Follow us on social

51225586695_e7dbb5e05d_o-e1658884632919

Emperor unclothed? Why we can't expect 'big change' from the president

Something much bigger than POTUS — call it the MIC or the deep state — has de facto veto power on all matters related to national security.

Analysis | Washington Politics

Writing in the New York Times, veteran foreign correspondent Edward Wong reports that the Biden “administration’s approach to strategic priorities is surprisingly consistent with the policies of the Trump administration.”

What ought to be surprising at this juncture is Wong’s surprise. 

Its source?  It derives from the bizarre notion that when it comes to foreign policy, the President of the United States, commonly referred to as the “most powerful man in the world,” is a free agent who wields quasi-imperial authority. Going at least as far back as the days when Franklin Roosevelt occupied the Oval Office, this has been a staple of American politics, relentlessly promoted by the media. On the global stage, the U.S. president is an unrivaled kingpin.

Candidates for the presidency routinely play along with this conceit. If elected, they promise that Big Change will follow in short order. When Donald Trump vowed in his Inaugural Address that "This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” his choice of vocabulary may have raised eyebrows, but the basic sentiment was supremely presidential. The nature of the carnage to which he referred was (to put it politely) hazy. But as president he was willing it to cease and so it would.

But it did not. Nor did the Big Change promised by his several immediate predecessors or by his successor occur. Especially in matters related to America’s role in the world, the status quo has proven stubbornly persistent.

In practice, the power wielded by the most powerful man in the world turns out to be quite limited. Factors at home and abroad constrain presidential freedom of action. True, POTUS flies around the world in a very big airplane and everyone stands up when he enters the room, but as a practical matter presidential authority is circumscribed. 

Should there be any doubt on that score, consider the Manchin Effect:  a single sitting U.S. Senator — of the president’s own party, no less — making mincemeat of the current president’s domestic agenda. And foreign capitals are filled with Manchin clones who delight in complicating, obstructing, and otherwise frustrating the will of the U.S. president. 

Sometimes it’s subtle — a fist bump, say, as a way to mend fences with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. Sometimes it’s overt and gratuitous: Remember the delight that Benjamin Netanyahu took in humiliating President Barack Obama during the Israeli prime minister’s appearance before Congress in 2015?  It turns out to be not all that difficult to get away with scoring points at the expense of an American president. 

The truth is that the press pays way, way too much to presidential promises of Big Change. Indeed, Trump himself offers the best example of overpromising. He was going to end America’s endless wars in the Middle East and “take” the oil. He was going to pull the United States out of NATO. He was going to “build a wall” and thereby solve the border security problem once and for all. None of these happened.

It's important to recognize why he fell short in each instance — and why Biden’s efforts to change course are likewise doomed to fail. Two factors stand out, one structural and the other ideological.

The structural factor refers to the institutions whose wellbeing is dependent upon maintaining arrangements that devolved during the Cold War and survived the Cold War’s passing. Call it what you will — the Blob, the Deep State, the military-industrial-congressional complex — it exercises a de facto veto power on all matters related to basic U.S. national security policy. 

Here’s an illustration of how it works in practice:  A 20-year long U.S. war in Afghanistan ends in abject failure. The Congress responds the following year by increasing the size of the Pentagon budget, with large bipartisan majorities approving. In the executive suites of the MIC and in the E-Ring of the Pentagon, champagne corks pop.

The ideological factor rests on explicit or tacit claims of American Exceptionalism: That it is incumbent upon the United States to lead the world, with leadership tending in practice to become a synonym for global primacy and primacy tending to be expressed in military terms. Such expectations are wildly at odds with the emerging reality of multi-polarity and with a growing agenda of common problems such as the climate crisis to which military power is irrelevant.

Thirty years after the end of the Cold War it becomes increasingly evident that the United States has squandered the position of global dominion that was seemingly ours in 1989. That we need to do things differently is self-evidently the case. But don’t expect solutions to come from the Oval Office. The U.S. president is as much a captive of circumstance as he is an agent of Big Change. 


President Joe Biden prepares remarks regarding the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack and resumption of operations, Thursday, May 13, 2021, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
Analysis | Washington Politics
F-35
Top image credit: Brian G. Rhodes via shutterstock.com

US gov't admits F-35 is a failure

Military Industrial Complex

Nearly a quarter century after the Pentagon awarded Lockheed Martin the contract to develop the Joint Strike Fighter Program into the F-35, the government finally admitted the jet will never live up to Lockheed’s ambitious promises — used to sell the $2 trillion boondoggle to nearly 20 countries around the world.

The Government Accountability Office released a report last month detailing the ongoing challenges the program faces. The first paragraph of the highlights page includes this sentence:

keep readingShow less
Europe Ukraine
Top image credit: August 18, 2025, Washington, District Of Columbia, USA: Top European leaders in the Oval Office, Monday, August 18, 2025. (Credit Image: Daniel Torok/White House/ZUMA Press Wire)

Europe's latest seized Russian asset scheme is as dumb as ever

Europe

Last month, Lithuania’s former foreign minister Gabrielius Landsbergis pithily diagnosed Europe as being stuck in a perpetual geopolitical Groundhog Day. Landsbergis is quite correct, though for reasons that would leave him unsmiling.

Europe’s problem is not its hesitance to confront Russia, one quality it enjoys in ample abundance, but its insistence on prioritizing short-term measures over a realistic strategy for ending the war in Ukraine.

keep readingShow less
Chris Pratt, Steph Curry
Chris Pratt (Joe Seer/Shutterstock); Israel flag (Shutterstock); Stephen Curry (Reuters)

Israel wants to hire Chris Pratt and Steph Curry

Washington Politics

A newly created firm called Show Faith by Works is carrying out a $3.2 million outreach and digital targeting campaign to Christian churches in the western United States on behalf of the Israeli government. The firm’s goal, as described in its filing under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, is to increase “positive associations with the Nation of Israel, while linking the Palestinian population with extremist factors.”

Show Faith by Works will carry out the campaign through December for its work, which includes targeting churchgoers with pro-Israel ads “geofencing” major churches, hiring celebrity spokespeople, and visiting churches and colleges with a mobile trailer called the “10/7 Experience” on behalf of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

keep readingShow less

LATEST

QIOSK

Newsletter

Subscribe now to our weekly round-up and don't miss a beat with your favorite RS contributors and reporters, as well as staff analysis, opinion, and news promoting a positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy.