The MAGA FP Documents…

How do you even deal with this?

I don’t expect this to be a big deal because I do actually think that folks can see through this garbage. I do wish that the “Restraint” community had made itself more useful with respect to MAGA foreign policy, but much as with Afghanistan the institutions of that movement have failed dreadfully. It’s been quite clear for a while that the Quincy Institute is interested in building a relationship with MAGA; some lefty pundits have resisted this conclusion mostly because they have friends who work at Quincy, but you don’t invite David Sacks to contribute because of the quality of his prose or his deep intuition. Kelly Vlahos, for example, can barely contain her enthusiasm for Trump’s efforts to sell out Ukrainian democracy come January. Fortunately or no, most of the quality people associated with the Restraint position have been so put off by Quincy’s horrific response to Russia’s invasion that they’ve moved along, leaving a crew who are either MAGA chuds or at the very least MAGA tolerant. It takes a lot to pretend that Trump would have been better on Gaza than Biden and that Trump’s promises to invade Mexico are a “seriously, not literally” kind of thing, but as long as he’s serious about abandoning Ukraine I guess pretending will be enough.

In other news of MAGA foreign policy, James Pogue’s deep read of Steve Bannon’s foreign policy thinking is worth your time, as is Van Jackson’s commentary on same. I know that the domestic stakes of this election are quite dire, but the foreign policy side could get very ugly very quickly.