His pinball-machine style hinges on his advisers’ personal fealty. This will mean more trouble ahead.
Donald Trump’s chaotic national-security governance is in full flood. Whether it’s risking American military operations, making volatile, highly dubious tariff decisions, hiring uninformed senior advisers, or seeing senior government officials dissenting from presidential decisions, the disarray is palpable and likely to spread. It did Thursday, with the ouster of national security adviser Mike Waltz. It doesn’t have to be this way. Not in my experience have emojis been deployed as they were during the inexplicable group chat on Signal. For Mr. Trump, however, chaos is embedded in his DNA and endemic in his team. Consider the recent evidence.
Open debate before a presidential decision is normal and productive. Questioning decisions afterward, even doubting the boss’s judgment, is something else, but apparently not to JD Vance on whether to strike the Houthis: “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now.” Weeks later, Mr. Vance hied himself off to Greenland to denounce Denmark’s administration of that Trump-coveted island. Denmark’s foreign minister metaphorically slapped the administration’s wrist, emphasizing correctly that this is no way to treat close allies. Even congressional Republicans now see the Vance style as a problem. If he gives similar speeches about China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, perhaps we could rest easier.
Mr. Trump’s chaotic management is exemplified by his friend Steve Witkoff, whose portfolio began with Gaza hostages and then absorbed the entire Middle East, including Iran’s nuclear-weapons program and the highest-level U.S. negotiations with senior Iranian officials in years. It expanded to the Russia-Ukraine war, on which Mr. Witkoff meets alone with Vladimir Putin, and now includes crushing the Houthis. Shadow secretary of state? Not bad for someone without diplomatic experience.
Mr. Witkoff has no evident expertise in Russia, Eastern Europe (especially Ukraine), the Middle East, Iran, state-to-state negotiations, nuclear-weapons technology, weapons-of-mass-destruction proliferation, verification of international agreements, or armed conflict. His Ukraine cease-fire work verges on collapse. He acts at Mr. Trump’s direct behest, and his connection to Secretary of State Marco Rubio is unclear. Mr. Witkoff’s access could be ideal to introduce Mr. Trump to reality, but both men succumb all too readily to Russian propaganda, as these pages have shown.
This article was first published in the Wall Street Journal on May 2, 2025. Click here to read the rest of the article.
