perfect opportunity to wound him. For the “restrainers”, the problem was not just that Waltz screwed up by adding Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, to the chat. There was a deeper issue: why was he even talking to Goldberg, a journalist known for hawkish views on the Middle East? Surely he was planning to leak things and undermine his ideological foes. (Trump himself seems to share this concern.)

Thus Waltz finds himself on the defensive. Even though he committed the original sin of adding Goldberg, it was Hegseth who committed the arguably greater sin of sharing classified attack plans in the chat. But the latter’s job seems secure—because his views are closer to those of the “rebalancers”, who have more sway in Trumpworld.

Waltz’s allies have tried to fight a rearguard action focused on the substance of the chat rather than the chat itself. On March 27th Jewish Insider reported that unnamed Republican senators were unhappy with Vance’s isolationist arguments against bombing the Houthis. Not long after, the vice-president went nuclear on the site’s editor-in-chief:

This went beyond the usual Trumpian attacks on the press. Why would the vice-president make such a harsh personal attack on the editor of a niche publication, over an issue as obscure as mixing up the names of militant groups? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Jewish Insider has published a series of pieces criticizing Vance’s ideological allies at the Pentagon.

Other examples abound. Steve Witkoff, the president’s Middle East envoy, does not seem to have deeply-held views on foreign policy. But his instinct for making deals tends to put him at odds with the hawks. An acquaintance in Washington described Morgan Ortagus, his deputy, as the “pro-Israeli eyes on Witkoff”. Trust does not run deep in Trumpworld: this is an administration fighting with itself.

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What’s striking about the leaked chats is their focus on politics. Vance (to his credit) at least raises concerns about the second-order consequences of bombing Yemen: it could affect oil prices or drive the Houthis to attack Saudi Arabia. But there is no other talk about the efficacy or real-world implications of a strike.

Neither side can make their real arguments. Hegseth alludes to that difficult when he says this is “not about the Houthis”. He wants to pursue a narrow goal (reopening the Red Sea for commercial shipping) that is very hard to achieve without pursuing a broader goal (removing the Houthis from power in Yemen). But he cannot talk about the latter without sounding like too much of a hawk.

Vance plainly does not want to do the strikes, but there is no American greatness in arguing that a campaign against the Houthis might be long and strategically ineffective. Instead he is left to mutter about volumes of trade through the Suez canal.

The whole debate is refracted through the funhouse mirror of intra-conservative politics. Which is the real MAGA policy, standing up for freedom of navigation or telling those freeloading Europeans to deal with it themselves?

All of this is a trial run for the much bigger (and more factious) policy debate around Iran. My sense, from conversations in Washington, is that Trump and Witkoff both want a new nuclear deal. That worries the hawks, who think this is a moment to keep the boot on Iran’s neck.

At the same time, I am skeptical that Trump and Witkoff will get their deal—in large part because Iran does not seem to understand that times have changed, that this is not 2015, that they have a narrow window to conclude an agreement before they face a serious military threat (more on that in a future post). That worries the isolationists, for obvious reasons.

During the first Trump administration, everyone was more-or-less united around their demands for a new agreement. There is no unity this time around. In the past week Waltz has demanded “full dismantlement” of Iran’s nuclear program, while Witkoff has called for a “verification program” to ensure Iran is not building a bomb. Very different things! The former is impossible to achieve in a negotiated agreement; the latter is wildly insufficient to satisfy many American lawmakers, to say nothing of the Israelis.

Another striking thing about the past few weeks: Republicans keep talking about Signalgate. The sensible thing to do, politically, would be to let the scandal die. But the scandal is a proxy for a larger fight, and both sides of the ideological divide want to use it to tip the balance of power in their favor.