Anne Applebaum writes:

Last year, a team of American diplomats from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center traveled to two dozen countries and signed a series of memoranda. Along with their counterparts in places as varied as Italy, Australia, and Ivory Coast, they agreed to jointly expose malicious and deceptive online campaigns originating in Russia, China, or Iran.

This past September, the Trump administration terminated these agreements. The center’s former head, James Rubin, called this decision “a unilateral act of disarmament,” and no wonder: In effect, the United States was declaring that it would no longer oppose Russian influence campaigns, Chinese manipulation of local politics, or Iranian extremist recruitment drives. Nor would the American government use any resources to help anyone else do so either.

The recent publication of the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy showed that this decision was no accident. Unilateral disarmament is now official policy. Because—despite its name—this National Security Strategy is not really a strategy document. It is a suicide note. If the ideas within it are really used to shape policy, then U.S. influence in the world will rapidly disappear, and America’s ability to defend itself and its allies will diminish. The consequences will be economic as well as political, and they will be felt by all Americans.

Before explaining, I should acknowledge the curious features of this document, which seems, like the Bible, to have several different authors. Some of them use boastful, aggressive language—America must remain “the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful country for decades to come”—and some of them prefer euphemism and allusion. Sometimes these different authors contradict one another, proposing to work with allies on one page and to undermine allies on the next. The views expressed in the document do not represent those of the entire U.S. government, the entire Republican Party, or even the entire Trump administration. The most noteworthy elements seem to come from a particular ideological faction, one that now dominates foreign-policy thinking in this administration and may well dominate others in the future. [Continue reading…]