Saagar Enjeti: evaluation

Transcript context

…The book, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis by Graham Allison, it presents three different models of how government works, the Rational Act model, so seeing government as one entity. Trying to maximize the national interest. Also seeing government as through the lens of the momentum of standard operating procedures. So this giant organization that’s just doing things how it’s always been done. And the government politics model of there’s just these individual internal power struggles within government. And all of that is a different way to view, and they’re probably all true to a degree, of how decisions are made within this giant machinery of government. That’s why it’s so important is because you cannot read that book and say one is true and one is not. You can say one is more true than the other, but all of them are deeply true. And this is one, or this is probably a good transition to Donald Trump because… And I guess for the people out there who think I’ve been up too obsequious, you’ll be my criticism, Trump says something very fundamental and interesting on the Joe Rogan podcast, probably the most important thing that he ever said. Which is he said, “I like to have people like John Bolton in my administration, well, because scare people and it makes me seem like the most rational individual in the room. ” At a very intuitive level, a lot of people can understand that, and then they can rationalize, while there are picks that Donald Trump has brought into his White House, people like Mike Waltz and others that have espoused views that are directly at odds with a “anti-neocon anti-Liz Cheney agenda”. Now, Trump’s theory of this is that he likes to have “psychopaths” like John Bolton in the room with him while he’s sitting across from Kim Jong Un because it gets scared. What I think Trump never understood when he was president, and I honestly question if he still does now, is those two theories that you laid out, which are not about the rational interest as the government is one model, but the bureaucratic theory and the organizational theory of politics. And because what Trump I don’t think quite gets is that there are 99% of the decisions that get made in government never reached the president’s desk. One of the most important Obama quotes ever is, “By the time it gets to my desk, nobody else can solve it. All the problems here are hard. All the problems here don’t have an answer. That’s why I have to make the call.” The theory that Trump has that you can have people in there who are, let’s say warmongers, neocons or whatever, who don’t necessarily agree with you, is that when push comes to shove at the most important decisions, that I’ll still be able to rein those people in as an influence. Here’s the issue. Let’s say for Mike Waltz, who’s going to be the National Security Advisor, a lot of people don’t really understand there’s this theory of national security advisor where you call me into your office and you’re the president and you’re like, “Hey, what do we think about Iran?” I’m like, “I think you should do X, Y, and Z.” No, that’s not how it works. The national security advisor’s job is to coordinate the inter-agency process. His job is to actually convene meetings, him and his staff, where in the situation room, CIA, state Department, SECDEF, others before the POTUS even walks in, we have options. We’re like, “Hey, Russia just invaded Ukraine. Weed a package of options. Those packages of options are concede of three things. We’re going to have one group, we’re going to call it the dovish option. Two, we’re going to call it the middle ground. Three, the hardcore package.” e packages of options are concede of three things. We’re going to have one group, we’re going to call it the dovish option. Two, we’re going to call it the middle ground. Three, the hardcore package.” Trump walks in, this is how it’s supposed to work. Trump walks in and he goes, “Okay, Russia invaded Ukraine. What do we do?” “Mr. President, we’ve prepared three options for you. We got one, two, and three.” Now, who has the power? Is it Trump when he picks one, two, or three? Or is the man who decides what’s even in option one, two, and three? That is the part where Trump needs to really understand how these things happen. And I watched this happen to him in his first administration. He hired a guy, Mike Flynn, who was his national security advisor. You could say a lot about Flynn, but him and Trump were at least like this on foreign policy. Flynn gets outed because what I would call an FBI coup, whatever. 33 days, he’s out as a national security advisor, H.R McMaster, he’s got a nice shiny uniform, four star, all of this. McMaster doesn’t agree with Donald Trump at all. And so Trump says, “I ran on pulling out of Afghanistan, I want to get out of Afghanistan.” They’re like, “Yeah, we’ll get out of Afghanistan, but before we get out, we got to go back in.” As in we need more troops in there. And he’s like, “Oh, okay.” It’s like all this and proves a plan and effectively gives a speech in 2017 where he ends up escalating and increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan. And it’s only until February, 2020 that he gets to sign a deal, the Taliban peace deal, which in my opinion, he should have done in 2017. But the reason why that happened was because of that organizational theory, of that bureaucratic politics theory where H.R McMaster is able to guide the inter-agency process, bring the uniform recommendations of the joint chiefs of staff and others to give Donald Trump no option but to say, “We must put troops.” Another example of this is a book called Obama’s War by Bob Woodward. I highly encourage people to read this book because this book talks about how Obama comes into the White House in 2009 and he says, “I want to get out of Iraq and I don’t want to increase… I want to fight the Good War in Afghanistan.” Obama’s a thoughtful guy, too thoughtful actually. And so he sits there and he’s working out his opinions. And what he starts to watch is that very slowly his options began to narrow because strategic leaks start to come out from the White House situation room about what we should do in Afghanistan. And pretty soon David Petraeus and Stan McChrystal and the entire national security apparatus has Obama pegged where he basically politically at the time decides to take the advantage position of increasing troops in Afghanistan, but then tries to have it both ways by saying, “But in two years, we’re going to withdraw.” That book really demonstrates how the deep state can completely remove any of your options to be able to move by presenting you with ones which you don’t even want, and then making it politically completely infeasible to travel down the extreme directions.…

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