By Masha Gessen
“The President provides the hunches and instincts,” Kiron Skinner said, at the annual Future Security Forum, “and it’s my job, and that of Secretary Pompeo, to turn those hunches and instincts into hypotheses.”
One of the most frightening things I’ve witnessed in recent months was a very polite conversation in a well-lit room in the Ronald Reagan Building, in Washington, D.C., on Monday. The director of policy planning at the State Department, Kiron Skinner, was interviewed onstage by a woman who used to hold her job: Anne-Marie Slaughter, who is now the head of the New America Foundation (where I am a fellow this year). The occasion was the annual Future Security Forum, and the audience consisted of several dozen foreign-policy and security experts, many of them in uniform.
The discussion was nominally devoted to the challenges that the State Department will face in 2030, though very little was said about that year or, indeed, about the future. It was conducted in the moderately accessible policy jargon that is typical of such conversations. Except this time the familiar language took on the opposite of its usual sticky, overburdened quality: it was hollow now, like the words meant nothing. Not literally nothing, of course—words always convey some meaning, and the meaning inevitably changes depending on the speaker and the context—but here the chasm between what the words might have meant to one interlocutor and what they meant when spoken by the other was so vast that it was as though the words were no longer part of a recognizable language. The same was true of the women’s introductory banter. They both noted that it was remarkable that two State Department policy directors were speaking to each other and that both were women. They didn’t note it, but the audience saw that one of them, Skinner, is an African-American woman. This was three days after President Trump doubled down on his characterization of the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, in August 2017, as “very fine people,” and one’s brain could break trying to grasp the meaning of this African-American woman’s status and presence.
A large part of Skinner’s job is listening to what the President says and trying to make sense of it. She said as much. “The President provides the hunches and instincts,” she said, “and it’s my job, and that of Secretary Pompeo, to turn those hunches and instincts into hypotheses.” She called the hypotheses the “Trump Doctrine” and the “Pompeo Corollary.” Slaughter, logically, asked what the Trump Doctrine was. “That’s a tough one,” Skinner responded, without a hint of irony. “It is, in a kind of broad way, a set of pillars that address twenty-first-century realities.”
The pillars were: the “return to national sovereignty”; national interest; reciprocity in international relations and trade; “burden sharing,” particularly in defense; and “new regional partnerships” for what she described as “particular crises.”
“If I can summarize,” Slaughter suggested, “the Trump Doctrine is ‘The United States is a sovereign nation guided by its national interest—we’ll do for you if you’ll do for us.’ ”
Skinner confirmed that Slaughter’s understanding was correct. Then she spun this crude approach to international relations as something akin to naïve art. “Donald Trump, who probably has not studied international relations extensively, and who has been a successful businessman, but who did study at Penn,” Skinner, who was educated at Spelman College and Harvard, said, has reignited debate “on some concepts that we thought were settled.” He has forced the foreign-policy establishment to revisit “first principles,” Skinner said—most importantly, to debate the meaning of national sovereignty. She did not elaborate on the substance of the debate, and one got the impression that the debate was rather an exercise in translating the slogan “America first” into the language of bureaucracy. It was like saying that someone who has carpet-bombed your city has turned your fellow-citizens into builders again: technically it’s true, but morally and intellectually it is a lie.
It came time for Slaughter to ask about the Pompeo Corollary. Skinner seemed almost surprised to have to answer the question. “The Pompeo Corollary,” she said, “is trying to find the diplomatic angle in all aspects of what the President is attempting to do—in security, society, the economy, energy, and the international system, and in each of those, looking at, what’s the role of diplomacy?” she said. “We are working on that, and it’s a lot of fun!” No one, including Skinner, seemed to smile. But, once the floor was opened to questions, everyone was very polite, as though they were having an actual meaningful conversation with a key government official.
I have heard talk like this before, in Russia. A government official once told me that he “carried out emanations”: not policies, laws, or even orders but signals akin to what Skinner called “hunches and instincts.” It’s what officials do in countries that are led by a combination of ignorance and corruption. I had heard the isolationism and destruction of Putin’s rule be framed in phrases such as “sovereign democracy” and in a lot of other plausible-sounding policy gobbledygook that served to rob every word of familiar meaning. In Russia, a kind of record was set last week, when a senator named Yelena Mizulina claimed—on the day the Russian parliament passed a law that enables the state to wall Russia off from the World Wide Web—that “where something is banned is where a person is most free. Because it means, ‘This is forbidden but everything else is up to you.’ ” She added, “Because what is the rule of law? That’s the biggest unfreedom! The more rights you have, the less free you are, because rights, unlike prohibitions, are when you are supposed to act strictly in the way that accords with the law.”
A decade and a half ago, Mizulina belonged to Yabloko, a pro-democracy political party. Even more recently, some of the words she was throwing around last week held meaning that most Russians could agree upon. But now, even if the Putin era were to end tomorrow, there would be no language left to use to create a new political reality. Watching Skinner on Monday, I was struck, not only by how familiar the process of hollowing out language felt but by how quickly, easily, and politely a Washington audience can accommodate itself to it.
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