Ideology is Supplanting Intelligence

Paul R. Pillar

Foreign Policy Iran, United States Middle East

With Donald Trump’s earliest appointments to senior national security positions, some of the disturbing implications for the making of foreign policy of his own lack of qualifications for office are beginning to appear.  A president-elect whose outrage-filled campaign alienated many serious thinkers in both parties has made personal support even more of a paramount consideration in the appointment process than it usually is, and even more than Trump’s own inclinations would have made it in the first place.  Not only does the priority given to insight and objectivity thereby lessen; the president-elect’s own thinness of understanding of the national security issues involved makes it hard for him to perceive the lack of insight and objectivity of potential appointees.  Some people are thus attaining positions of power and influence not because of perspicacity and temperament that would make them suited for the jobs they are given but instead because they were not sufficiently outraged during the campaign to exile themselves from Trumpland.

Once in office, the same thinness of understanding at the top will leave the new president ill-equipped to question, to critically appraise, and to push back against whatever hobby horses his non-objective appointees bring with them.  A president who doesn’t read books and gets what he thinks he needs to know from “the shows” will be a poor corrective to the less constructive tendencies of ideologues below him.  Ideology will bounce around inside a small echo chamber without other correctives from the outside.