Josh Rogin - Chaos Under Heaven

On one particular day in Washington, April 24, 2019, the Trump administration’s answer to Kennan managed not only to bungle the history of Kennan but also to create a worldwide and completely unnecessary scandal in the process. This is the story of the State Department’s failed initial attempt to devise, much less articulate, an overall argument for dealing with China.

Clash of Civilizations

When Mike Pompeo became secretary of state, he was determined to leave his mark as a China hardliner. He knew Trump prioritized the trade deal above all, but he wanted to make China a focus of his tenure, and so he staffed up for that purpose. He filled the post of assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs with a brigadier general from Indo-Pacific Command named David Stilwell, a proud hardliner. He hired as a senior adviser Mary Kissel, a Wall Street Journal columnist who had lived and reported from Hong Kong. Pompeo held what he called “Saturday Sessions” on China outside the State Department and invited outside experts like Michael Pillsbury to come and talk through various China-related issues.

But Pompeo made one big mistake when he chose Kiron Skinner to be his new policy planning director (the same job Kennan had) and gave her the project of devising an overarching strategic argument for how to deal with China.

On paper, Skinner was perfectly qualified. Like Kennan, she had a PhD from Harvard in political science. At age twenty-three, she had met then Stanford junior faculty member Condoleezza Rice and enlisted her to serve on her dissertation review committee, the beginning of a long mentorship. Skinner had done research for the memoir of another secretary of state, George Shultz. She was a tenured professor at Carnegie Mellon with a list of publications to her credit and strong ties to the national security community in Washington.

Skinner had a political identity too. She served on the foreign policy staff of the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush, Rand Paul, Newt Gingrich, and eventually Donald Trump. The Trump campaign was like the film The Dirty Dozen, where the rejects of the GOP foreign policy establishment were assembled and sent on a mission of certain suicide. Not many of them survived to actually serve in the administration. Skinner lasted only a few days on the transition team before she clashed with other early Trump administration officials and vanished from the scene.

Rex Tillerson chose Brian Hook, a conventional GOP establishment type, to be his policy planning director. Hook’s focus was Iran. When Pompeo replaced Tillerson, he wanted new blood. Skinner seemed like a logical choice. What Pompeo didn’t know was that she was a management disaster and a public relations liability. But that became clear when Skinner took the stage on April 24, 2019, for a public event hosted by the New America Foundation, run by another Harvard alumnus and former State Department director of policy planning, Anne-Marie Slaughter.

The State Department’s policy planning shop “is the place where the containment doctrine was born,” Slaughter began. “Everybody who holds this role serves in the shadow of George Kennan and containment and the Marshall plan.”

She asked Skinner, what exactly is the Trump doctrine? This was a popular question to ask Trump officials in public, because there was no real answer and each official who answered it usually just inserted their own worldview mashed up with whatever Trump had said recently. Skinner simply said it was “evolving” and that her job was to develop it.

“Part of my job is to provide the intellectual architecture for the Trump doctrine,” she said. “If it doesn’t happen at policy planning, the only foreign policy think tank in the government, it doesn’t happen.”

She laid out what she saw as the pillars of a Trump doctrine: a preference for national sovereignty above international organizations and international law, a laser focus on the American interest, a push for reciprocity from our adversaries and more burden sharing from our friends.

“He provides the hunches and instincts and it’s my job with Secretary Pompeo to turn those hunches and instincts into a hypothesis,” she said, adding that there was a “Pompeo corollary” to the Trump doctrine, which she was also in charge of developing, details to come later.

Nobody in the crowd likely believed that Skinner was in charge of Trump’s foreign policy. But that kind of vague pablum was common enough in these think tank panels even before Trump. The problems started when the topic turned to China. Skinner said the White House economic crew had gotten hold of the China issue early on in the administration and that the State Department needed to reassert its role. Then she revealed that Pompeo’s shop was working on their own paper that would trace the sources of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) conduct and how America should respond.

“State is in the lead in that attempt to get something like a Letter X for China, that Kennan wrote,” she said. “You can’t have a policy without an argument underneath it. What hasn’t happened in this century is to advance the argument, and that is what we are working on at State. And if it will happen, it will happen at the State Department.”

It’s true Pompeo had initiated an effort to produce an internal document to guide US-China policy. Skinner called it “Letter X,” incorrectly referring to the Foreign Affairs article Kennan wrote and misremembering which Kennan document she was attempting to re-create, the Long Telegram. But the bigger problem was what she said next.

“This is a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology and the United States really hasn’t had that before,” she said. “It’s also striking that it’s the first time we will have a great power competitor who is not Caucasian.”

Slaughter, hearing the word “civilization,” immediately responded by invoking the only foreign policy trope more common at think tank events than invoking Kennan. “It’s like Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations,’” she said, referring to yet another Harvard PhD holder, Samuel Huntington, whose famous work dividing the world into a set of civilizational entities was the first item on my International Affairs 101 syllabus as a freshman at the George Washington University.

Slaughter could have just pointed out that what Skinner said was totally inaccurate (see Japan). Instead, she decided to point out that the United States is not all Caucasian (which is true, but not the point). Skinner replied that the foreign policy elite establishment is actually very heavily Caucasian (which is also true, but also not the point). The event ended without either realizing the controversy they had just unleashed.

Losing the Battle of Ideas

The condemnation and ridicule of Skinner after the event came swiftly and from all sides. For some, it was proof that the Trump foreign policy doctrine was racist. For others, it was proof that the Trump team was provoking the “clash” in the “Clash of Civilizations.” For others, it was just evidence that Skinner was out of her depth.

Skinner was put into what I call the “senior official witness protection program,” never to be allowed to speak in public again. Four months later, she was fired amid allegations of management abuse and chaos in her shop. Her staff had reported that she was prone to yelling, making homophobic remarks, alleging her staffers were sleeping with each other, and retaliating against anyone who complained.

If Skinner’s Long Telegram project was primarily meant to offer an opening salvo in the US-China war of ideas, the scandal ensured that Beijing won this skirmish. The Chinese media had a field day with it and the Chinese government never let it go.