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US Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg gave a somewhat surprising briefing in Brussels to the European press today. See the Official transcript and UK Grauniad coverage - the most comprehensive coverage in an English-language publication.
The quote that attracted most attention is in response to a question about EU AI regulation. Helberg says "I know that the National Security Strategy, the language around Europe and around civilizational erasure, drew a lot of attention in Europe. What I’d like to highlight is that that language is a warning. It’s not an insult. And – because there is a growing sense of concern and alarm in the United States about the fact that Europe’s economic – relative economic decline as a share of the global GDP is a crisis." The Guardian's headline writer describes this as "doubling down" on the criticism of Europe in the published strategy, but the actual article correctly points out that Helberg is doing the opposite - he is walking it back. The published strategy is crystal clear that "civilisational erasure" the US wants to prevent is about cultural change driven by mass immigration, that the main threat to the Atlantic alliance is the possibility that major European countries will cease to be majority white*, and that concerns about economic policy are secondary.
The reason why I wanted to post about this is that this is the latest in a number of pieces of circumstantial evidence suggesting that the US has fallen into the common trap of running one foreign policy out of the White House and a different one out of the State Department. Rubio being both SecState and National Security Advisor should make this impossible, but Vance seems to have taken over the usual role of the NSA as the principal opponent of the State Department in intra-administration battles. A dual foreign policy seems to be the best way to make sense of why the Trump administration is trying to make nice to Putin (in order to end the Ukraine war) with one hand while bombing and invading his clients with the other.
Two things are unusual about the way the Trump national security strategy was published - neither my search-fu nor ChatGPT identifies who wrote it (this would normally be a relatively senior person working for the NSA, and they were unofficially identified with previous strategies), and it wasn't publicly launched by the NSA (i.e. Rubio) at a major press event. Apart from a linguist helpfully pointing out that (unlike the 28-point Ukraine peace plan), the national security strategy was not translated from Russian, the only name mentioned by the press is Vance, with multiple outlets comparing the discussion of Europe to Vance's Munich speech. Does all this suggest that Rubio as NSA was not responsible for the document? Helberg, of course, works for Rubio, and quietly but publicly said that the strategy does not mean the Vance-aligned things it says. [Helberg is also, personally, a China hawk, and a major theme of his press briefing is that the main thing the US wants from Europe is for us to work with you on keeping China out of key supply chains].
In terms of the major foreign policy priorities of the Trump administration, Rubio is clearly in charge on Latin America - now apparently adding Paraviceroy of Venezuela to his increasing stack of hats. Vance has the unenviable job of going from TV station to TV station telling the ridiculously obvious lie that the ousting of Maduro was actually about drugs. (To anyone paying attention, including e.g. other corrupt Latin American leaders, the Hernandez pardon is a credible signal that it isn't). Whereas on Ukraine Rubio appears to be largely cut out, with diplomacy handled by people who work directly for Trump (Kellogg, Witkoff, and now Jared Kushner) and Vance conducting most of the open mouth operations.
If I had to sum up the difference between Team Rubio and Team Vance it would be that Team Rubio sees the number one threat as Chinese influence (and particularly Chinese influence in the Americas), Europe as a crappy ally that needs to stop freeloading, Russia as a committed Chinese ally, and defending Ukraine as a good idea in principle but a dubious use of US resources, whereas Team Vance sees the main threat as ideological, Europe as part of the woke enemy, Russia as a potential ally that needs to be brought in from the cold and offered a better alternative to their current arrangement with China, and the war in Ukraine as an obstacle to this. All factions seem to agree on Israel/Iran.
* The strategy says "majority non-European" but the meaning is clear in context.
This is a misunderstanding of the objectives of the Trump administration at this time.
The goal of the administration is not to impose a cohesive, functional policy worldview. Their goal is not long term control of the government and direction of policy. That has been judged to be impossible for a variety of reasons. This isn't a takeover, it is a raid, it is material and positional denial. The goal is to spike the cannons so that when the counterattack succeeds, the enemy will no longer be able to use those weapons. This will permanently tilt the board in the direction of preferred policies and against disfavored policies, even after the exposed salient is lost.
This is a particular application of Madman Theory, which Trump has often leaned towards, but I think it is better labeled in this case Unreliable Partner Theory. The goal isn't to extract concessions, as in Madman Theory, but to make it clear that you cannot rely on the United States under any circumstances, because the United States is deeply schizophrenic and unreliable. The rules based international order cannot be altered, but it can be ruined beyond repair. The deep ideological heart of Trump World sees the writing on the wall. A few weeks ago polling showed a 16% lead for Democrats in the mid terms on a generic ballot. Generic ballots aren't real, and it's ten months away, but a 16% loss would be a wipeout, and likely prevent any legislation from getting passed. Republicans, and especially MAGA candidates, have underperformed without Trump on the ballot, and he's not going to run in 2028, or if he tries he's quite likely to be unable to do the job in short order, being an 80 year old man who loves McDonald's and thinks that cardio reduces your lifespan because you only get a certain number of heartbeats before you die. Seeing that they only have a small window, the focus is not on implementing smart, sane, gradual policies that will build things for the future; it is on implementing radical, constantly changing, caleidoscopic policies that make it impossible to rely on the US Government in the future, forcing a decoupling of everything from foreign partners to local industry.
This is visible in the approach to the federal workforce. Can Trump shrink the federal workforce? Maybe, maybe not. But what he can done, what he already has done, is permanently break the understanding that a federal government job was a sinecure for life. The federal government is, for a lawyer or researcher or engineer, no longer a reliable partner. In the future when a Democratic president tries to expand the federal. workforce, they will find fewer takers.
The Trump Administration can remove some illegals in an orderly legal manner, but a later Democratic administration can just let more in. By being cruel and arbitrary, the Trump administration insures that no future illegal migrant, and fewer legal migrants, will feel safe coming to the United States, even after future policy changes.
The Trump administration can force new provisions into NATO requiring higher military spending by European countries, but those provisions already exist and won't be enforced by future administrations. (I've never understood the media theory for why talking about breaking Article 5 is a threat to NATO, while actually violating Article 3 for years is no big deal) But the Trump administration can act in such erratic and confusing ways that European powers will be forced to increase their military spending in order to provide for their own protection.
Viewed in this lens, the NSS and the confusion surrounding it makes a lot of sense. It's designed to scare the Euros straight, because even if these guys are out of power, they might be in power again, and it's doing a bang up job.
I think this is wrongheaded way to think, for one big reason, is I wish a lot of it were true, but it simply isnt. If Trump can't shrink the federal workforce, there is not going to be a deterrent effect. Federal employment isn't some high-prestige-low-pay proposition anymore. Its Mid-Mid. If you threaten the stability levels you aren't going to run out of candidates. In fact, most the lawyers and engineers I know that work for the feds basically got a huge pay bump and a lifeline out of failing careers in private practice to go federal. Those people aren't deterred by a few weeks or even months of interruptions so long as the civil service protections get them their back pay. If the AOC administration wants to hire 5000 new lawyers for the EPA to write crushing green regulations it will easily find 30,000 "underemployed" zealots to fill those positions, that, even if fired 4 years later, will have had 4 years where they made 30% more while working 50% less than they did at some PI or SSDI mill that advertises on billboards on the side of the highway.
The migrants issue is a little rosier from my POV. The fact that no laws were changed, and the border was significantly sealed AND people are getting deported I think does have a real incentive effect. But that is not some wrecker thing, its just actually following the law as written, and particularly with regards to border security, its what Americans have been asking for for basically 40 years at this point. The deportations are occasionally uglier, but that is just how its going to be when the majority of corporate media is hostile to any sort of action. I could, as a police chief, run an operation where my goal is to confiscate firearms from convicted felons, and the public perception of it would be largely determined by how the 3-4 local tv stations cover it. If they like me I'm making the streets safe, if they don't I'm racistly putting minorities in prison, and they will pick the appropriate video footage to so portray me (angry man with a gun vs. graduation picture of a guy whos now 29).
I do wish we could scare the Euros straight as well, I think they are too foolish for it though. They wont figure out self defense. They will continue to jail people for teaching their dogs to salute, or for complaining about their daughters being raped in impolite ways. Even the financial sanctions on the international court people wont get them to change their ways (just like the federal employees, its again a cadre of mediocrities making lots of money for doing little at all).
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One could sum it up as the two approaches being, respectively, geostrategic and civilizational. The Rubio doctrine seeks a correction of US state policy to respond to a changing environment, the Vance doctrine understands that the fundamental danger to the American people is the regime (not the administration, the permanent regime) and that Europe will be an enemy in that balance until they have their own regime changes. Eh, I like 'em both, and they often work together well - for instance, if you want to make nice with Putin, effortlessly slapping his client states gives him more incentive to respond in kind.
What does interest me is the Helberg quote. Looking at the transcript, he seems to be fumbling to give a non-answer to a question he maybe wasn't prepared for or didn't want to give specifics on (“Has the EU/UK done enough to limit the use of Chinese tech? Will the U.S. respect separate and distinct regulations by the EU/UK of AI and other tech-related activities, including search and so on?”), and when he brings up the National Security Strategy, he justifies it by referring to the previous question, also unrelated (“Would you like any further changes to the EU’s AI Act? If so, can you explain why?”). The sense I get from all of Helberg's responses is that he didn't really want to do a Q&A, he had some talking points about economic growth/deregulation he wanted to make without going into specifics, and the National Security Strategy line was a throwaway. Always a rough day at work first Monday after New Year's, I guess.
I think your idea that Helberg was rolled by the journalists makes sense. But I don't think the message Helberg had hoped to deliver was particularly about growth and deregulation. Given his personal interests, and the stuff he was talking about when he was in control of the agenda, I think the message he was trying to deliver was that the US and EU could and should still co-operate on anti-Chinese supply chain policy even as the relationship deteriorates in other areas.
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I agree with this, but let me rephrase this conclusion: Rubio is running a relatively classically (in an American sense) conservative foreign policy. They think Europe is weak and prissy, they don't trust international institutions, and they believe in unilateral action if allies are uncooperative, but their assessment of who US friends and enemies are is fairly conventional. Vance is pushing an extremely online The-West-Has-Fallen foreign policy. Openly worrying about the immigration policy and demographics of another continent is very peculiar from a normal security perspective, but makes significantly more sense as an expression of the not-so-subtly-white-supremacist faction of the Trumpist coalition. However, it's not really clear to me how much actual influence Vance wields in foreign policy versus being a dancing monkey for certain elements of the base.
Trump is, of course, drunkenly careening around doing whatever crosses his mind in the moment and leaving his subordinates to try and pick up the pieces (we're apparently back to threatening to invade our allies). This doesn't really help either faction - Rubio et al want the EU to cooperate in the anti-China coalition, which is significantly less likely if Trump insists on pissing directly into their mouth, while the Vance/Miller faction has to worry about Trump's behavior negatively polarizing European voters against the RW populist parties they're trying to promote (see also: the Poilievre collapse in Canada).
Vance did make an odd comment a few weeks ago on 12/22:
"Consider this hypothetical: If an opportunity is presented that would make Marco Rubio look good, be great for the administration, and wouldn't really involve me (at least publicly), what do I do?" Vance continued. "If I'm optimizing for 2028, I try to kill the opportunity. If I'm optimizing for the country, for the administration, and to be a good human being, we do it."
And it seems hard to imagine that this comment isn't about the Venezuela operation, considering that some reporting has claimed it was scheduled to launch on Christmas Day before the Nigeria strikes distracted everyone. Maybe Vance wants to claim he chose not to fight instead of having no influence? But Vance was in the Houthi strikes Signal group and actively talking, where Marco seemed to just be there pro forma, and Vance is clearly more aligned with a number of the other defense policy principals like Colby and Caldwell.
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