MAGA Foreign Policy is Death and Domination
...but it narrates itself as “post-primacist.” Don’t believe it.
An impossibly weird thing happened.
Assuming you know who these two are, you might be doing a double take. But this is not what it looks like. It does, however, reveal something important about the MAGA mindset on foreign policy, which is not even honest with itself let alone others.
Bridge wants to dissociate his political project from the primacy label by associating primacy with two decades of horrific Middle East policy. There’s truth in that, but that’s just one _expression_ of primacy. What he seeks is not post-primacist—he wants to move the goal posts for the standard of primacy to be all about China.
Let me explain.
A Fake Convergence
Matt Duss, as many Un-Diplomatic readers likely know, was Bernie’s foreign policy adviser and is now the EVP of the Center for International Policy (where I’m affiliated). It’s one of the few strongholds in DC for progressive foreign policy thought.
Bridge Colby, for those who don’t know, is a right-wing patrician “defense intellectual” best known for his single-minded obsession with insisting America sacrifice everything in order to win a war with China that he believes is inevitable (…unless, he says, we sacrifice everything to mobilize for a war with China). And no, he doesn’t accept the self-fulfilling nature of that reasoning.
Bridge is also unique among Washington foreign policy elites for his open alignment with the MAGA right. Not only did he serve as a political appointee in the Trump administration—he’s been advising Ron DeSantis on his red-baiting, threat-inflating, anti-democratic horror show of a China policy in the ongoing presidential campaign. Bridge has also identified with some extremely odious far-right views over the years. I’ve been planning to write more about it for a while and will definitely get to it in 2024.
I only gesture at it now because if you know the backgrounds of these two folks, you might find it exceedingly jarring to see Bridge agreeing with Matt.
The thing is, he’s not agreeing with Matt. He’s trying to co-opt Matt’s view, which is consistent with the MAGA movement’s positionality on foreign policy. Like all things far right, MAGA foreign policy tries to seize on the rhetorical critiques from progressives and socialists while providing their own dystopian answers to the critiques.
The left is hyper-critical of basically every version of American primacy because it underwrites American militarism abroad, global fiscal crises, an inequality-exacerbating permanent war economy, and a growing crisis of mental health problems and substance abuse among veterans. Primacy also, you know, makes the world more dangerous. Anyway, the critiques are not new if you’ve been on Un-Diplomatic for a while.
But what Bridge is doing is seizing on the left critique of primacy to say, “Yeah, I’m against primacy too! Those deep-state elites sold out or country by dragging us into stupid wars in the name of primacy!” Bridge is, of course, in denial about being the preeminent deep-state elite insofar as they actually exist. He also refuses to acknowledge that his anti-China political project is precisely what promises to drag us into the next stupid war.
More importantly, he’s gaslighting the public (and possibly himself?) about what is and is not primacy. Two things here give Bridge’s game away.
Bridge Was an Unrepentant Author of US Primacy
First, Bridge was involved in the Trump White House’s “U.S. Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific” that was declassified in 2021. It explicitly affirmed US primacy as a means and end of US strategy. As I break down that document in Pacific Power Paradox:
Trump’s National Security Council thought of military superiority as…serving “U.S. strategic primacy”—a term of art explicitly referring to “diplomatic, economic, and military, preeminence.” This phrase, with this precise understanding of its meaning, was used in a paper declassified by the NSC just as Trump was leaving office in January 2021. The document…claimed that a “Loss of U.S. preeminence in the Indo-Pacific would weaken our ability to achieve U.S. interests globally.” It was logically problematic given that the same document defined “peace through strength” as one of its four paramount interests—meaning that loss of “preeminence” threatened the goal of having “strength”…Understood more charitably, the document was saying that a negative peace, achieved through the projection of preeminent strength, was as good as it gets; there was no deeper peace to be had.
US strategic primacy = diplomatic, economic, and military preeminence. There’s even a line in there that says “Maintain US primacy in the region.” That was Trump’s strategy. Bridge was one of Trump’s leading strategists. Unless Bridge disavows the work of his recent past and the core of his service in the Trump administration, Bridge is a primacist. What am I missing here?
Moving the Primacist Goal Posts
But there’s a second way in which Bridge is masking his own hyper militarist project, by marketing it as something other than primacy (thereby making it more appealing if you don’t think too hard about it). Essentially, Bridge is playing a language game that treats “primacy” as nothing but a signifier for America’s disastrous Middle East policy, including the War on Terror.
Now, the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq, and weapons-dumping across the Middle East do represent violent disasters that are downstream of primacy. And a different, non-primacist orientation toward the world might have meant something less disastrous for the Middle East.
However!
That’s not all primacy is, man. That’s just one _expression_ of it. What a primacist strategy looks like and requires of the military depends on the historical conjuncture in which it’s pursued. Primacy is about the capacity to dominate, of course, and that has a material component—military superiority.
But what satisfies that military standard for domination? Well, it used to be sizing and shaping the military for two mid-sized regional wars in different regions but overlapping timeframes (the two-war construct).
During Bridge’s tenure in the Trump Pentagon, military superiority became both the overall national security strategy priority—not just a defense thing—and a standard that was redefined to mean overmatching China in a war over Taiwan, just off China’s coastline. As I’ve explained many times and probably will again in the future, that standard is unreasonable given both China’s arsenal and the geographic scope of the challenge.
Reasonable people can disagree about how best to defend Taiwan, how best to prevent war over Taiwan, whether it makes sense to commit to defending Taiwan, and what the relative priority of these questions should be.
What is unreasonable, though, is pretending that:
pure overmatch against China in a Taiwan scenario is feasible,
US national security is reducible to war planning for China,
there is no domestic political price to be paid for war alarmism about China, and
sizing and shaping the military to win a war against China off its coast is not primacy (it very obviously is).
Bridge is a primacist, and he has been his entire public life. It’s on the record. What he’s saying now does not recognize that he is the very thing Matt is warning about: “be wary of new variants [of primacy] driving us into potentially worse disasters.”