The emperor's new clothes ...

Until this weekend, I couldn't, for the life of me, understand how classical liberals or Republican national-security intellectuals could ever talk themselves into supporting a second Trump term. Leaving his obnoxious personality and on-call mob to one side, if Trump stands for anything, it's protectionism, unchanged entitlement spending, and a pledge to "expel the warmongers" and "drive out the globalists" [CPAC 2023].

And then I listened to the latest GoodFellows (hvr.co/3S2dewa) podcast discussion between Niall Ferguson, H.R. McMaster, and John Cochrane.

Speaking before US-led retaliation against Houthi infrastructure, McMaster - Trump's first proper national security advisor - was understandably exasperated at the Biden administration's fear of escalation with Iran (and Russia). Throughout the discussion, all three speakers - plus host Bill Whalen – expressed anger at the Democrats' failure to exert US power and at the woke virus in American universities. Cochrane, with support from McMaster, criticised Democrats for focusing on Trump as a "threat to democracy". The threat, he said, was two-sided - and came as much from overreach by Democratic prosecutors as it did from MAGA resistance to the 2020-21 power transition.

To his credit, Ferguson didn't both-sides the threat to the constitutional order. "My view of 2024 is very simple," he said. "It's a choice: empire or republic … You can choose to strengthen the United States against its foreign enemies. If you vote for Donald Trump, then you almost certainly achieve that, but you lose the Constitution along the way. Or you can vote for Biden - or maybe somebody else that they switch in - and you can probably save the Constitution, but you probably lose American primacy".

If I were American, that would be a no-brainer. But, as a European and for as long as Europe plays "balancing power" games, I want the exertion of "American primacy" against the current enemies of liberal democracy and the free but arbitrated market. However, this isn’t the choice and I can’t believe Professor Ferguson genuinely thinks it is.

Ferguson claims that "our adversaries were much more deterred by Donald Trump - whether you look at Iran, Russia - in their behaviour ... If you go round the world and ask foreign leaders who intimidates you more: Donald Trump or Joe Biden? Then it's a pretty clear-cut case". Not to me, it isn’t. I can only assume the foreign leaders he’s been talking to are democrats. Trump may physically intimidate some of them (the Montenegrin premier, for example) despite decades of evidence of his personal cowardice. You could even argue, as many of his followers do, that foreigners are wrong-footed by his erratic Madman-theory decision-making. But, as a president and prince across the golf-course lake, his foreign policy was and will be predictably isolationist, risk-averse and pacific.

He has promised to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours by making "a deal [for Putin] to take over something, you know, there are certain areas that are Russian speaking areas, right". On Iran, just read John Bolton's account of Trump's last-minute reversal of his own 2019 decision to retaliate for the destruction of a surveillance drone. "Fire and fury" against North Korea quickly turned into a "love" affair with Kim Jong Un. Does anyone honestly believe Trump would lift a finger to defend Taiwan in the event of an escalation or attack?

"He also made good decisions in his appointments," said Ferguson before admitting: "They may not be such good decisions in his second term". No, they won't. Appointments of acting cabinet secretaries, intelligence chiefs, and White House staff will be made according to loyalty and a commitment to the America First agenda. There will no McMasters, Mattises, and Kellys briefing the president. It will be Bannons, Patels, and Grenells. And it will four years of unapologetic retreat from primacy.

Biden may not be the neocon the GoodFellows (or I) would like him to be. He certainly wasn’t as vice president. But, like fellow podcasters Eric Edelman and Eliot Cohen at Shield of the Republic, why not compare him and his national security team to the alternative rather than the Almighty? I fear I know the answer and, as a fan of Ferguson’s historiography, I hope I’m wrong. What I heard this weekend was the laying of an intellectual foundation for choosing Trump in November as the lesser of two evils—empire over republic.

And they don’t even get the empire.