I am a national security Never-Trumper who, after the election, made the case that young conservatives should volunteer to serve in the new administration, warily, their undated letters of resignation ready. That advice, I have concluded, was wrong.
.. The tenor of the Trump team, from everything I see, read and hear, is such that, for a garden-variety Republican policy specialist, service in the early phase of the administration would carry a high risk of compromising one’s integrity and reputation.
.. The president-elect is surrounding himself with mediocrities whose chief qualification seems to be unquestioning loyalty. He gets credit for becoming a statesman when he says something any newly elected president might say (“I very much look forward to dealing with the president in the future”) — and then reverts to tweeting against demonstrators and the New York Times. By all accounts, his ignorance, and that of his entourage, about the executive branch is fathomless. It’s not even clear that he accepts that he should live in the White House rather than in his gilt-smeared penthouse in New York.
.. The canary in the coal mine was not merely the selection of Stephen K. Bannon for the job previously filled by John Podesta and Karl Rove, that of counselor to the president and chief strategist. Rather, the warning signs came from the Republican leaders excusing and normalizing this sinister character — and those who then justified the normalizers.
.. No band of brothers this: rather the permanent campaign as waged by triumphalist rabble-rousers and demagogues, abetted by people out of their depth and unfit for the jobs they will hold, gripped by grievance, resentment and lurking insecurity. Their mistakes — because there will be mistakes — will be exceptional.
.. Until it can acquire some measure of humility about what it knows, and a degree of magnanimity to those who have opposed it, it will smash into crises and failures.
.. Until then, let the Trump team fill the deputy assistant secretary and assistant secretary jobs with civil servants, retired military officers and diplomats, or the large supply of loyal or obsequious second-raters who will be eager to serve. The administration may shake itself out in a year or two and reach out to others who have been worried about Trump.
For Putin, Disinformation Is Power
While most Americans saw the end of the Cold War as a triumph over the Soviet Union, most Russians saw it as a victory of their own common sense over a senile and inept regime that had run out of money and ideas and had lost its appetite for repression.
After Mikhail Gorbachev opened up the Soviet media, the contrast between socialist and capitalist economic systems had become too apparent.
.. Then came an American mistake: triumphalism, rather than congratulating the Russian people on their victory over authoritarian rule, and using a short window of opportunity to offer Russia sufficient economic aid to ease the pain of a collapsing economy.
.. Every time Russia attacks a former Soviet republic, the confrontation is portrayed as a proxy war started by America against Russia.
.. Now Mr. Putin, who is known to bear grudges, appears to be disrupting Mrs. Clinton’s own presidential campaign with “active measures.”
.. Mr. Putin has long dreamed of a new Yalta-style agreement to let Russia and America divide Europe again.
.. An angry and declining Russia is far more perilous than an ascending economic power like China.