President Trump’s “Board of Peace,” formally launched at the annual confab of the world’s elite at Davos, amounts to little more than perhaps the most ambitious pay-to-play scheme in history. 

Originally a part of last October’s Gaza cease-fire plan, the Board of Peace has since evolved into a broader scheme that holds enormous potential for corruption. According to its charter, nations wanting a permanent seat on the body must give it “more than USD $1,000,000,000 in cash funds to the Board of Peace within the first year of the Charter’s entry into force.” Trump himself serves personally as chairman for life and holds more or less total authority over the board’s composition and activities — right now, it includes such luminaries as Secretary of State-slash-National Security Adviser Marco Rubio, the apparently omnicompetent special envoy Steve Witkoff, and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. What’s more, Trump will also be able to handpick his own successor.

Never mind that violence continues to plague Gaza, meaning the Board of Peace doesn’t have much real peace to keep. Even the most seemingly easy parts of the ceasefire plan — the return of Israeli hostages, living and dead — have taken longer than initially envisaged, with far more difficult steps like the disarmament of Hamas and the assembly of an International Stabilization Force for Gaza yet to get underway. Jared Kushner’s fantasy of gleaming, redeveloped luxury Gaza will likely remain just that — a fantasy. 

Beyond the rather obvious corruption risk that gives foreign potentates the opportunity to buy Trump’s favor, the Board of Peace is also a bid by Trump and his cronies to usurp or circumvent the functions of existing international bodies and institutions like the United Nations. Flawed as they may be in many respects, these institutions do possess widespread legitimacy: virtually every nation on Earth belongs to the UN. We don’t need to romanticize these institutions or pretend that they’re better and more effective than they really are — in far too many cases, they even wind up prolonging conflicts and issues they intend to resolve — to recognize they often have practical value as forums for discussions among nations and, in some cases, mechanisms for action on pressing international problems. 

As a pay-to-play scheme with its membership determined by Trump himself, the Board of Peace will lack even a patina of legitimacy — and it may find it impossible to achieve anything aside from its primary function of enriching Trump himself or its original purpose of supervising the Gaza ceasefire plan. 

Indeed, the board’s membership remains far too narrow to command anything resembling widespread and lasting legitimacy. Right now, the board consists of a handful of governments already politically aligned with Trump or seeking to curry his favor in one way or another: countries like Argentina and Hungary run by Trump allies Javier Milei and Viktor Orban, as well as Middle Eastern states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey that combine ties to Trump with their own national interests in Gaza’s stability. All told, around thirty-five countries out of the fifty or so Trump invited to join the Board of Peace have said they’ll sign up, with only Vladimir Putin promising to pony up the $1 billion payment required for a permanent board seat — funds the Kremlin says will be drawn from Moscow’s frozen assets. If Trump were to accept Putin’s offer, he would effectively be comping the Kremlin for its membership.

It’s also telling that some of America’s closest and longest-standing allies have rejected Trump’s invitation to join his Board of Peace. France, Germany, and Italy have all signaled that they will not sign on, while Trump himself petulantly revoked Canada’s invitation after Prime Minister Mark Carney’s sober call at Davos to recognize that the so-called rules-based order no longer governs the affairs of nations — due in large measure to Trump’s bristling hostility toward America’s NATO allies and chronic threats to tariff America’s closest trading partners. This sort of mercurial behavior offers another in a long line of stark warnings to other nations: humor Trump and join the Board of Peace at your own peril.

As a result, it seems unlikely at the moment that the Board of Peace will succeed either as a mechanism to enrich Trump himself or as a substitute for the existing international bodies like the United Nations. It lacks the basic legitimacy that the UN, for all of its often severe flaws and failings, possesses by virtue of its near-universal membership. Only the most corrupt and undemocratic of nations will shell out the billion dollars demanded for the permanent opportunity, as the Washington Post columnist Max Boot put it, “to volunteer to be bossed around by Chairman Trump.”

For its part, Congress should refuse to appropriate or authorize any funding for the Board of Peace that goes beyond the role specified for it in Gaza under UN Security Council Resolution 2803. Indeed, Congress should hold Trump’s feet to the fire and require him and his Board to actually come up with a workable plan for Gaza lest the cease-fire, such as it is, unravels. The Trump administration, having demolished USAID and no doubt highlighting the UN’s shortcomings, will likely insist that American taxpayers foot part of the board’s bill. Outside of possible funding for Gaza, however, Congress should answer any request to do so with a firm and resolute no. 

Of course, this could all be much ado about very little if Trump fails to make any money from the Board of Peace over the next year. It will stagger on as a zombie institution through the remainder of Trump’s term, remembered as nothing more than a colossal exercise in vanity and corruption.

In recent weeks, untold numbers of ordinary Iranians have taken to the streets of their towns and cities to protest the repression and incompetent economic management of the country’s ruling theocratic regime. The regime itself appears intent on slaughtering its way to survival, murdering thousands of ordinary Iranians in what has become one of the bloodiest domestic crackdowns the world has seen in decades. Supposed moderates have closed ranks behind the regime, and cracks have yet to appear in the regime itself or among security services like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). While its immediate fate remains uncertain, the regime’s long-term prognosis appears terminal: too much popular discontent with a regime too ideologically rigid and corrupt to face (much less solve) Iran’s severe economic problems.

Even if the Iranian people topple the present regime and replace it with a more liberal and democratic one that reflects the actual aspirations of the Iranian people, that new government may not see eye to eye with the United States when it comes to regional and global politics. But it would lack the current regime’s ideological zealotry and would probably not maintain Iranian support for terrorist and militant groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis that sow chaos and destruction across the Middle East and the rest of the world. 

For his part, President Trump threatened military action against Iran if it continues its crackdown — though it’s not clear what the use of force would actually achieve. Destroying some regime security services facilities — say, a few IRGC barracks — probably would not do much to stop the regime’s current killing spree; this is, after all, an existential question for the regime from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on down. Moreover, an American-led air campaign seems just as likely to disrupt protests as hamper the regime’s repression: many ordinary Iranians would understandably head for cover to avoid incoming missiles and bombs, while the regime would use such strikes to attack protestors as tools of foreign powers and pose as the defenders of Iranian sovereignty. Even if air strikes precipitated the fall of the present regime, moreover, it’s hard to believe that a new Iranian government that rose to power in the wake of American military action would prove entirely stable or legitimate even in the short run. 

Nor, for whatever it’s worth, do America’s regional partners — Israel and Egypt as well as Gulf monarchies Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia — want the United States to take military action against Iran. Most Americans agree, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll that finds some 70% of registered voters opposed to American military intervention in Iran. 

Fortunately, the United States does have smarter and potentially more effective policy options beyond the use of military force to support Iran’s protestors: cyber operations could disrupt the regime and its security services as they continue their murderous crackdown on the Iranian people, making coordination between elements of the security services more difficult and giving protestors more room for maneuver against them. It could also deny the regime the ability to censor and jam communication with the outside world, allowing Iranians to get their story out without regime interference. Functional American public diplomacy and support for civil society groups could also have proven useful in Iran today had not the Trump administration made them an early target of its lawless attack on the federal government; indeed, Trump slashed funding for initiatives intended to help dissidents and protestors circumvent internet shutdowns of the sort imposed by Iran’s regime.

It would also be useful for the United States to coordinate with its allies and partners in the European Union, bringing additional pressure to bear on the regime from governments that historically have had more avenues for engagement with Tehran. But President Trump’s insane impulse to seize Greenland by whatever means necessary has created a rift with America’s European allies that only consumes time, attention, and resources that could’ve been devoted to real problems — not just the Iranian uprising, but support for Ukraine in its ongoing fight against Russian aggression. Instead, America and its European allies find themselves in a wholly unnecessary crisis of Trump’s own making.

What’s more, the United States could offer carrots in the form of sanctions relief that could both buoy protestors and create rifts within the regime itself. Ironically enough, Trump himself has precedent here: he lifted sanctions on the new post-Assad government in Syria last year, and could make a similar pledge to do so in Iran if the regime changes there. And if Iranians were to, in fact, change their regime, it would certainly be helpful if the United States had some sort of foreign assistance agency to help any new Iranian government establish itself and take root — but with the destruction of USAID, no such agency exists.

But President Trump and his administration appear more interested in military action against Iran for its own sake, only loosely tethered at best to any political or strategic objectives — to say nothing of an actual sense of how the use of force might help achieve them. They seem to believe their earlier uses of military force — against Iran’s nuclear facilities last June, against small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, and most recently against Venezuela — have been wholly unqualified and unblemished successes, leading Trump and his administration to level military threats not only against Iran but Colombia, Mexico, and Greenland as well. 

There’s a word for this sort of overconfidence: hubris. And hubris inevitably leads to nemesis: downfall and ruination. 

Madness.

That’s the only way to describe President Trump’s obsession with seizing Greenland by whatever means necessary and no matter the cost. It’s a preoccupation that’s untethered from reality and lacks any rational justification.

Indeed, the shifting rationales offered by the Trump administration for this fixation do not add up and make zero sense.

Take the supposed national security justification for the annexation of Greenland: It’s impossible to say what the United States might gain from such a move because the United States would not gain anything from it. The U.S. military already possesses extensive access to Greenland thanks to the 1951 agreement between Washington and Copenhagen, and the Space Force maintains a base at Pituffik in the territory’s far north that helps monitor for ballistic missile attacks. Moreover, America is already committed to defending Greenland against aggression via Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty. Per that provision — invoked only once in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the United States — an armed attack on Greenland, an autonomous and self-governing territory under Danish sovereignty, would be considered an attack on the United States itself. What’s more, the Danish government has already made crystal clear its willingness to discuss even deeper security cooperation with the United States in Greenland.

Put bluntly, there is no national security reason for the United States to annex or otherwise assume direct control over Greenland. Even if they could somehow mount a military expedition to Greenland, China and Russia could not “take over” the island without triggering Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty and provoking an American-led military response. It makes absolutely no sense for the U.S. government to idly contemplate destroying the alliance that obliges the United States to come to Greenland’s defense and tearing up a decades-old security agreement that gives the U.S. military wide-ranging access to the island in order to acquire Greenland itself, supposedly for national security purposes.

The mooted economic rationale for acquiring Greenland makes just as little sense. It’s true that Greenland possesses significant reserves of rare earth elements and other critical minerals, but it’s nowhere near the motherlode the Trump administration claims: indeed, the island’s rare earth reserves rank just below those of the United States itself. If American mining companies aren’t operating in Greenland, it’s due to a lack of interest rather than a lack of access: it’s almost certainly cost-prohibitive to mine these minerals given the ice sheet that covers the island, the remoteness of the deposits, and the near-total absence of necessary mining infrastructure. In short, it will take a long time and cost a lot of money to extract these minerals — and there are much easier prospects elsewhere.

Concern about possible Chinese attempts to corner the market for these resources does not justify an American attempt to seize Greenland itself. Such worries ought to motivate the United States to work more closely with Greenland’s own democratic government, Denmark, NATO, and the European Union to both bar Chinese investment in Greenland’s critical minerals and infrastructure, and more importantly, to invest more themselves in Greenland. (Canada and the United Kingdom hold 23 mining licenses each, the most of any one country.) Again, it makes no sense to destroy these relationships in the pursuit of presidential fantasies of territorial expansion.

So why does Trump appear dead-set on annexing Greenland, strategic and economic costs to the United States — to say nothing of America’s allies and the rest of the world — be damned?

Trump’s own ego and personal vanity appear to be a major factor, with the president telling New York Times reporters that ownership of Greenland is what he feels “is psychologically needed for success.” Annexing Greenland, in other words, will make Trump feel like a big man. He also seems to find Greenland a tempting target because — and I wish I were kidding — it looks “massive” on Mercator map projections that exaggerate the size of landmasses near the poles. 

More ominously, though, Trump’s drive to take Greenland any way he can is a logical outgrowth of his gangster-style approach to the world — and in particular his apparent desire to carve the globe up with his idol Vladimir Putin and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. Echoing Putin’s nauseating pre-war assertions that Ukraine should “bear with” the Kremlin’s brutal impending invasion, “whether you like it or don’t like it,” Trump has vowed to “do something on Greenland  whether they like it or not.”

Congress has options to stop the madness, or at least make it more onerous for the Trump administration to try and make its twisted fantasies of territorial aggrandizement real.

First, Congress can preemptively deny Trump authority to use force or subversion against Greenland. Such a move would absolutely clear that any orders Trump may give to attack, subvert, or otherwise undermine Danish sovereignty over Greenland and Greenland’s own democratic institutions would be prima facie illegal and subject to refusal by responsible military officers and intelligence officials. It would also send a signal to Denmark and other NATO allies that Congress does not approve of Trump’s ambition to seize Greenland and that it lacks democratic legitimacy in the United States itself.

Congress can also explicitly bar the use of any funds to purchase Greenland or engage in any activities meant to subvert or otherwise undermine Danish sovereignty over the island. Last year, President Trump ordered the intelligence community to increase its spying on Greenland, and the Trump administration has reportedly considered sending Greenland residents cash payments of up to $100,000 if they support secession from Denmark and annexation by the United States — efforts that would not be eligible for funding under a Congressional funding band. Again, this move would be as much about sending signals to NATO allies and giving national security professionals strong grounds to refuse illegal orders as anything else.

Senators and representatives can also travel to Greenland, Denmark, and NATO headquarters in Brussels to show solidarity with these nations and the alliance as a whole. Indeed, a nine-member delegation led by Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and including Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) has already left for Copenhagen to, in Coons’ words, let the Danish government know “we understand the value of the partnership we have long had with them, and in no way seek to interfere in their internal discussions about the status of Greenland.” Once again, such visits would serve notice that Trump’s proposed aggression against Greenland lacks both support and legitimacy in Congress and the United States. Or as Coons put it, “I just think it’s important for us to be heard as strongly supporting NATO and our alliance.”

This list isn’t exhaustive, but it offers Congress a place to start if we hope to stop this insanity before it proceeds any further.

Now-former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was a brutal dictator whose dreadful politics and policies, largely inherited from his equally autocratic predecessor Hugo Chavez, ran his country into the ground. The U.S. military operation that captured Maduro once again demonstrated the tactical and operational proficiency of the American armed forces. But neither Maduro’s autocratic governance nor the audacity and skill of the U.S. military in executing assigned tasks are the primary issue at hand here: at the whim of one man and with no real explanation or apparent rationale, the United States has launched an unwise and illegitimate military intervention that only undermines American interests and international security. 

Here are five reasons why:

A clear and overt act of war. President Trump’s kidnapping of Maduro represents unprovoked aggression against a nation that has not declared war against the United States nor engaged in hostilities against it. Maduro and his regime may be corrupt, repressive, and possess relatively minor ties to international cocaine trafficking, but in no real sense could the United States be said to have been in armed conflict with Venezuela before last weekend’s raid. President George H.W. Bush’s 1989 invasion of Panama, Operation Just Cause, does not offer a parallel: Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega declared a state of war existed between his nation and the United States five days before the invasion; the next day, an American serviceman was killed by Panamanian military personnel. 

In short, President Trump ordered the sort of aggressive action American statesmen have sought, however imperfectly, to banish from the conduct of international affairs since at least the days of Woodrow Wilson.

Illegitimate at home and abroad. Neither consulting nor seeking support from Congress at home or relevant nations and international organizations overseas, President Trump’s Venezuela raid lacks basic domestic and international legitimacy. 

• Unlike President George W. Bush in Iraq in 2002, he has neither sought nor received authorization from Congress to use military force against Venezuela. 
• Unlike President Barack Obama in Libya in 2011, he has not received authorization from the United Nations Security Council for military operations in Venezuela. 
• Unlike President Bill Clinton in Kosovo in 1999, he does not have the support of a relevant regional organization (NATO, in the Kosovo case) for his intervention. 
• And unlike President Obama’s intervention against ISIS in Iraq and Syria in 2014, he does not have the support of Venezuela’s immediate neighbors for military operations against the Maduro regime — indeed, Trump already appears to be threatening similar interventions against neighboring Colombia and other nations in the Western Hemisphere. 

The lack of any sort of domestic or international authorization for Trump’s act of war against Venezuela isn’t just a matter of legality — though it is, of course, that as well. Neither Trump nor his administration have offered either the American public or the rest of the world much in the way of explanation or rationale for their use of force in Venezuela. (By contrast, the Bush administration spent months making a case for the invasion of Iraq to both the American people and the world.) Instead, they have displayed contempt for the principle of democracy at home and what the Declaration of Independence called “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” abroad. 

Taking America to war on a personal whim. As with his other domestic and foreign policies — most notably tariffs — Trump has taken the United States to war on little more than his own personal whim, whittling the notion of “national security” down to meaninglessness in the process. He has, as noted, refused to make a clear or compelling case for this act of war against Venezuela to either the American people or the world, and has gone on to threaten the sovereignty of America’s ally, Denmark, and its longtime security partner, Colombia, as well as neighboring Mexico and Cuba. Trump clearly believes the U.S. military can be deployed anywhere at his own personal whim without providing any justification to anyone — he kept Congressional Democrats in the dark, for instance, about the Venezuela operation before agreeing to a briefing several days after the fact.

These are the actions and attitudes of an aspiring strongman with no respect for America’s republican principles, not a responsible political leader in a democracy. 

No plan for what’s next. The Trump administration has no apparent plan for what it aims to achieve in a post-Maduro Venezuela, making the Bush administration’s negligent post-war planning for Iraq in 2002 and 2003 look like a masterpiece of advanced preparation by comparison. Though the U.S. military had only snatched Maduro and left the “Chavista” regime that has ruled the country since 1999 largely intact, Trump proclaimed that the United States would now “run” Venezuela despite the fact that the Trump administration lacks a foreign policy apparatus beyond a few critical personnel like Secretary of State-slash-National Security Adviser Marco Rubio and peripatetic presidential special envoy Steve Witkoff. Trump himself dismissed Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel laureate María Corina Machado as a potential Maduro successor because, according to anonymous White House officials, she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize that Trump imagines is his due.

The plan, such as it is, appears to be to threaten Venezuela’s new leadership with further military action if it does not give in to Trump’s unclear demands (which seem to include some sort of seizure of the nation’s considerable oil assets) — a gangster-style approach to foreign policy if there ever was one.

One giant leap toward a world where might makes right. Like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, President Trump clearly believes the world can and should be carved up into spheres of influence to be ruthlessly dominated by great powers as they see fit, with supposedly lesser nations forced to bow to the whims of more powerful ones. His special military operation in Venezuela and subsequent threats to other Caribbean nations (to say nothing of American ally Denmark) reflect this belief — and stand in direct contradiction to the sort of world American leaders have sought to create, however fitfully, for at least the past century. As Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and their successors understood, the law of the jungle does not make for a stable, secure, or prosperous world. 

Indeed, in Ukraine alone, the United States and its European allies have spent hundreds of billions of dollars — and some 50,000 Ukrainians have given their lives — to defend the notion of national sovereignty and the right of nations to choose their own destiny that Trump has blatantly violated in Venezuela. In effect, then, President Trump has given a green light to similar great power aggression around the world, from Putin’s war against Ukraine to a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan and beyond.  

With his Venezuela raid, Trump has swung open the door to a world run on the principles of gangsterism — and America will come to regret it.

This article originally appeared on Peter Juul’s personal Substack, The Dive.

We’re well beyond the point where we ought to take documents like the Trump administration’s just-released National Security Strategy seriously, at least on a practical level. It’s hard to put much stock in such an embarrassingly sycophantic policy document, especially when the administration itself appears to be little more than a pack of scheming viziers to an increasingly nominal president who himself regularly struggles to stay awake during public appearances.

But it’s beside the point to engage with this document as if it’s a matter of policy, programs, or even strategy. It does no good to point out its incoherence and incontinence, much less ponder how what’s proposed in it might play out in the real world or how, if you stand on your head and squint and read it backwards, it might contain worthwhile ideas. The product of ideologues who fancy themselves world-historical thinkers but evince no real understanding of America or its place in a world permanently changed by revolutions in science, technology, and industry dating back a century and a half now, this national security strategy both betrays American interests overseas and perverts America’s traditional liberal values both at home and abroad.

In short, this national security strategy amounts to nothing less than a declaration of moral bankruptcy — a statement of immoral principle that stands in direct opposition to what America ought to stand for and represent in the world. (As always, it’s the self-styled super-patriot who hates his country the most.) It doesn’t tell us much that we don’t already know about Trump’s foreign policy, but the document does effectively distill the Trump administration’s ongoing renunciation of any real American responsibility for global affairs and international security.

Indeed, it’s a foreign policy that Charles Lindbergh would have loved: a not-quite-explicit tripartite carve-up of the globe with dictators in Europe and Asia, with America selling out its allies in those two parts of the world while building a garrison state in the Western Hemisphere to bully our own neighbors the same way Putin and Xi do theirs. Add dollops of insulting illiberalism, crude dollar diplomacy, and thinly veiled racism, and voila: you’ve reinvented the original America First platform.

In the end, this national security strategy is little more than a manifesto for global gangsterism — or perhaps the longest geopolitical suicide note in history.

Let’s look at some of the specifics: the Trump administration promises to abandon America’s allies in Europe while meddling in their own domestic politics. It parrots the Kremlin’s line on NATO, characterizing the alliance as “perpetually expanding,” while seeking “strategic stability” with Moscow — presumably at the expense of Ukraine and other erstwhile American allies. Combined with a purported 2027 deadline for NATO nations to assume primary responsibility for the alliance’s conventional defenses, a reported lack of communication with key alliance militaries like Germany, and Trump’s own eagerness to sell out Ukraine, the Trump administration seems to be setting the stage for an effective American withdrawal from the Atlantic alliance.

Worse, the Trump administration has made its intent to interfere in European politics on behalf of far-right political parties and, not incidentally, American tech oligarchs quite clear. It employs racist rhetoric to claim that the continent will be “unrecognizable in 20 years,” with certain states “majority non-European” and therefore somehow uncommitted to the NATO alliance. It goes on to assert that it must “regain its civilizational self-confidence,” primarily through the victory of illiberal far-right parties and politicians like Germany’s AfD party and Hungary’s Viktor Orban that the Trump administration views as “political allies” whose success it hopes to encourage.

Like Lindbergh and his original America First movement, this national security strategy focuses monomaniacally on the Western Hemisphere. It casts the challenges in this hemisphere—migration, narco-trafficking, and foreign (presumably Chinese) investment in critical industries — as all-important and all-consuming while tacitly dismissing traditional American strategic priorities in Europe and the Pacific as “peripheral or irrelevant to our own” interests. These priorities, the document heavily implies, were not the consequence of a careful consideration of American interests in a world transformed by science, technology, and industry, but rather the result of deceit by treacherous foreigners who have taken advantage of the United States to further their own interests at America’s expense.

Nor is it hard to see the crude, Putin-style sphere-of-influence logic behind the Trump team’s obsession with Latin America specifically and the Western Hemisphere more generally (at least beyond their obvious preoccupation with immigration). Given the language of this national security strategy, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Trump — or, more precisely, his perpetually scheming advisers — would like the United States to do in Latin America what Vladimir Putin wants to do in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. We’ve already tasted the rancid fruit of this impulse with Trump’s killing spree in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, where American special operators blow small boats allegedly running drugs out of the water and, in the first instance at least, massacre the survivors.

China, for its part, is seen primarily as a commercial competitor and not a strategic problem or geopolitical challenger. That’s hardly surprising considering the general emptiness of hawkish Republican rhetoric on China, and this strategy sends yet another signal that Trump talks tough but has no appetite for confrontation with Beijing — a message reinforced by his deep-seated antipathy toward American allies like Japan and South Korea.

It all adds up to a morally bankrupt vision of a world carved up between real and would-be dictators to suit their own whims and fantasies, one supremely hostile to America’s long-standing interests as well as its traditional liberal values. Put another way, the Trump administration now seeks precisely the nightmarish world that American presidents have desperately sought to avoid for more than a century.

On the bright side, it’s unlikely this strategy will ever be fully implemented; national security strategies rarely guide any administration’s foreign policy so much as they reflect it. Moreover, the Trump administration has so hollowed out America’s foreign policy and national security apparatus — his team, such as it is, remains confined to a small clique when not farmed out to one of Trump’s former real estate pals—that it remains a mystery as to how they’d execute any strategy the administration might come up with. Secretary of State Marco Rubio continues to serve as acting national security adviser, for instance, presiding over a National Security Council largely denuded of anything resembling real bureaucratic or subject-matter expertise, while America’s military and intelligence agencies have suffered rolling political purges that will likely reduce their own effectiveness over time.

Trump’s attempt to impose gangster rule at home and abroad will eventually, inevitably fail — though it will inflict enormous damage on America and the world along the way. The danger inherent in this national security strategy lies less with the potential that it might be implemented than in the indecent principles upon which it is based and seeks to advance. It exposes the moral rot at the heart of the Trump administration and its foreign policy for all to see, presenting us with yet another manifestation of our wider crisis of national virtue and integrity.

In that respect, however, it may paradoxically prove salutary: this strategy should cause a rededication to the basic moral propositions that make America a worthwhile endeavor, an experiment in liberty and self-government that’s more fragile and endangered now than at any point since World War II. Do we stand for freedom, equality, and democracy in the world? Do we keep faith with ourselves and our friends?

Though he could be quite unsentimental in private conversations, President Franklin D. Roosevelt rightly understood that American foreign policy requires a moral sensibility — a spirit that guides it and makes clear that America stands for more than the prerogatives of raw power and the amoral pursuit of national self-aggrandizement offered actual and aspiring dictators as well as self-proclaimed “realists” throughout recent history. As Roosevelt himself explained, “order among Nations presupposes something enduring—some system of justice under which individuals, over a long period of time, are willing to live. Humanity will never permanently accept a system imposed by conquest and based on slavery.”

America may not be and may never have been the perfect embodiment of its professed liberal ideals of freedom and equality, but that’s both irrelevant and immaterial. But at its best, America has been the main champion of liberal values in a world where they have had few if any powerful defenders and many influential opponents, a standard to which the partisans of human liberty could repair when all else failed. In that regard, then, this national security strategy represents a deep and profound betrayal of America itself—one that must be repudiated in the clearest terms and replaced with a renewed moral vision that Roosevelt and his contemporaries would easily recognize.

There was an idea that was America, and it’s well past time to revive it.

If recent news reports are accurate, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth likely issued an illegal order to give no quarter in the first of what are now many likely illegal strikes against alleged narcotics trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific. Already manifestly unfit and unqualified for the job, focused primarily on fighting culture wars and politicizing, and having previously endangered American military personnel by discussing sensitive operational details over an off-the-books group chat, Hegseth may now be guilty of war crimes if not outright murder. 

Congress must now embark on a thorough investigation of these strikes and Hegseth’s potentially criminal role in ordering them. Ultimate responsibility for these immoral and likely illegal military actions rests with President Donald Trump, but Hegseth bears significant responsibility of his own for following and executing Trump’s directives. As secretary of defense, however, Hegseth has the right and duty to refuse manifestly illegal orders from the president — but he has chosen to follow them instead.

Indeed, Trump likely nominated Hegseth as secretary of defense in part because, like Trump, he possesses few if any qualms about ordering the American military to act in direct contravention of the laws of war. As a Fox News television personality during the first Trump term, for instance, Hegseth successfully lobbied President Trump to pardon Eddie Gallagher, a former Navy SEAL accused of war crimes by his fellow SEALs, and defended others charged with or alleged to have ordered similar crimes. His partisan polemics, moreover, seep with barely-concealed contempt for the laws and rules of war. In Hegseth’s telling, America fails to win wars because the U.S. military cannot act like its enemies and commit obvious war crimes with abandon — a morally reprehensible stance that drags America down and damages our standing in the world.

Hegseth also summoned the military’s highest-ranking officers back to the United States in September for a lecture that included, among other things, a promise that the military would no longer have to follow “stupid rules of engagement.” He also reportedly forced Adm. Alvin Holsey, head of U.S. Southern Command, to resign less than a year into his three-year appointment after Holsey expressed doubts about the legality of the Trump administration’s boat strikes — doubts buttressed by the command’s senior military lawyer, whose view that such strikes were illegal was overruled by the Trump administration’s lawyers. 

In a blatant attempt to intimidate critics, moreover, Hegseth has absurdly threatened Senator Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) — a retired Navy pilot and astronaut who flew 39 combat missions during the 1991 Gulf War and piloted four space shuttle missions from 2001 to 2011 — with a court-martial for recording a video with other Congressional Democrats that reminded American servicemembers of their right to refuse illegal orders. Hegseth has acted beneath the dignity of his office in other ways, such as active trolling on social media and provoking a Canadian children’s book publisher to condemn him for using one of their characters in a juvenile AI-generated meme.

Hegseth has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that he has no business holding his present office. In a normal political universe, he would never have been nominated as secretary of defense in the first place. But we live in abnormal times, and President Trump wants Hegseth as his secretary of defense because of their shared disdain for the laws of war and the notion of basic human dignity during armed conflict. Given its general subservience to Trump, this Congress will almost certainly not impeach and remove Hegseth — no matter how much he deserves to be dismissed from office. 

Assuming he remains Secretary of Defense and Democrats retake one or both houses of Congress in next year’s mid-term election, Hegseth’s impeachment and removal from office should be one of a new Democratic majority’s first orders of business. If successful, Hegseth’s impeachment and removal from office will be only the start of accountability for the Trump administration’s lawless and immoral war in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific — but a start must be made.