In mid-March Sebastian Gorka, the White House’s senior director for counterterrorism, took the stage at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. The think tank has served as the inner sanctum of the foreign policy establishment for more than a century: the place where a bipartisan collection of diplomats and strategists planned much of the postwar international order, and where Henry Kissinger published his first bestseller. Throughout its history the Council has prided itself on the collegial tone of its gatherings; its meeting guidelines state that “all participants are expected to maintain the highest levels of civility and respect.” And yet here was Gorka, a MAGA diehard known for threatening journalists and disparaging Islam, discussing the administration’s counterterrorism strategy with the PBS correspondent Nick Schifrin.
Gorka started by attacking Joe Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, who had just resigned from the Trump administration over the 2026 Iran war, calling him “an utter disgrace.” He lavished praise upon Trump (“What the president has done is absolutely astounding”) and insulted the press, from “the scum at Politico” to the “HuffPo jokers” to a New York Times journalist whom he described as “some piece of human filth.” He grew more combative as the conversation progressed, taking an errant swipe at the “transgender lunacy flag,” dressing down a Harvard Law School lecturer who tried to question him about Congress’s constitutionally granted war powers—“Who’s the commander in chief?” Gorka repeatedly asked—and lashing out when asked whether the administration planned for blowback from Iran: “I mean, you have to be smoking Hunter Biden’s crack pipe to believe this crap.” In each case, the moderator moved on to the next question.
Though Gorka exuded confidence on the CFR dais, he was in fact largely unwelcome in most policy circles until recently. During the first Trump term, he lasted less than a year in the White House, and was unable to obtain a security clearance; Foreign Policy denounced him as a “far-right nativist” and a “terrible scholar,” and even John Bolton called him a “con man.” Between Trump’s terms, he hosted a radio show called America First, entirely shut out of the mainstream save for appearances on Fox News.
But since Trump returned to office, the bipartisan foreign policy establishment has seemed eager to bring figures like Gorka into the fold. CFR recently hired Trump’s former Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg and economic adviser Pierre Yared as fellows, and has given a stage to more than a dozen second-term officials, including Jamieson Greer, Peter Navarro, Chris Wright, Doug Burgum, and Elbridge Colby. (Kristi Noem, then Homeland Security secretary, was due to speak in October 2025 but canceled two days before.) The Atlantic Council has brought on at least eight Trump administration alumni, including the former homeland security adviser Julia Nesheiwat (recently nominated for an ambassadorship-at-large to the Arctic), who sits on its board as well as being a distinguished fellow. The Center for a New American Security (CNAS), founded in 2007 to give the Democratic Party stronger defense bona fides in the George W. Bush era, now hosts events with Trump officials, like the hostage envoy Adam Boehler, who headlined the opener of its National Security Exchange series in September 2025; CNAS retains Ellen Lord, formerly the Trump Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, on its board of advisers. Not every institution has this access: at a January 2026 trade event, the Brookings Institution’s economic studies director said that “multiple” administration officials had been invited and none accepted.
The pattern continues beyond Washington. Sean Spicer and Corey Lewandowski have been fellows at the Harvard Institute of Politics, and Mick Mulvaney and Ken Cuccinelli at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. Robert O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser during the January 6 attack on the Capitol, was in the first class of distinguished fellows at the Columbia University Institute of Global Politics. Trump’s former National Security Council chief of staff Fred Fleitz, of the America First Policy Institute, spoke at London’s Chatham House in early October.
This courtship hasn’t abated since the Pentagon suspended engagement with think tanks in 2025, starting with its abrupt withdrawal from the Aspen Institute’s annual security forum on the grounds that the meeting, in the words of a Pentagon spokesperson, “promotes the evil of globalism, disdain for our great country, and hatred for the President of the United States.” (Aspen, in typically bipartisan fashion, continues to send invitations to Trump officials.) Senior officials at lower-profile agencies—such as Greer, the administration’s trade representative—still visit mainstream think tanks in D.C., which have also hosted off-the-record sessions with appointees like United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz. And the ban itself has sometimes proven porous, as when Pete Hegseth spoke at the Reagan National Defense Forum, a traditional Republican conference, in December.
Even when MAGA figures aren’t present, establishment gatherings increasingly seem to echo their brash and pugilistic foreign policy. At the recent Aspen Security Forum, former officials from other administrations treated the interventions of Trump’s second term—the overthrow of Venezuela’s president without a plan, the initiation of a cataclysmic war on Iran—as an opportunity to imagine how a more conventional presidency might carry on with such bellicosity. “We have big decisions,” Nicholas Burns, a distinguished career diplomat who served as Joe Biden’s ambassador to China and George W. Bush’s to NATO, said at a session on the Western Hemisphere. “Do we intervene in Cuba? Do we intervene in Venezuela further?” Later, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice championed Trump’s Iran offensive in terms that reprised Bush-era admonitions about the necessity of preemptive war. “People will say the threat wasn’t imminent,” she said. “Do you really want to wait until it’s imminent?”*
The Aspen Institute YouTube
Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice speaking at the Aspen Security Forum, Aspen, Colorado, July 14, 2026
Does all this suggest that the establishment is absorbing the tenets of MAGA, translating them into its own idiom? Or has the reverse occurred, with the notoriously hawkish foreign policy elite—what the former Barack Obama adviser Ben Rhodes famously called “the Blob”—tutoring a president who ran as an antiwar candidate in its commitment to militarism? I’m both an observer and a participant in the foreign policy community (I direct a think tank program, spent about a decade as a journalist in Washington, and am a dues-paying term member of the Council), and I’ve been mulling that question as I make the rounds at on- and off-the-record sessions, over lavish luncheon buffets and well-stocked open bars, in Washington and New York.
I’ve been around long enough to recognize that there is nothing novel in the imperialist rhetoric of a military-intervention-first foreign policy; Trump’s Washington sounds a lot like the D.C. of the Bush era. Indeed, the current merger owes much to the fact that the hawks inside and around MAGA—Marco Rubio, Hegseth, the late Senator Lindsey Graham—won the argument against the America First faction that wanted out of the Middle East, a fight that Kent’s resignation made public. But something new does seem to be happening. Bush’s advisers—Rice, Colin Powell, Stephen Hadley, Paul Wolfowitz—were drawn from universities, conservative think tanks, and earlier Republican administrations, with decades of government service between them. Trump’s heavyweights more often arrive from real estate (Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner), cable news (Hegseth, Gorka), or Silicon Valley (Jacob Helberg), their standing derived from loyalty or private fortune.
And while inviting such people to speak at policy shops is not improper in itself—engaging the government of the day is what these institutions exist to do—it’s worth noting who appears less often than they used to: the career ambassadors, regional specialists, and arms-control negotiators who were once the default speakers, along with the ground-up voices from Palestine, Iran, or Venezuela that were always scarce and are now nearly absent. At the institutions that certify foreign policy expertise, in other words—much as in the White House and the cabinet—MAGA operatives seem to be displacing the traditional diplomatic corps.
Although the Blob only got its name in 2016, an elite, bipartisan clique has been at the center of US foreign policymaking since the beginning of the cold war. In his book Tomorrow, the World (2020), the historian Stephen Wertheim details how a cohort of scholars, planners, and lawyers who came together during World War II designed the global institutions that emerged afterward. Crucially, this group had positions external to government—they were based in places like the Council as well as white-shoe law firms, foundations, and universities—which meant that they persisted from one administration to the next, revolving in and out of jobs in the national security state. From the first, their bias was toward war and military dominance. In the eighteen months between the fall of France and Pearl Harbor, “foreign policy elites undertook a thoroughgoing reevaluation of America’s world role, ultimately concluding that the United States should underwrite international order by securing its own political and military supremacy,” Wertheim writes. They found in the British Empire “a ready-made model for covering the stark coercion of superior force with the veneer of liberal freedom.”
The rarefied world of international affairs has long been siloed from domestic policy; in the postwar period as today, national security leaders were “responsible for the country but not responsive to it,” as David Halberstam wrote in 1972. Even the most disastrous results of American interventionism have never disqualified its proponents from holding senior positions in government. The members of Reagan’s national security team, who allied with paramilitaries that participated in massacres in Central America and mired themselves in scandals like Iran-Contra, continued to find jobs in subsequent administrations. The “peace dividend,” as George H. W. Bush and Margaret Thatcher termed the promise that profuse weapons spending would be redirected after the Berlin Wall fell, never arrived; military budgets just kept growing. Under Bill Clinton, the US bombed Iraq and ensured that the military alliance NATO kept expanding even after the Soviet Union disbanded. During George W. Bush’s presidency, nearly all of Washington rallied behind the expansive and expensive counterterrorism wars, and the Blob never held anyone accountable for the resulting quagmires.
Rhodes, who worked under Obama as his foreign policy speechwriter and deputy national security adviser, coined the term “the Blob” in response to the concerted campaign to stymie the Iran nuclear deal. Swept into office by Obama’s idealistic vision for the world and his ambitious campaign commitment to end the Iraq War, the team that included Rhodes was surprised to learn that “it was harder to build support for a diplomatic agreement with Iran than it was to take our country to war in Iraq,” as Rhodes said in a 2022 podcast interview. The groupthink they encountered was “often reflexively interventionist, without necessarily considering the consequences of interventions.”
In that interview Rhodes described the Blob as an assemblage of policymakers who “overstated the capacity of the United States to shape events inside of other countries, particularly in the Middle East.” The term captured not only the establishment’s tendency to speak in a single voice but also the way it seemingly could not be displaced; whatever blows reality delivered to its worldview, it would spring back into its accustomed shape. As if to affirm the existence of the phenomenon, many of the people who advocated for the Libya overthrow under Obama—which failed on its own terms, leading to civil war—then landed jobs in the Biden administration.
The concept of the Blob, as the name might also imply, is slippery and hard to pin down, not quite an ideology or a network or a collection of specific institutions but rather a combination of the three. The term irked many members of the establishment. “It’s a pejorative and imprecise way to dismiss those who disagree with you, and it doesn’t advance the foreign policy conversation,” Richard Haass, then the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told The New York Times in 2021. Others, like the former CIA director and career ambassador William Burns, have embraced the moniker in their own writing. Some have gone so far as to praise the group it describes. “In truth, the foreign policy establishment is an American strength rather than weakness,” the conservative academics Hal Brands, Peter Feaver, and William Inboden wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2020, in an article titled “In Defense of the Blob.” “It is more open-minded and accountable than its critics allow. It acts as a storehouse of accumulated professional wisdom, providing intellectual ballast to the ship of state.”
When it comes to mapping the Blob, certain think tanks are helpful landmarks, though it might be more accurate to focus on individuals, who often wear multiple hats at various institutions (working as lobbyists and consultants; serving on the boards of defense contractors and, recently, tech companies; and burnishing their CVs with think tank fellowships and scholarly sinecures). In short, the Blob is made up of influential people without a constituency. Membership is less about particular pedigrees or positions than an almost religious belief in American exceptionalism and a fervent commitment to a mode of postwar imperialism in which the United States’ status as an empire is never explicitly acknowledged.
The Blob largely rejected Trump in 2016. In an open letter that March, 122 Republican national security experts called him “utterly unfitted to the office.” This hostility surely had something to do with Trump’s call to “drain the swamp,” of which the Blob was clearly a part. But many leading voices of the establishment also misunderstood the president as an isolationist. “It is revealing that his adopted slogan of ‘America First’ initially gained currency in the 1930s as the isolationist banner of Charles Lindbergh, who fought to keep the US out of the fight against Hitler’s Germany,” Haass wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2016, warning that “the consequences of a lasting American retreat from the world would be dire.”
A few traditional Republican figures—Bolton and Mike Pompeo, as well as many nonpartisan military and intelligence officers—joined the new administration as national security cabinet members and senior advisers. They saw themselves as being there to keep an unconventional leader in check; the press dubbed them “the axis of adults,” a label Bolton referenced in his memoir The Room Where It Happened. (Bolton later warned, in a 2024 foreword to the book, that “Mr. Trump’s most dangerous legacy is the spread of the isolationist virus in the Republican Party.”)
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Donald Trump with National Security Adviser John Bolton in the Oval Office, August 20, 2019
Before long, however, Trump started displaying a penchant for interventionism. In 2017 he dropped the so-called Mother of All Bombs—the most powerful nonnuclear explosive in America’s arsenal—on Islamic State fighters in Afghanistan; he also accelerated drone strikes on Somalia and Yemen by relaxing the rules of engagement. In January 2020 he ordered a strike on the Iranian commander Qasem Suleimani. Some in the Blob hailed such moves as bold expressions of American power: in April 2017, after Trump launched dozens of Tomahawk missiles on Syria, Antony Blinken, later Biden’s secretary of state, wrote that Trump “was right to strike.” CNN’s Fareed Zakaria declared, “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States last night.”
With Trump’s loss to Biden in 2020, it became difficult for former Trump appointees to get jobs at establishment institutions, except for a handful of experts with the right credentials. Yet MAGA insiders still found affiliations at traditional neocon redoubts, like the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the Hudson Institute, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The influx of Trump alums into these Blob strongholds was part of a broader trend in which conservative organizations started taking on a more Trumpian feel; MAGA even took over the Heritage Foundation by 2021. At the same time, MAGA types created their own institutions, like the America First Policy Institute, which hosted cabinet officials and developed ideas in tandem with Project 2025, and the Abraham Accords Peace Institute, which focused on Middle East policy (and has since been integrated into Heritage).
As the Trump-aligned wing of the Republican Party gained importance, establishment figures began more openly cultivating relationships with their MAGA counterparts. In 2023 Hillary Clinton cofounded the Institute of Global Politics at Columbia University, which invited prominent practitioners as visiting scholars; it soon brought on Pompeo, who had served as Trump’s secretary of state and CIA director during his first term, as a fellow. Pompeo had laid a variety of traps to sabotage the incoming Biden administration, redesignating the Houthis as a terrorist group and upgrading relations with Taiwan. As secretary of state, he had threatened to release Clinton’s emails; earlier, when he was a member of Congress, he grilled her over the Benghazi affair. But last November they appeared together on stage at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in New York. After Clinton described the perceived threat from China in stark terms—saying that “the principal problem” for the US is whether it or “the Chinese Communist Party model” is “going to succeed in the twenty-first century”—Pompeo replied, “I agree with almost everything Secretary Clinton said there.”
Clinton nodded. “Record that,” she said.
Columbia SIPA YouTube
Former secretaries of state Mike Pompeo and Hillary Clinton speaking at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, New York City, November 12, 2025
By then the Blob had embraced major aspects of Trump’s foreign policy as its preferred solutions to long-held problems. In the Middle East, Washington’s think tanks prioritized establishing diplomatic relations between Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in a continuation of the normalization pacts Trump had sealed, known as the Abraham Accords—effectively putting aside the question of a Palestinian state. Biden never rejoined the nuclear deal with Iran, from which Trump had withdrawn, and never fully resumed the operations of the US embassy in Cuba.
Perhaps most notably, Biden’s administration more or less adopted the hawkish approach to China that the Trump team had laid out in its National Security Strategy in 2017. (Though the Trump plan built, to a certain extent, on Obama’s “Pivot to Asia,” it intensified the prior administration’s focus on “strategic competition,” defined as economic and geopolitical rivalry between two great powers, in the distinctly militarized terms that have since won over Washington.) “The best area so far of President Biden’s foreign policy has been on China,” Matthew Pottinger, Trump’s first-term deputy national security adviser and architect of his team’s Asia policy, said on CFR’s podcast The President’s Inbox. “It’s been a policy of continuity in many respects; he’s not dialed back many of the significant steps that we took during the Trump administration.”
Though he ran for a second term as an antiwar candidate—promising to end the Ukraine war on Day One and arrive with the Gaza cease-fire that Biden had failed to secure—Trump made it clear almost as soon as he retook office that he would in fact spend his term exerting military power. Within a year, he had launched extrajudicial strikes on boats that have since killed more than two hundred people in the Caribbean and the Pacific, in what legal scholars say amounts to murder. Some members of the Blob have noted the clear illegality of the strikes, while others, like Elliott Abrams, Trump’s first-term Venezuela and Iran envoy, argued in the fall of 2025 that they should go even further. Graham said that Trump had “all the authority in the world.”
There is plenty of precedent, of course, for the Blob cheering as an administration runs roughshod over US and international law. But the foreign policy establishment has tended to couch its interventionism in altruistic terms. The Trump administration, in contrast, doesn’t talk about winning hearts and minds or carrying liberties to unfree quarters of the globe; this is about raw American power, an attitude exemplified by the Jerusalem cross—the emblem of the Crusades—tattooed on Hegseth’s chest. As the president posted on Truth Social in April, “with a little more time, we can easily OPEN THE HORMUZ STRAIT, TAKE THE OIL, & MAKE A FORTUNE.”
And yet when Trump first waged war on Iran in June 2025, joining Israel in twelve days of hostilities, even Democratic hawks couldn’t entirely condemn the maneuver. As Blinken wrote in The New York Times, “The strike on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities by the United States was unwise and unnecessary. Now that it’s done, I very much hope it succeeded.” Earlier that month, when the US was engaged in diplomacy with Iran over its nuclear program, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer used the acronym “TACO”—for “Trump Always Chickens Out”—in a social media post that mocked the president for holding off on military intervention.
The overthrow of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, further invigorated the Blob. Both Republicans and Democrats have pursued devastating economic sanctions against the country for nearly two decades. While many from the Democratic establishment criticized Trump’s disregard for international law when news broke of the kidnapping, they also evinced a certain awe. “When we saw this operation unfold and we heard the results of it, I think we all thought, damn, that’s impressive,” Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, said on the podcast he cohosts, The Long Game.
The Blob, then, decries Trump’s disregard for norms while admiring the results of his lawlessness. Asked at Aspen about the worst part of Trump’s second term so far, Hadley said, “I think they need more process, they need more discipline.” After Maduro’s kidnapping, the lawmakers who criticized the president likewise did so mostly on proceduralist grounds, arguing that he should have sought congressional authorization for the coup. But the Democratic leadership hardly mounted resistance even amid signs that another US attack—on Iran, or possibly Cuba—was imminent. The former Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, an America First hardliner, objected in stronger terms than Democrats in Congress: “The ‘peace president’ went to war and is killing and wounding our troops,” she posted about Iran in June 2026.
These feeble responses from outside the administration have found an echo in the striking lack of dissent within it, beyond a handful of resignations like Kent’s. Since retaking office Trump has presided over the transformation of the security state. In his first term, he struggled to implement his foreign policy platform because of bureaucratic incompetence, internal resistance, and a muddled strategy. Over the past two years, his administration has systematically remade departments and agencies: Elon Musk dismantled USAID, Trump confidants purged the State Department’s career officers and other bureaucrats across government, and Hegseth transformed the Department of Defense into a “Department of War.” The civil servants who managed to hang on to jobs have largely accepted the current political climate and decided not to take the risk of pushing back. That has had broader effects, as the academic and former Obama administration defense policy adviser Van Jackson argued in his Substack newsletter, Un-Diplomatic. “My sense is that a large portion of people working in government right now are numb to just how far-right the state apparatus itself has become,” he wrote. “The Blob, in other words, is part MAGA now and scarcely realizes it.”
The foreign policy establishment is also being shaped by its relationship with a new, and newly influential, military tech sector. The Council has invited executives from Peter Thiel’s Palantir to speak about defense innovation and the ever-popular topic of AI, and held sessions with executives from Anduril—the military tech mega-startup founded by the MAGA billionaire Palmer Luckey—and the Trump-aligned venture capital behemoth Andreessen Horowitz. While the Blob has always included figures with close ties to the “primes”—the leading legacy defense firms—the new military tech mavens are arriving in Washington with a decidedly partisan political project. Companies like Musk’s SpaceXAI and Thiel’s Palantir have deep ties to MAGA, from Musk serving on the new Project Meridian commission to Thiel’s mentees serving throughout the executive branch. As they’ve gained power and authority, however, national security leaders from the Biden administration have also begun to pass through the revolving door to work for them, or for companies in the related finance sector. Biden officials have joined investment firms that partner with Musk and Thiel’s outfits, or been hired by Anduril or Andreessen Horowitz.
Jacob Helberg, a top Trump State Department official responsible for economic diplomacy, lately of Palantir, spoke in April at the Council’s Washington office about replacing traditional foreign assistance with investment and commercial diplomacy. During the Q&A, I asked whether anti-American sentiment—in response to the vast number of civilians killed in Iran and the US’s provision of weapons for what many have described as a genocide in Gaza—was impeding his diplomatic entreaties. The answer came in business terms. “Well, the Philippines just gifted us unconditionally 4,000 acres” for a high-tech industrial park, Helberg replied. “So I think it’s going pretty well. We’re not seeing any slowdown in interest or in desire to partner with the United States.” I heard similar language at other prominent think tanks. In April the deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, speaking at the Atlantic Council’s Global Prosperity Forum, said: “It’d be amazing to think of an Iran that was not an enemy state, but a state that would welcome private sector investment from the US and other countries.”
Atlantic Council YouTube
Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau speaking at the Atlantic Council’s Global Prosperity Forum, Washington, D.C., April 9, 2026
One reason that establishment institutions have increasingly welcomed the MAGA set may be that the latter promises to fill a vacuum of ideas at the former. The foreign policy consensus about the Middle East is a case in point. The think tanks were clearly at a loss after the attacks of October 7, 2023. In the weeks and months that followed, they largely avoided acknowledging the human cost of Israel’s military campaigns across the region—or even discussing the risk of blowback or legal liability for US policymakers. I went to homepage after homepage looking for analyses of Israeli war crimes and how they were damaging American interests, and found almost nothing. By fall of 2025, my organization’s polling showed that a third of Americans viewed Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide, and other polls suggest it may now be closer to four in ten. But the think tanks never mobilized the way they did at the start of the Ukraine war, when they spotlighted Russian atrocities.
Instead of hosting its own discussions about Israel and Palestine, the Blob seems to be signing onto Trump’s disruptive proposals. After decades in which the traditional goal of a two-state solution has come to seem increasingly far-fetched, institutions like the Middle East Institute or the Atlantic Council have appeared energized by the normalization agreements between Israel and Arab states. In 2025 the Middle East Institute brought on Kenneth Pollack, an influential advocate of the Iraq War, as vice president for studies; it also parted ways with Khaled Elgindy, who directed its Palestine program. Events on Israel–Palestine have dwindled, and judging by their descriptions, Israeli normalization comes up roughly twice as often as Palestinian statehood.
A similar phenomenon is playing out at other institutions. At a recent Atlantic Council event, the moderator, the longtime Middle East hand Brett McGurk, asked Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa about the prospect of establishing diplomatic ties to Israel without mentioning the long-standing prerequisite of creating a Palestinian state. The Trump formulation for Middle East policy, however contested, has become Washington’s status quo.
In a June article for the Financial Times, Hillary Clinton defended the president’s Board of Peace, a multilateral organization with pay-to-play membership requirements that appointed Trump—as an individual, not as the US president—to serve as its chairman, seemingly for life. (The human rights attorney Zaha Hassan has warned that the lack of oversight makes the board highly susceptible to corruption, and noted that it plans to “forcibly displace and dispossess Palestinians.”) Clinton presented her support as a matter of pragmatism, despite the fact that the board has done little to alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. “The Board of Peace and the plan contain elements many governments dislike or disagree with,” she wrote. “Yet if even I, an implacable opponent of the president, can accept that this is the best option, then surely others can too?”
This is the kind of alliance that Pompeo touted earlier this year at the JPMorganChase Center for Geopolitics. Its director, Derek Chollet, worked as a senior Biden national security official and one of Blinken’s closest advisers. Formerly a critic of Pompeo’s tenure in the cabinet, Chollet hosted him in February on the center’s podcast to discuss leadership. “We’re going to be just fine,” Pompeo said, “if we can get our senior leaders to sort of figure this all out and stop shouting and start talking.”