Over the past quarter-century I have written 1,100-odd articles for Chronicles: some 300 columns, reviews, and features for the print edition and over 800 web articles, totaling roughly 2 million words. Many specific assessments made over the years inevitably have been rendered obsolete or proven wrong, but my overall record of making accurate predictions has been good.

I do regret writing one of those articles, however. It is my American Interest column, published in the forthcoming December 2024 issue of Chronicles, “A Global Agenda for Trump 2.0.” It was completed on the morning after the election. Within a week, its assumptions and predictions were proven wrong by Donald Trump’s appointment of four key members of his foreign policy and national security team.

None of the Trump loyalists from his four years in the wilderness, whom I listed as likely senior officials in the second Trump administration, were given a major post. Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy Elbridge Colby, a key player in the development of the 2018 U.S. National Defense Strategy and one of the few seasoned foreign policy strategists on what seemed to be the likely “Team Trump,” got nothing, contrary to my expectations.

The same applies to Fred Fleitz, vice chairman of Trump’s own America First Policy Institute Center for American Security, and Lt. Gen. (Ret) Keith Kellogg, the center’s co-chairman. Last year, the two drafted a plan for ending the war in Ukraine, some key elements of which Trump has adopted as his own; but Fleitz and Kellogg still remain sidelined.

Another staunch Trump loyalist, former ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell, was supposedly considered for the post of secretary of State. As of this writing, however, he is also without a job in the incoming administration. Let me add that a matter of special regret is that Colonel Douglas Macgregor, Grenell’s unconfirmed successor in Berlin and a distinguished military intellectual, has not been given any post.

Robert C. O’Brien, Trump’s fourth and last national security advisor in the first term, is also not on any list. That, at least, is good news because, unlike the other four, O’Brien is a dyed-in-the-wool neoconservative. The bad news is that that within one week of the election Donald Trump has appointed four inveterate neoconservative warmongers to four key positions in the realm of foreign and national security policy.

Oddly enough, before making those appointments he announced that two neoconservative hawks prominent in his first term—former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who served as Trump’s high-profile secretary of State, and Nikki Haley, Trump’s former UN ambassador—would not be considered for any post. That announcement sounded like an encouraging sign that Trump was pivoting towards an anti-war, hands-off approach abroad—that the epoch of global U.S. entanglements may be winding down.

A series of cold showers soon followed, however.

Most outrageously, Sen. Marco Rubio will succeed Antony Blinken as secretary of State. Rubio has spent most of his political career promoting neoconservative orthodoxy and advocating U.S. military interventions abroad. Until his supposed MAGA conversion two years ago he had never seen a war he did not like and praised George W. Bush’s Iraq disaster as late as 2016, way beyond its sell-by date. Rubio reportedly was close to the late billionaire Sheldon Adelson and other big neocon donors, and has supported illegal settlement building in the West Bank as well as suggesting that the U.S. may have to go to war with Iran over its nuclear program. 

Rubio is the embodiment of the GOP establishment wing. When running for the Republican nomination against Trump in 2026, he said that American power must be “motivated by a desire to expand freedom, rather than simply expand its own territory … While America did not intend to become the world’s indispensable power, that is exactly what our economic and political freedoms have made us … The free nations of the world still look to America to champion our shared ideals.” Und so weiter, ad nauseam…

Rep. Michael Waltz will be Trump’s national security advisor, former Fox News presenter Pete Hegseth will be secretary of Defense, and Rep. Elise Stefanik will be UN Ambassador. I will not bore you with their belligerent quotes, dozens of them, on any issue of import over the past decade. Suffice to say that, until very recently, none of them had ever seen a war they did not like. Stefanik in particular is a piece of work. She once worked for the arch neocon Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and (worse still) for Bill Kristol’s Foreign Policy Initiative. The late unlamented John McCain would be delighted.

As I wrote in my latest print column, soon after he started his first term, Trump faced concerted obstacles from the upholders of old bipartisan orthodoxy within his own team. “Let us hope that he has learned from his mistakes,” I went on, “and that he will weed out potential neoconservative Trojan horses … from the candidacy for senior positions.”

That hope now seems conclusively forlorn. It is of course theoretically possible that Rubio et al have undergone sincere and enduring conversions from enthusiastic neocon warmongers to America First devotees, as suggested in a recent New York Times article.

Pete Hegseth described his own conversion to America First four years ago: “I think a lot of us who were very hawkish and believe in American military might and strength were very resistant to how candidate Trump characterized the wars … But if we are honest with ourselves, there is no doubt that we need to radically reorient how we do it. How much money have we invested, how many lives have we invested and has it actually made us safer? Is it still worth it?”

Elise Stefanik is now loath to stand by her previous push for Ukraine’s immediate NATO membership, and her office refuses to confirm whether she still believes Russia committed “genocide” in Ukraine, as she asserted in 2022.

Such professions of conversion are unsurprising, of course, but they sound shallow. Proclivity to neoconservatism—the meeting point between Trotsky, Stalin, and Hitler—is a psychotic condition remarkably similar to one’s tendency to embrace liberalism or communism. It is most unlikely that the clarion call of American exceptionalism, “rules-based international order,” and “benevolent global hegemony” can be cured overnight, like a bad hangover, in four key appointees who had been the cult’s devotees for decades. It may be possible in one of them, it is unlikely in two—but four? Hardly.   

It is more likely that seasoned political and media operatives like Rubio, Waltz, Hegseth and Stefanik have made purely pragmatic and temporary compromises in pursuit of power and career advancement. Their friends and allies seem to know the true score. “You are hearing a sigh of relief from America’s allies abroad,” Alyssa Farrah Griffin was quoted as saying by Newsweek. “These are people who are qualified … These are people who know who America’s enemies are: Russia, China and Iran, and they know who our allies are, and I think they are good choices.”

All this is eerily reminiscent of the first month of Trump’s first term. At the security conference in Munich (Feb. 17, 2017) and at the EU headquarters in Brussels two days later, Vice President Mike Pence offered profuse assurances to the European elite class that the Trump administration supports NATO, Western unity, and cohesion. Defense Secretary James Mattis made identical points to the same audience. Earlier in that same week Secretary of State Rex Tillerson went to Germany for the Group of 20 foreign ministers’ meeting. As he left the meeting, “there was a palpable sense of relief” among the Europeans. Tillerson and Pence “look like adults” was a theme repeated time and over again by various delighted Eurocrats.

The same is being said right now by Trump’s enemies of Rubio et al. It is unsurprising that Trump’s core supporters are currently dividing into two camps, anger and delusion.

Even if the neocon quartet’s road to Damascus was genuine, it is puzzling that Trump should select recent converts for the four top foreign policy and national security posts, rather than proven MAGA loyalists who had remained with him during the four long years in the wilderness—when his eventual comeback seemed uncertain at best.

Trump has been given a clear mandate for an America First foreign policy which would finally abandon globalism and foreign interventionism. “No more wars, I’m going to stop wars” he vowed in his first post-election speech to voters. His “America First” approach was widely perceived as rejecting the doctrine of the United States as a proposition nation and its global engagement, questioning NATO’s utility and core mission, advocating rapprochement with Russia, foregoing the regime-change mania of earlier administrations, and reaffirming the realist raison d’état as the guiding principle of foreign policymaking.

Now, however, it is an even bet that systemic incoherence—bordering on outright schizophrenia—will reign inside Trump’s second-term team. Or else, more likely perhaps, America’s grand strategy will continue to be shaped by the bipartisan orthodoxy of yore, merely camouflaged by MAGA rhetoric for decency’s sake.

It may be too early to claim that Trump has betrayed that mandate, but the signs are not good. The first litmus test will be whether he will rescind Biden’s handlers’ disastrous decision to send long-range missiles to Ukraine and to authorize the regime in Kiev to hit targets deep inside Russia with the assistance of American/NATO real-time intelligence and electronic guidance.

This is a spectacular escalation of the war in Ukraine by the lame duck Democratic administration—a reckless act with dire long-term consequences. If Donald Trump is duly inaugurated come Jan. 20 and that decision stays in force, we’ll know that the game is over, that the permanent bipartisan war party of the swamp has prevailed yet again.

If so, it will become somewhat clearer why Trump was allowed to win and Harris was not allowed to cheat, why there have been no Antifa or BLM riots in the aftermath of his victory, why there is no “resistance” within the federal bureaucracy anywhere on the horizon, and why the mainstream media machine is notably less hysterical vis-à-vis Trump than at any time over the past nine years.

The notion that this time round Donald Trump has made a deal with the neocon-infested deep state is too awful to contemplate. This is exactly why it needs to be allowed and examined.