The think tank (Brookings Institute) which he is part of laid out the Iran strategy "Path to Persia" something like 15 years ago.
I think he does recognize that the US needs Europe for projecting power, so that part is genuine. The US could not prosper against a hypothetical Eurasian union.
Not sure what to make of this. Maybe it is supposed to appease the EU (you still have allies in Washington), maybe it is a wakeup call for the deep state to pull the brakes.
Who even is the deep state any more? MAGA was sure it was backroom democrats. Project 2025 has provided much of the playbook for this administrations run, and thats deep red conservative territory. Meanwhile we have an overwhelming body of evidence for market manipulation and extreme profit taking on the war and oil fronts, pointing to politically aligned financiers.
I don't think the deep state is any discernible single group, but rather whoever we want to point the finger at on a particular topic.
The deep state is and always has been the ultra-wealthy.
Rampant, uncontrolled consolidation of media, PACs, lobbying, and granting cushy jobs to retired congresspeople all give the wealthiest individuals extremely outsized control over what happens in the US government.
I think the problem is that the "deep state" really came into public consciousness with Trump, on his first run. While I agree with your definition of the deep state, that is not what most people think of in current days, and Trump is probably the deepest of deep state you can legally be. He ran against the deep state, while being deeply embedded inside it. It was just easier to pass off because he wasn't a politician (at least from an American point of view, not sure of your country of origin).
It’s just funny he ran on releasing all of the Epstein Files, didn’t, and when we caught a glimpse of a slither of it, it turned out he was in there so much it could have been renamed the Trump Files
The deep state is any agent of meaningful power/influence that works for the government or is very closely entangled with the government, and that retains some or all of their power/influence from one admin to the next.
That includes for example powerful figures in the Pentagon or intelligence agencies that remain from one admin to the next. These people all have agendas of their own, and they network as people do. Dick Cheney was a deep state figure across a couple of decades, often working in the shadows. So was Rumsfeld. So was Kissinger across a few decades during his prime power/influence years. They all had long-term agendas, their ideas about the world, and extremely deep connections throughout the Federal Government.
It's not a mysterious conspiracy. It's just people with power/influence pursuing outcomes that they'd like to see happen, and working with other like-minded people to get there.
There is this building where guys wearing masks wheel you into a room behind locked doors at dawn and then use drugs to knock you out. They then take sharp knives and cut you open and rummage around your insides, sometimes taking organs out. Blood goes everywhere. The footage is gory. When they're done with you it may takes you weeks to recover.
The rest of just call his "surgery at a hospital".
My point is that you've just described in nefarious terms the "civil service" or the "administrative state". Every government department is full of career civil servants who will go through many administrations. Only the very top officials in any department are political appointees. We're talking the secretary, their deputies and some positions under those.
Government simply cannot function without career civil servants who end up becoming subject matter experts in what they're administering.
Or, you know, you can nerfariously say "deep state".
In my opinion a 'civil servant' sees their job as serving the American people to the best of their ability even if they don't agree with the outcomes of the latest election.
A member of the 'deep state'; however, is ideologically driven. If their favorite party is in power, they use their job to push their ideology to its limits. If the opposition party won the election; then they view their role as a means to 'resist', 'thwart', or otherwise delay any policies the elected officials try to implement.
Their general view is that their own opinions are superior to those of voters.
> In my opinion a 'civil servant' sees their job as serving the American people to the best of their ability even if they don't agree with the outcomes of the latest election.
Sure, but a bunch of stuff isn't supposed to change just because the president changes. It's supposed to take laws to change it, or even amendments. If those haven't been passed and the President tries to do that stuff anyway, we should want our civil servants to resist that.
The contrary notion is the Unitary Executive, which is that the president should be absolute dictator of what the executive branch does, with legality to be sorted out elsewhere even in egregious cases. This notion is very bad and we should not let it become normal, especially in a world where we've already seen absolutely insane rulings that place the president personally above the law.
If the executive is empowered by the legislative, we should not want civil servants to do gladly do every thing a president might ask of them. If the president is instead possessed by default of unlimited power to direct the executive branch and it's the legislative branch's job to reign in that boundless power (until the president ignores the law, then it's the judicial's job to finally make the executive knock it off one or more years later) then we would want totally obedient (to the president) civil servants. However, this latter idea is stupid and bad, so, we should want civil servants that don't treat the president's word as law, but the law as law.
> A member of the 'deep state'; however, is ideologically driven
What you're describing is a federal employee. The kind that takes a massive pay cut, and loses out on paycheck stability (due to government shutdowns), because they at least start out earnestly attempting to improve the system.
How they define "improving the system" varies by ideology, but career civil servants, in wanting to follow their definition of improving the system, are ideologically driven.
What you're describing is still just "A collection of civil servants that aren't disillusioned and dead inside"
I'm sorry but no. "Deep state" is nothing more than enemy within propaganda to justify a purge of government departments to replace them with ideologues and to further concentrate power in the hands of the so-called "unitary executive".
The point of my comment is that Republicans have this habit of describing perfectly ordinary and normal things in nefarious tones to make them sound sinister. The real problem is people are so gullible in falling for it.
The deep state, for example, would tell a president that if you bomb Iran and kill its autocratic leader, the country might close the Strait of Hormuz. And that naval escorts through the strait will only get sailors killed.
Trump ran on vanquishing the deep state because all he cares about is personal loyalty, not loyalty to the country, the Constitution, or objective fact.
I think the distinction between the one that you're describing and the one that the person you're replying to is describing is crime.
People like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheneye were part of a criminal conspiracy to rob the America people and destabilize the US to make it ripe for further hijacking.
That's the deepstate -- it's everything you mentioned above + a criminal conspiracy mindset.
Calling it "civil service" instead of "deep state" does not make it any better. We don't have either in the Constitution so whatever you call it, it has to be removed from power.
And then what? The spoils system? Rampant incompetence?
And, we have to get rid of it because it's not in the Constitution? You know what else isn't in the Constitution? DHS. The IRS. ICE. An enormous number of other agencies.
The Constitution gives very little guidance on the Executive Branch, other than the President and Vice President. That does not mean that hiring people in federal agencies is unconstitutional! It just means that the Constitution is silent on the topic, neither requiring nor prohibiting very much.
Then back to the system defined in the Constitution, it gives enough guidance. If you think the President is not enough for the Executive - amend the Constitution, used to be enough for ~200 years though.
The Constitution does not define a civil service system. You seem to interpret that as saying that any system is unconstitutional until the Constitution is amended to define one. That is... let's just call it "very much a minority interpretation".
We are not going to either amend the Constitution nor abolish the civil service just because some pseudonymous online account says we should.
The same thing it's always been: The military-industrial complex.
> MAGA was sure it was backroom democrats.
It's not that hard to distinguish "them", just look at how fast the mainstream media threw Biden under the bus over Afghanistan withdrawal.
1)POTUS orders the withdrawal.
2)Generals botch the withdrawal on purpose.
3)Mainstream media (left and right) eviscerates the POTUS. This sends a strong message to this POTUS, as well as any subsequent Presidents: "Don't mess with the profits of the complex or else."
This was the tipping point for me when I realized that the deep state is not a just a bogeyman conjured up by the right wingers. Should you cross the complex, it will just as easily come for you even if you're a Democrat that's been in politics for 50 years.
Finally, the Atlantic is as establishment as it gets. No matter which party is in power, their editorial board serves the ruling class, of which almost nobody on HN is a part of.
Whether their interests align with yours or not you can ascertain just by looking at approval ratings of the US Congress.
Yeah, given that there are some theories floating around that Trump is actually executing the "Path to Persia" paper, it's interesting that those people are (ostensibly) distancing themselves from it.
How times have changed when a neoliberal institution (not quite as bad as The Economist) openly says this:
> Even the threat of terrorism from the region was a consequence of American involvement, not the reason for it. Had the United States not been deeply and consistently involved in the Muslim world since the 1940s, Islamic militants would have little interest in attacking an indifferent nation 5,000 miles and two oceans away. Contrary to much mythology, they have hated us not so much because of “who we are” but because of where we are. In Iran’s case, the United States was deeply involved in its politics from the 1950s until the 1979 revolution, including as the main supporter of the brutal regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The surest way of avoiding Islamist terrorist attacks would have been to get out.
This is absolutely correct and it's wild we now live in a time when mainstream media just comes out and says it.
I agree with two general themes of this article:
1. This administration has done more to destroy American's global power than any other in history and it's not even closer. We live in a time when Europe is questioning its position of being America's dog. The Gulf states are questioning what they get out of America's security guarantee if America can't or won't protected them; and
2. Russia and China are huge winners here. China simply has to do nothing and not interrupt the US while they're making a historic and unprecedented mistake. And Europe and the US will likely make peace with Russia over Ukraine because of spiralling energy costs thanks to America's reckless misadventure in the Gulf.
This is going to end very badly for the US and it will (IMHO) go down as the biggest own-goal in American history.
A rogue superpower? We are never going to right the ship when we keep misrepresenting ourselves. Self-reflection is difficult or... too close to the forest to see the trees.
The USA is a rogue terror state and we're living in the aftermath of democratic collapse. Everything we see in the news is theater for the masses.
The single most interesting thing that will come out of the Iran war, is it's giving the go-ahead signal for China. I don't mean morally specifically, I mean practically: China is plainly seeing the US can't sustain a long campaign what-so-ever. The US has burned through ~850 Tomahawks in weeks, 20-25% of its stock. Again an opponent that wasn't that hard to knock down in terms of air to ground / ground to air, and strategic targets.
While the US can demolish high value targets all day long (assuming it can find them), it won't be able to sustain volume. And this is against a dramatically outmatched opponent (in terms of air + navy + intel, not boots on the ground).
China will build a hundred cruise missiles per day and truck them in from factories far away from the coast. The US can build 10-20. China's cruise missiles won't be as good, and they won't need to be. And that's the absolute least of what China will hyper produce in a mobilization to a war manufacturing stance. The US should just wave the flag before the first shots are fired re Taiwan given what we're seeing in Iran, it's over before it ever begins.
The US can't control the Straight of Hormuz properly, without taking losses (which it clearly doesn't want to do). That's a trivial task compared to trying to keep China from controlling the waters near Taiwan. The US won't be able to even get close to Taiwan is what this is demonstrating. China can stand-off the US easily.
The US is showing China and the world that it has zero chance at stopping a takeover of Taiwan.
China should be looking at this Iran mess and moving as fast as it can to launch their invasion. The US isn't ready, and won't be.
The US could put up a big fight at a full war mobilization, given some time to spin up. That scenario will not occur with regard to Taiwan. China has the green light.
---
edit:
There was a story about the early days of the invasion into Iraq by the US, after 9/11. It was about the US soldiers rolling into Iraqi towns, cities. They thought the US soldiers were maybe superhuman, or at least had extraordinarily advanced technology. An Iraqi boy wondered if the US soldiers could see through buildings with their helmets and goggles. After all they dispatched Saddam from power so quickly, seemingly so easily - one can understand the wonder.
Then they figured out the US soldiers were just meatbags like any other soldiers. That IEDs killed them just the same, and sniper rounds, and so on.
One of the very large benefits to rarely using your capabilities as a military superpower, is so that your enemies are unsure of just what you're capable of if pushed. And if you're lucky enough to put on a staggering outcome - as in the first Gulf War - in which Russia got to see their hardware decimated by vastly superior US weapons, then you should rest on that perception as long as possible. Iraq and Afghanistan substantially weakened the perception of US military domination (just a Vietnam did before that, for a generation). Iran doesn't show the US to be weak per se, rather, it shows the limits of its present endurance capabilities among other things. And that's what China needs to know.
And of course this happens to major powers from time to time throughout history. Russia goes into Ukraine and gets humiliated, its capabilities at the point of launching that war, were revealed to be embarrassingly mediocre compared to what was thought to exist. Or the USSR and Afghanistan before that.
114 comments
>
Can't read the Atlantic any more since it became privateIt has always been in private ownership, never having been owned by a publicly traded company:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atlantic#Ownership_and_edi...
Currently majority ownership is with Laurene Powell Jobs (widow of Steve Jobs).
More like "members only" for the website where they don't accept "strangers" like they used to do :(
Add-on free bypass
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
The think tank (Brookings Institute) which he is part of laid out the Iran strategy "Path to Persia" something like 15 years ago.
I think he does recognize that the US needs Europe for projecting power, so that part is genuine. The US could not prosper against a hypothetical Eurasian union.
Not sure what to make of this. Maybe it is supposed to appease the EU (you still have allies in Washington), maybe it is a wakeup call for the deep state to pull the brakes.
I don't think the deep state is any discernible single group, but rather whoever we want to point the finger at on a particular topic.
Rampant, uncontrolled consolidation of media, PACs, lobbying, and granting cushy jobs to retired congresspeople all give the wealthiest individuals extremely outsized control over what happens in the US government.
That includes for example powerful figures in the Pentagon or intelligence agencies that remain from one admin to the next. These people all have agendas of their own, and they network as people do. Dick Cheney was a deep state figure across a couple of decades, often working in the shadows. So was Rumsfeld. So was Kissinger across a few decades during his prime power/influence years. They all had long-term agendas, their ideas about the world, and extremely deep connections throughout the Federal Government.
It's not a mysterious conspiracy. It's just people with power/influence pursuing outcomes that they'd like to see happen, and working with other like-minded people to get there.
The rest of just call his "surgery at a hospital".
My point is that you've just described in nefarious terms the "civil service" or the "administrative state". Every government department is full of career civil servants who will go through many administrations. Only the very top officials in any department are political appointees. We're talking the secretary, their deputies and some positions under those.
Government simply cannot function without career civil servants who end up becoming subject matter experts in what they're administering.
Or, you know, you can nerfariously say "deep state".
A member of the 'deep state'; however, is ideologically driven. If their favorite party is in power, they use their job to push their ideology to its limits. If the opposition party won the election; then they view their role as a means to 'resist', 'thwart', or otherwise delay any policies the elected officials try to implement.
Their general view is that their own opinions are superior to those of voters.
> In my opinion a 'civil servant' sees their job as serving the American people to the best of their ability even if they don't agree with the outcomes of the latest election.
Sure, but a bunch of stuff isn't supposed to change just because the president changes. It's supposed to take laws to change it, or even amendments. If those haven't been passed and the President tries to do that stuff anyway, we should want our civil servants to resist that.
The contrary notion is the Unitary Executive, which is that the president should be absolute dictator of what the executive branch does, with legality to be sorted out elsewhere even in egregious cases. This notion is very bad and we should not let it become normal, especially in a world where we've already seen absolutely insane rulings that place the president personally above the law.
If the executive is empowered by the legislative, we should not want civil servants to do gladly do every thing a president might ask of them. If the president is instead possessed by default of unlimited power to direct the executive branch and it's the legislative branch's job to reign in that boundless power (until the president ignores the law, then it's the judicial's job to finally make the executive knock it off one or more years later) then we would want totally obedient (to the president) civil servants. However, this latter idea is stupid and bad, so, we should want civil servants that don't treat the president's word as law, but the law as law.
> A member of the 'deep state'; however, is ideologically driven
What you're describing is a federal employee. The kind that takes a massive pay cut, and loses out on paycheck stability (due to government shutdowns), because they at least start out earnestly attempting to improve the system.
How they define "improving the system" varies by ideology, but career civil servants, in wanting to follow their definition of improving the system, are ideologically driven.
What you're describing is still just "A collection of civil servants that aren't disillusioned and dead inside"
The point of my comment is that Republicans have this habit of describing perfectly ordinary and normal things in nefarious tones to make them sound sinister. The real problem is people are so gullible in falling for it.
Trump ran on vanquishing the deep state because all he cares about is personal loyalty, not loyalty to the country, the Constitution, or objective fact.
And so many of you bought it.
People like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheneye were part of a criminal conspiracy to rob the America people and destabilize the US to make it ripe for further hijacking.
That's the deepstate -- it's everything you mentioned above + a criminal conspiracy mindset.
And, we have to get rid of it because it's not in the Constitution? You know what else isn't in the Constitution? DHS. The IRS. ICE. An enormous number of other agencies.
The Constitution gives very little guidance on the Executive Branch, other than the President and Vice President. That does not mean that hiring people in federal agencies is unconstitutional! It just means that the Constitution is silent on the topic, neither requiring nor prohibiting very much.
We are not going to either amend the Constitution nor abolish the civil service just because some pseudonymous online account says we should.
> Federal employees are unconstitutional
Are you a law clerk for Clarence Thomas?
Because statecraft isn't gig work.
> Who even is the deep state any more?
The same thing it's always been: The military-industrial complex.
> MAGA was sure it was backroom democrats.
It's not that hard to distinguish "them", just look at how fast the mainstream media threw Biden under the bus over Afghanistan withdrawal.
1)POTUS orders the withdrawal.
2)Generals botch the withdrawal on purpose.
3)Mainstream media (left and right) eviscerates the POTUS. This sends a strong message to this POTUS, as well as any subsequent Presidents: "Don't mess with the profits of the complex or else."
This was the tipping point for me when I realized that the deep state is not a just a bogeyman conjured up by the right wingers. Should you cross the complex, it will just as easily come for you even if you're a Democrat that's been in politics for 50 years.
Finally, the Atlantic is as establishment as it gets. No matter which party is in power, their editorial board serves the ruling class, of which almost nobody on HN is a part of.
Whether their interests align with yours or not you can ascertain just by looking at approval ratings of the US Congress.
> Even the threat of terrorism from the region was a consequence of American involvement, not the reason for it. Had the United States not been deeply and consistently involved in the Muslim world since the 1940s, Islamic militants would have little interest in attacking an indifferent nation 5,000 miles and two oceans away. Contrary to much mythology, they have hated us not so much because of “who we are” but because of where we are. In Iran’s case, the United States was deeply involved in its politics from the 1950s until the 1979 revolution, including as the main supporter of the brutal regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The surest way of avoiding Islamist terrorist attacks would have been to get out.
This is absolutely correct and it's wild we now live in a time when mainstream media just comes out and says it.
I agree with two general themes of this article:
1. This administration has done more to destroy American's global power than any other in history and it's not even closer. We live in a time when Europe is questioning its position of being America's dog. The Gulf states are questioning what they get out of America's security guarantee if America can't or won't protected them; and
2. Russia and China are huge winners here. China simply has to do nothing and not interrupt the US while they're making a historic and unprecedented mistake. And Europe and the US will likely make peace with Russia over Ukraine because of spiralling energy costs thanks to America's reckless misadventure in the Gulf.
This is going to end very badly for the US and it will (IMHO) go down as the biggest own-goal in American history.
The USA is a rogue terror state and we're living in the aftermath of democratic collapse. Everything we see in the news is theater for the masses.
While the US can demolish high value targets all day long (assuming it can find them), it won't be able to sustain volume. And this is against a dramatically outmatched opponent (in terms of air + navy + intel, not boots on the ground).
China will build a hundred cruise missiles per day and truck them in from factories far away from the coast. The US can build 10-20. China's cruise missiles won't be as good, and they won't need to be. And that's the absolute least of what China will hyper produce in a mobilization to a war manufacturing stance. The US should just wave the flag before the first shots are fired re Taiwan given what we're seeing in Iran, it's over before it ever begins.
The US can't control the Straight of Hormuz properly, without taking losses (which it clearly doesn't want to do). That's a trivial task compared to trying to keep China from controlling the waters near Taiwan. The US won't be able to even get close to Taiwan is what this is demonstrating. China can stand-off the US easily.
The US is showing China and the world that it has zero chance at stopping a takeover of Taiwan.
China should be looking at this Iran mess and moving as fast as it can to launch their invasion. The US isn't ready, and won't be.
The US could put up a big fight at a full war mobilization, given some time to spin up. That scenario will not occur with regard to Taiwan. China has the green light.
---
edit:
There was a story about the early days of the invasion into Iraq by the US, after 9/11. It was about the US soldiers rolling into Iraqi towns, cities. They thought the US soldiers were maybe superhuman, or at least had extraordinarily advanced technology. An Iraqi boy wondered if the US soldiers could see through buildings with their helmets and goggles. After all they dispatched Saddam from power so quickly, seemingly so easily - one can understand the wonder.
Then they figured out the US soldiers were just meatbags like any other soldiers. That IEDs killed them just the same, and sniper rounds, and so on.
One of the very large benefits to rarely using your capabilities as a military superpower, is so that your enemies are unsure of just what you're capable of if pushed. And if you're lucky enough to put on a staggering outcome - as in the first Gulf War - in which Russia got to see their hardware decimated by vastly superior US weapons, then you should rest on that perception as long as possible. Iraq and Afghanistan substantially weakened the perception of US military domination (just a Vietnam did before that, for a generation). Iran doesn't show the US to be weak per se, rather, it shows the limits of its present endurance capabilities among other things. And that's what China needs to know.
And of course this happens to major powers from time to time throughout history. Russia goes into Ukraine and gets humiliated, its capabilities at the point of launching that war, were revealed to be embarrassingly mediocre compared to what was thought to exist. Or the USSR and Afghanistan before that.