According to a formal whistleblower complaint, President Donald Trump withheld Congressionally-appropriated aid from Ukraine in an attempt to pressure Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Trump’s 2020 political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. In addition to seeking dirt on Biden, Trump also asked Zelensky to help locate the computer server allegedly used by the Democratic National Committee that was hacked by Russia, suggesting that Trump is intent on relitigating the Mueller investigation into the 2016 campaign.

Although Trump has tried to pass off this episode as entirely above board, he did all this largely outside official channels. Rather than going through the normal interagency process to carry out official policy, Trump tasked his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and several other loyalists to do his dirty work “off the books.” The White House also engaged in an attempted cover up of this chicanery, according to the complaint.

The controversy brings to mind a famous New York Times op-ed published a year ago. In it, an unnamed senior administration official, claiming to be a part of an internal resistance against the president, identified Trump’s “amorality” as “the root of the problem.” “Anyone who works with him,” the official explained, “knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.”

We agree. It is clear from the whistleblower complaint, the rough transcript of the Zelensky call, and Trump’s own public confessions that the president put his personal political interests above the national interest. While the revelations are shocking, they should not be surprising.

We study international relations, so that’s our frame for analyzing, in our forthcoming book, what drives Trump’s decision-making. To be sure, President Trump is a hard case. His foreign policy preferences often defy neat categorization, and many of his positions change with the political winds — sometimes even within a single news cycle. The president’s mercurial personality and psychological makeup, and his apparent lack of a fixed ideology, make it difficult to define his worldview with precision.

But it is possible to work out certain consistent features of Trump’s overall worldview that drive his approach to foreign affairs. And his apparent attempt to shake down a foreign leader to provide dirt on a political opponent makes perfect sense in light of these defining features.

First, Trump is driven by zero-sum transactionalism. This mentality pervades his thinking across personal and political domains, and explains his views on trade, alliances, and multilateral agreements. His record in office so far strongly suggests that ethical and strategic imperatives matter far less than whether Americans – or, more often, him personally – can gain at the expense of others.

This calculated transactionalism is reflected not only in Trump’s attempt to use the power of his office to further his own narrow election interests, but also in his expectation that Zelensky’s only concern would be narrow self-interest. Ukraine desperately wanted the U.S. military aid Trump withheld, and the president expected a simple zero-sum transaction — a quid pro quo, if you will.

Second, Trump is a stereotypical Jacksonian. “Jacksonian political philosophy,” explains the political scientist Walter Russell Mead in a 2001 book, “is often an instinct rather than an ideology…a set of beliefs and emotions rather than a set of ideas.” Jacksonians, according to Mead, are disposed “toward conspiracy thinking” and are willing to deploy the powers of the presidency “even at the cost of constitutional niceties.” That political leaders “employ vigorous measures” is more important to Jacksonians “than to worry about the niceties of international law.”

Indeed, Trump’s attempt to pressure Ukraine was driven in part by a stream of debunked conspiracy theories circulating on the fringes of the right-wing online media. One such theory alleges that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 elections on behalf of the Clinton campaign. Another claims that Vice President Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire its prosecutor in order to relieve his son, who was then on the board of a Ukrainian company Burisma Holdings, of scrutiny for corruption (in fact, the prosecutor was failing to go after corruption, the investigation into Burisma had gone dormant, and Ukraine’s current top prosecutors says publicly that there is no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the Bidens).

Third, Trump is obsessed with his own reputation. In a review of five hours of recorded interviews with Trump con­ducted by his biographer in the mid 2000s, the New York Times’s Michael Barbaro identifies Trump’s “deep-seated fear of public embarrassment” as his most powerful driving force. “The recordings reveal a man who is fixated on his own celebrity” and “anxious about losing his status.”

Again, this helps explain Trump’s determination to get information from Ukraine. The finding of the U.S. intelligence community and Special Counsel Robert Mueller that Russia meddled in the 2016 election to help the Trump campaign undermines the legitimacy of his election. Overturning that narrative by getting to the bottom of these Ukraine conspiracy theories required pressuring Kiev outside of official U.S. channels, something Trump apparently had few qualms about.

Finally, Donald Trump’s inclinations are unusually authoritarian by the standards of contemporary U.S. political culture. Scholars have been researching authoritarian personality traits in political leaders for decades. Authoritarians tend to share important psychological habits and decision-making styles. They have greater difficulty engaging in critical thinking, are more likely to blame scapegoats for societal problems, are given to superstition and stereotyping, place a high value on power and toughness, and tend to abuse and intimidate subordinates, thus suppressing an open and deliberative decision-making process.

Donald Trump exhibits all of these characteristics in spades. He demands loyalty from officials in federal departments that are supposed to be independent and nonpartisan. Trump has repeatedly attacked federal courts as illegitimate, and leveled ad hominem attacks against individual judges who had the gall to overrule his executive orders. He vilifies the press as “the enemy of the people.” He has recklessly accused the whistleblower of being a spy and Rep. Adam Schiff, who is leading the impeachment inquiry, of treason.

For President Trump to conduct his foreign policy in this way makes sense, given his character and his worldview, but that does not mean it is acceptable. It should make Americans rethink not just the expanded powers of the presidency, but U.S. foreign policy in general.

America’s outsized role in the international system is in part justified on the grounds that U.S. leadership is morally superior to the alternatives and that America is guided by higher principles. One need not confine oneself to the Trump years to appreciate the weakness of this claim.

But Donald Trump does clarify the danger. His ascendance to the highest office in the nation is per­haps the most compelling illustration of the hazards of vesting the pres­idency with so much unbridled power, both domestically and internationally. The presidency, and the global military presence it commands, must be cut down to size and properly checked by its co-equal branch. With or without Trump, any world order that depends for its survival on the whims of a single person in a single branch of gov­ernment in a single country is simply untenable.

Next Tuesday the People’s Republic of China is celebrating the 70th anniversary of its founding on October 1, 1949. Quite an extravaganza is planned, even as protesters in Hong Kong plan a counter-rally. China’s opposition to democracy in Hong Kong and in China itself is not just the recalcitrance of cranky old men. It’s part of the Chinese Communist state’s founding mission.


Take the speech of Mao Zedong on July 1, 1949, as his Communist armies neared victory. The speech was titled, “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship.” Instead of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it spoke of “the extinction of classes, state power and parties,” of “a socialist and communist society,” of the nationalization of private enterprise and the socialization of agriculture, of a “great and splendid socialist state” in Russia,and especially of “a powerful state apparatus” in the hands of a “people’s democratic dictatorship.”


Tragically, unbelievably, this vision appealed not only to many Chinese but even to Americans and Europeans, some of them prominent. But from the beginning it went terribly wrong, as really should have been predicted. Communism created desperate poverty in China. The “Great Leap Forward” led to mass starvation. The Cultural Revolution unleashed “an extended paroxysm of revolutionary madness” in which “tens of millions of innocent victims were persecuted, professionally ruined, mentally deranged, physically maimed and even killed.” Estimates of the number of unnatural deaths during Mao’s tenure range from 15 million to 80 million. This is so monstrous that we can’t really comprehend it. What inspired many American and European leftists was that Mao really seemed to believe in the communist vision. And the attempt to actually implement communism leads to disaster and death.

Fortunately, after Mao died in 1976, China changed rapidly. In far-flung parts of the country, villages and communes had already begun recreating markets and individual plots of land. Mao’s old comrade Deng Xiaoping, a victim of the Cultural Revolution, had learned something from the 30 years of calamity. He began to implement policies he called “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which looked a lot like freer markets—decollectivization and the “responsibility system” in agriculture, privatization of enterprises, international trade, liberalization of residency requirements.


The changes in China over the past generation are the greatest story in the world—more than a billion people brought from totalitarianism to a largely capitalist economic system that has eroded the continuing authoritarianism of the political system. But on its 70th birthday, the CCP still rules China with an iron fist. There is no open political opposition, and no independent judges or media. President Xi Jinping has become more authoritarian, and has concentrated more power in his own person than any ruler since Mao. Some say China is becoming “the perfect dictatorship.” But there are rumblings of dissent inside the Chinese leadership. Maybe the passion and endurance of the Hong Kong protests, coming on top of the oppression of the Uighurs and the Hui, closures of liberal think tanks, tightening of economic controls, and a general increase in repression, will be a beacon that will help China return to its faltering path toward openness.

As I point out in a new National Interest Online article, a multi-sided struggle for power in Libya continues to fester more than eight years after the United States led an air war to help rebels oust longtime dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Libya joins Iraq and Syria as a classic example of the failed U.S. regime-change strategy.

Fighting between Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar’s so-called Libyan National Army (LNA) and the even more misnamed Government of National Accord (GNA) has intensified in and around the capital, Tripoli. The LNA boasted on September 11 that its forces had routed troops of the Sarraj militia, a GNA ally, killing some 200 of them. That claim may be exaggerated, but there is no doubt that the situation has become increasingly violent and chaotic in Tripoli and other portions of Libya, with innocent civilians bearing the brunt of the suffering. Throughout the years of chaos, more than a million Libyans have become refugees, many of them trying to flee across the Mediterranean in fragile, overcrowded boats and perishing in the process.

The country has become the plaything not only of rival domestic factions but major Middle East powers, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Those regimes are waging a ruthless geopolitical competition, providing arms and in some cases even launching airstrikes on behalf of their respective clients.

Given the appalling aftermath of the original U.S.-led intervention, one might hope that advocates of an activist policy would be chastened, but that is not the case. The latest confirmation of continuing arrogance can be found in the new book by Samantha Power, an influential NSC staffer in 2011 and later U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Power’s response to the Libya horror the Obama administration created is shocking flippant. “We could hardly expect to have a crystal ball when it came to accurately predicting outcomes in places where the culture was not our own,” she contends. American Conservative analyst Daniel Larison excoriates her argument. “If Libyan culture was so opaque and hard for the Obama administration to understand,” Larison responds, it “should never have taken sides in an internal conflict there.”

Moreover, prudent foreign policy experts warned Power and her colleagues about the probable consequences of intervening in a volatile, fragile country like Libya. Indeed, Robert M. Gates, Obama’s secretary of defense, confirms in his memoir that the administration itself was divided about the advisability of intervention. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, Vice President Joe Biden, and Gates were opposed. Among the most outspoken proponents of action, though, were Power and her mentor, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The existence of a sharp internal division is sufficient evidence in itself that Power’s attempt to absolve herself and other humanitarian crusaders of responsibility for the subsequent tragedy is without merit. They were warned of the probable outcome yet chose to plunge forward.

The stance of Power and other interventionists seems to be that armed global crusaders never have to say they’re sorry, no matter how disastrous the results of their policies. The American people need to reject that attitude and hold the architects of catastrophe accountable for their blunders. Such a standard should apply equally to the neocons who brought us the Iraq debacle and the progressives who created the Libyan and Syrian fiascos.

I was saddened to learn of the recent passing of Earl Ravenal, a one-time member of Cato’s board of directors, long-time senior fellow and distinguished senior fellow, and an important voice in the development of the case against global interventionism in the 1970s and 1980s.

He taught international affairs for many years at Georgetown University, and was the author of several books and monographs, as well as countless papers and articles, including Never Again: Learning From America’s Foreign Policy Failures (Temple University Press, 1978), and this gem, from way back in the Cato archives, “Reagan’s 1983 Defense Budget: An Analysis and an Alternative” (Policy Analysis no. 10).

In his sweeping history of the libertarian movement, Radicals for Capitalism, Brian Doherty describes Ravenal as “a foreign policy intellectual of real-world heft.” He was active in Libertarian Party politics, and was responsible for writing LP presidential candidate Ed Clark’s campaign statement on foreign and defense policies in 1980.

Ted Galen Carpenter, who preceded me as Cato’s vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, recalls “Earl was nearly unique in the 1970s and 1980s in being regarded as a serious scholar by much of the foreign policy establishment, despite his unorthodox views. That status made him a true trailblazer for those of us who reinforced the case for realism and restraint. Without his pioneering work, our task would have been far more difficult.”

Another Cato colleague remembers Earl’s dogged effort to assess the share of the Pentagon’s budget that was geared toward defending Europe and Asia during the waning days of the Cold War. This was a daunting task, given that such spending is fungible, and the things that it buys mobile. A ship in Norfolk can be deployed to the Mediterranean, but also to the Persian Gulf, or even the Pacific Ocean (it just takes longer). Planes fly. Even troops can be relocated — though their bases less easily. In the face of such complexity, most people simply shrugged their shoulders: “Who knows?” Ravenal improved public understanding of America’s military posture in the early 1980s by forcing a discussion of these costs into the debate.

As a young Cato fan in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I encountered many of Ravenal’s books and articles on foreign and defense policy. The most influential was arguably Designing Defense for a New World Order, published in 1991. I (somehow) managed to locate it on my bookshelf, and discovered countless highlighted passages, and earnest comments and questions in the margins.

Earl’s family reports that he passed away on August 31, 2019. He was 88 years old. I extend to them my sincere condolences.

A memorial service will be held in his honor next month at the Cosmos Club on Sunday, October 27 at 2 pm. The public is welcome.

Update: The memorial service has been postponed until further notice. We will provide additional information when it is rescheduled.


Update: It is with sadness that we’ve learned Carol Ravenal, Earl’s wife of 63 years, passed away on October 28, 2019. A joint memorial service has been scheduled for Sunday, November 24 at 2 pm.

We have an article published in the latest edition of Survival critiquing America’s foreign policy of global interventionism and making the case for a grand strategy of restraint. Here are some excerpts:

The United States should reject the myths of primacy and the hyperactive foreign policy it has promoted. The United States is not the indispensable nation. Nor is it insecure. Nor is it capable of micromanaging the world’s affairs efficiently and effectively from Washington. In this light, the United States should pursue a more modest foreign-policy agenda that facilitates global trade and focuses more narrowly on the physical security of the homeland, while worrying less about trying to police the world.

…[A]lthough the American foreign-policy establishment sees US power as the linchpin of the global order and the United States as an indispensable nation, the truth is that many of the trends contributing to stability and economic growth are emergent phenomena, occasionally helped and occasionally hurt by US foreign policy, but driven by factors largely exogenous to US designs. Fortunately, many countries benefit from the relative peace and prosperity that prevails today and are therefore motivated to help preserve it. At this pivotal moment in history, America’s leaders should seek to lock in those attitudes and build a more resilient global order that is not overly dependent on a single dominant state.

…One thing Trump’s presidency proves is that even a commander-in-chief averse to the imperial responsibilities of primacy will not readily shirk them. Power does not check itself, either in the international domain or the domestic…Donald Trump’s ascendance to the highest office in the nation nearly three years ago was perhaps the most compelling illustration of the hazards of vesting the presidency with so much unbridled power. We share many of the concerns voiced by the foreign-policy establishment about what Trump has done, and might yet do, to US foreign policy, and how detrimental it could be to the stability of the international system. But any world order that depends for its survival on the whims of a single person in a single branch of government in a single country is simply untenable. Trump seems to have come along at the tail end of America’s ‘unipolar moment’, and the relative decline in US power is yet another reason to revise American grand strategy to accommodate changing conditions in an increasingly multipolar world.

We also lay out some guidelines for how to implement a more modest set of foreign policy objectives and for how to reconceptualize what qualifies as vital national interests under restraint. Do read the whole thing.

The piece is adapted from the conclusion of our forthcoming book, Fuel to the Fire: How Trump Made America’s Broken Foreign Policy Even Worse (And How We Can Recover), to be published next month.

This morning, President Trump announced via Twitter that he had directed Treasury Secretary Mnuchin to “substantially increase Sanctions on the country of Iran!”

I issued the following statement in response:

The problem with the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign isn’t the pressure. No one doubts that U.S. policy is imposing considerable pain on the Iranian people. Additional U.S. sanctions will likely increase this suffering, as my Cato colleague John Glaser predicted here.

But to no good end. The Iranians will never give in to U.S. demands; to do so would amount to utter capitulation, the complete surrender of Iranian sovereignty, and the de facto end of the Iranian government. This has been a fervent hope among certain hawks for decades, but hope is not a strategy. Additional pressure and pain cannot resolve the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the Trump administration’s strategy toward Tehran.

More broadly, if President Trump is serious about resetting U.S. foreign policy, he must revisit his expectations – and his administration’s policies. He may claim to want to end our endless wars, but his actions are leading in the opposite direction. A combination of bluster, threats, and intransigence will not produce a diplomatic breakthrough. On the contrary, it is likely only to exacerbate the many ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, and increase the chances that Americans are drawn more deeply into them.

The smoke hasn’t yet cleared from the attack on Saudi Aramco’s facility, but U.S. officials were quick to pin blame on Iran, with some even going so far as to suggest that military strikes could be – and should be – in the offing.

Such a move should upset constitutional purists; Congress hasn’t authorized military action against Iran for these purposes. The case that the Trump administration might present to Congress in an attempt to build support for strikes is unlikely to be compelling. Indeed, the story of the attack and what U.S. military strikes in retaliation would achieve is a lot more complicated than the war hawks would have you believe.

First, everyone should keep the likely economic impact in perspective. The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that production losses from the shutdown at the Abqaiq facility would amount to “about 5.7 million barrels a day,” or “roughly 5% of the world’s daily production of crude oil.” But such supply shocks are rarely long-lasting, and facilities like the one at Abqaiq are often quickly repaired. Saudi Aramco is no different from any other company in that it wants to increase production as quickly as possible, and so is highly motivated to make speedy repairs. (Boston University’s Josh Shifrinson makes a related point here.)

Second, the energy market in general is far more resilient than people give it credit for. In addition to the strategic petroleum reserve, which President Trump has hinted he might tap, other energy producers will want to replace the lost Saudi supplies. If President Trump were truly concerned about the possible impact on gasoline prices for consumers, he might also reconsider his decision to try to keep Iranian oil off the market.

That is unlikely, however, because too many in his administration –and the DC policy community, generally – seem genuinely excited to use this latest incident as a justification for a widening of the conflict with Iran.

Last week, for example, before the attack, the State Department’s Brian Hook suggested that Iran is primarily responsible for fueling the war in Yemen, and claimed that greater U.S. involvement in the conflict was essential to preserving American security. The facts suggest otherwise.

Mr. Hook and others exaggerate the extent to which Iran controls the Houthis. The latter are a distinct group largely driven by narrow, local goals – not a proxy group doing Iran’s regional bidding. They don’t take orders from Tehran. Aiding the Houthis hasn’t brought Iran greater regional control. What it has done is frustrate the Saudi coalition’s objectives, sticking them in a quagmire that has earned them much of the world’s ire.

While some in Congress want Americans to become even more deeply embroiled in the Saudi-Iran dispute, we might instead take this occasion to reconsider our reflexive support for the House of Saud. The United States is, after all, already heavily involved in the proxy war that the two countries are waging in Yemen, mostly through intelligence sharing and arms sales. A report earlier this year concluded that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates “used the US-manufactured weapons as a form of currency to buy the loyalties of militias or tribes” in Yemen, including some who are affiliated with Al Qaeda. Other arms reportedly flowed to Iranian-backed militias. The Senate voted in June to block further sales, with seven Republicans joining the Democrats to rebuke the White House. This rare case of bipartisanship is unsurprising given that numerous polls show that the American people are anxious to avoid getting sucked into yet more conflicts in the region. Americans also strongly disapprove of continued U.S. support for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, one of the most illiberal and repressive regimes on the planet.

Congress should seriously consider the implications of military action in response to the attack on Abqaiq. Military strikes against Iran would only exacerbate tensions and increase the likelihood of a larger military conflict. The Trump administration’s bid to embroil the United States even more deeply in a brutal civil war undermines Americans’ security and erodes American values.