Trump Does Not Know How to Run an Empire

Politico

06-03-2025

America's 41st president, George H. W. Bush, hated the word empire, but he knew how to run one. He was president at the moment the Berlin Wall fell: when the United States instantly became a unipolar power. His deft foreign policy made him the second greatest one-term president in American history (after James K. Polk, who oversaw the largest-ever expansion of our territory, making us truly a continental nation). The elder Bush knew exactly how to both project and husband American power. In order to keep the Pacific stable, he refused to break diplomatic relations with China after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, as members of the Washington policy and intellectual class then were demanding. He refused to make a victory tour through Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War, in order not to humiliate the Soviets, who might then have used military force to preserve the Warsaw Pact. And he refused to march on to Baghdad after liberating Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1991, for fear of dismantling the Iraqi state.
The elder Bush was fond of saying that 'public service is a noble calling,' a conviction that was connected to his understanding of American empire. As our last aristocrat in the White House, the elder Bush was always deeply solicitous of not only his own staff, but of the federal bureaucracy. He saw government service as a noble calling because he deeply understood that he couldn't have accomplished anything without the veritable army of diplomats, area specialists and civil servants who did the meticulous staff work leading up to the momentous decisions of his presidency.
Bush, a World War II hero as a Navy pilot, believed fiercely in America's mission abroad. This made him an idealist and the best kind of imperialist: a reluctant one, who comprehended that it was a talented bureaucracy that projected world power through him. And it wasn't only Bush who understood this fact. Henry Kissinger once told me that while he had differences with the State Department's Arab experts, he never could have accomplished what he did in the Middle East without them. He relied on the men and women of the U.S. Foreign Service to tell him what was happening on the ground in each Middle Eastern country where he thereafter conducted a master class in diplomacy.
Yet these are the very people whom the Trump administration is moving not only to fire, but to humiliate.
President Donald Trump may be an imperialist or a mercantilist, or even a deal-maker extraordinaire as he prefers to think of himself. In any case, in his second term he appears to be in the business of exerting American power abroad, from Greenland to Gaza. But no modern empire has ever successfully projected power globally without a competent and motivated bureaucracy. The late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington wrote that the more complex a society becomes, the more it needs institutions to run it. And this is especially true of an empire, which the United States has been in functional terms since 1945. Americans may, like the elder Bush, be uncomfortable with the word empire, but our successes, challenges and even disasters have been akin to those of all the great empires of history. The Trump administration's war on its own imagined 'deep state' is essentially a war against the very institutions needed to organize society at home and especially, defend it from its enemies abroad.
American power abroad is expressed not only through presidential decisions, but through the power of institutions, notably the State Department and the Defense Department. American diplomats deal with crises in dozens upon dozens of countries in the world on a daily basis that you never read about: they include small countries and large, troubled, and complex states like Pakistan, Nigeria and Colombia. The finest linguists and political secretaries are needed in overseas embassies to manage such challenges. Weaken the bureaucracy at this crucial level — at the same time you are discouraging new generations of young people from going into public service — and you weaken American power itself. This might take time to be noticed, but its effect will be real and insidious.
While the Trump administration and conservative media deride those who staff these institutions as members of the 'deep state,' these are people I have personally known and reported on for a lifetime. They constitute the national security bureaucracy, and bureaucracy in this case is a word I have come to respect through my life experience writing about the world. Remember that even mass democracies require a bureaucratic elite to manage a world, especially one of imperial dimensions. For eight years I was a senior fellow at a Washington think tank, the Center for a New American Security, a center-left organization designed to prepare technocrats for government service. I have also written books about Middle East and China area specialists; as well as a book on the operations of the U.S. Agency for International Development on the ground throughout the Cold War. Yet, I do not recognize at all the people that Trump and tech mogul Elon Musk describe as part of an inefficient and corrupt government.
My colleagues who went on to become deputy assistant secretaries of state and defense, assistant secretaries of state and defense, undersecretaries and deputy secretaries — as well as ambassadors — were overwhelmingly politically moderate centrists, emotionally well-balanced, detail-driven technocrats who were at the same time idealistic about accomplishing great things in governments. Their heroes were the architects of the postwar order that America designed during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations: Gen. George C. Marshall, and diplomats and area specialists such as Averell Harriman and Charles Bohlen. My colleagues, like most people, wanted financial security and pensions, but their careers were not designed so they could get rich. They did it because government work excited them.
These are the people whose staff work serves up the options for the top American decision makers, as well as carry out their policies on the ground around the world. They are not necessarily bold thinkers, but that has never been their jobs. You acquire boldness through experience; otherwise you are reckless. Robert M. Gates, arguably the finest secretary of defense since the Cold War, spent four decades working his way up the national security bureaucracy as a so-called 'deep-stater.' I worry that the officials Trump has appointed to run the Defense department and other bureaucracies have spent little or no time acquiring the experience necessary to responsibly project power within their institutions and thus around the globe.
In other words, Trump wants to exert control worldwide, but his actions against the bureaucracy undermine that goal.
Take for example the area specialists. The Arabists and the China experts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have been some of the finest bureaucrats I have encountered. They are the ultimate early warning system: the Arabists warned against the 2003 Iraq War and the China experts about the political and economic dangers of a conflict over Taiwan. You want the very best people in these jobs. Empires at their best encourage cosmopolitanism, that is, a knowledge of other languages and cultures required for the maintenance of good diplomatic and security relations. Yet the Trump administration is essentially telling brilliant, linguistically adroit young people not to want a career in government. It is fine to trim bloated bureaucracies in order to save money and to improve efficiency. But it is another thing entirely to make life miserable for those who remain by requiring them to fill out weekly forms about their activities and so forth. In such a circumstance, the very people you need to be motivated won't be, and will look elsewhere for careers.
Nothing demonstrates how the Trump administration's war on bureaucracy is actually a war on American power than its action to dismantle USAID. USAID, through its projects often run by non-governmental organizations, has been for decades doing much more than running humanitarian programs throughout the developing world. In fact, these programs don't operate in the abstract: Because they are on-the-ground operations often in far-flung areas of a given country, they build vital human connections that are money in the bank for diplomats and military people to utilize, especially during crisis situations where local contacts are essential. An empire is about more than guns and money, it is also about the maintenance of relationships built up on official and non-official levels throughout the world by way of, among other things, humanitarian projects. Trump has been rightly concerned about the rise of Chinese power around the world, but has seemingly not realized that China is itself spreading its influence in large part through development projects. Dismantling our humanitarian projects in places like Africa and South America leaves a vast opening for the Chinese to fill with projects of their own. It will also hurt our intelligence gathering, as USAID staffers have had their own networks in the hinterlands of difficult countries.
The postwar American-led order has been administered through three non-economic pillars: NATO, USAID, and various treaty alliances in the Pacific. The Trump administration disdains the first, is trying to gut the second, and is making the third very nervous. America's Pacific allies all have China as their main trading partner. A tariff war can lead to real war. We shouldn't want America's allies to be forced to choose between the United States and China. If Trump is not careful, his self-declared 'golden age' can become an age of decline.
The British Empire lasted as long as it did through the brilliance of its diplomats and intelligence agents. As I can attest through reporting in Africa and elsewhere in the 1980s and 1990s, British influence continued for decades afterwards, partly because the British embassy or high commission in each country was manned by equally brilliant people who could always be counted on to deliver a great briefing to a reporter. Nothing projects power like the quality of people in your vital institutions at home and at your embassies and other missions around the world.
The most long-lasting world powers and empires succeeded not by raw power but by various methods of persuasion: the more subtle the approach, the more longevity for the great power involved. And such persuasion involves a talented and well-functioning bureaucracy, exactly what Trump is seeking to destroy. Our bureaucratic elite is not like others around the world: its sense of seeing little differentiation between American self-interest and promoting human rights and democracy might be somewhat naïve and self-serving, but it is real and deeply felt. These bureaucrats know that without that sense of idealism, America's foreign policy descends into a sterile, ruthless realpolitik: like China's. And no empire or great power has lasted very long without a sense of mission. That's why Trump's policies toward the bureaucracy are in direct conflict with his goals abroad, even if he doesn't know it.
Public service is the secret sauce that has maintained our position in the world for decades. If it is not nurtured and loses its nobility, the American Experience itself will darken. Empires have governed and organized humanity for thousands of years. At least ours has so far been benign (our blunders notwithstanding). And keeping it that way takes work. This is something that our 41st president knew in his bones.