By Wayne Allensworth
Legacy media is making far too much of “Signalgate.” It’s another example of the Blob’s Media Megaphone blaring away about a single incident, shorn of context or anything comparable, then manufacturing a crisis and attempting to set the “news” agenda. I doubt that it works so well this time. Anyone with a sense of even recent history knows better. If you want an enormous, devastating “national security” blunder, look no further than 9/11. And where was the establishment media’s sudden outburst of curiosity when an obviously mentally-impaired President Joe Biden was in charge of America’s nuclear arsenal? Has everyone already forgotten Hillary Clinton’s storing classified information on her private email server? What did four years of open borders and deliberate negligence mean for “national security?” Other examples abound, but the point is clear. The same people who castigate Donald Trump about his propensity for hyperbole are all too ready to go overboard in describing the Signal incident as the Worst Thing That Ever Happened. That’s par for the course for them. As far as I can tell, Signal is widely used in the government and the military and has been for some time. Whether it should be and under what circumstances is another question, but all of us, including high level government officials, have grown too accustomed to depending on cellular communications. It led to far too sloppy security and an embarrassing leak.
But the leak itself is not what concerns me here. Far more interesting and important was that, as far we can tell, Vice President J. D. Vance was the only participant in the Signal chat who voiced serious concerns about the planned missile strike on the Houthis in Yemen. Vance thought it a mistake. He was concerned that if the strike’s justification were Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, the U.S. accounted for a very small part of that. Europe, on the other hand, had a much bigger stake. Vance believed that after demanding that Europe take on more responsibility for its own defense, the U.S. again would be seen as “bailing Europe out.” It would be hard for the American public to understand the justification for the attack.
Another point: The US has been taking sides in the Yemen conflict for a decade, supporting a war the Saudis mounted against the Iranian-backed Houthis that, once again, entangled the U.S. in a distant conflict that barely affects Americans. That intervention is another instance of the all-too-common knee jerk support of Israel against its current Enemy #1, Iran, no matter what. Yet something else about this story that grabbed my attention. According to The Western Journal, citing the Jewish Insider.com, while some Republicans supported Vance, other GOP lawmakers sharply criticized him. An anonymous GOP senator is “concerned” about Vance’s “foreign policy views.” The anonymous senator also said that Vance’s concerns were “quite revealing,” and that Senate colleagues think Vance’s attitude represents a “mindset” that is “perplexing” to “our European allies.” The senator added that Houthi strikes against Israel were quite enough justification for an attack.
Well, the anonymous senator’s comments are also quite revealing. He obviously thinks that apart from bailing out the Israelis, America is to forever continue in the role of world policeman, protecting our “allies” in Europe who won’t defend themselves. Vance is one of the public officials who sees things differently … and says so: America’s “national security” problems are not primarily abroad, but within. Deindustrialization, the collapse of marriage and traditional morality, flooding the country with “migrants” — while simultaneously playing globo-cop — is senseless. Globalism’s continuing hold on our elites or even the powerful influence of the pro-Israel lobby don’t fully explains the all-too-predictable criticism of Vance’s position. If anything,that GOP criticism the split in the Democratic Party over Israel and the Palestinians, and, of course, Vance’s interventionist skepticism reflect an erosion of globalist influence and the post-WWII foreign policy consensus. Yet even with the reaction against globalism in middle America, there remains an attachment to superpower status and all that entails.
“Another hangover from the Cold War is an unfortunate sense of an American ‘greatness’ that in MAGA form paradoxically recognizes some limits but nevertheless lacks humility. Perhaps the most important statement in Trump’s inaugural address was his saying that America should stop wars — and not get into them in the first place. But stopping the war in Ukraine is one thing. America has no grand mission there, making it easier for Trump to pressure the combatants to talk. With the Middle East, it’s different. An American Greatness still predicated in part on a missionary sense, on ‘exceptionalism’ and the idea of ‘progress,’ as well as on great deeds, Moon landings and technological achievements, sophisticated weaponry and super computers, could easily be once again commandeered by the globalists.”
Whether the Trump Administration understands it or not, attempting to disentangle our country from the Ukraine-Russia war, to pressure the Europeans to look after themselves, to “drain the Swamp” and dismantle the Deep State point to the end of an era that grew out of the post-WWII internationalist consensus and the globalist triumphalism that followed the Cold War. It points to the end of the U.S. as a hegemonic superpower. Trump himself acknowledges that we must engage with other great powers. But if America First means anything, it means a more modest assessment of American capabilities and a sincere attempt to put America and Americans truly first by dealing with the myriad fissures and pathologies endemic in our post-modern technocracy. The “Trump effect” extends beyond the man himself. It includes a revitalized questioning of the establishment’s received wisdom. It must also revive the sense among us that America is our home, not a knight errant on an endless quest that cannot possibly be fulfilled — perpetual war for perpetual peace. National pride fueled by scientific and technological achievements, wrapped in the myth of the “bloody shirt,” and contingent on “greatness,” is ultimately the path of dead empires. As proud as we may be of American knowhow and American achievements, even without those, we must love America because she is our own.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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