The infamous commercial messaging chat between President Donald Trump’s top national security officials that accidentally included a journalist in a discussion about America’s military strikes against the Houthis in Yemen earlier this month excluded a key aspect: the Yemeni people. The text exchange, over the instant messenger service Signal, was revelatory in many ways. As has been widely noted, it showed a carelessness in handling sensitive information that could have endangered the lives of the American servicemembers involved in this operation. It also demonstrated how focused senior Trump administration officials are on tactics, operations, and the propaganda of political communications, such as how to talk to the public about military strikes. Yet lost in the reporting is that their self-leaked conversation conspicuously made no reference to the realities of the people directly affected by Houthi rule, how the US strikes might impact them, or even whether Washington should engage this population. The episode laid bare the central problems with Trump 2.0’s nascent national security approach: a strong inclination to prioritize tactics and propaganda in statecraft without a clear and practical strategic framework to deal with the biggest challenges in the world and in the Middle East. In the Yemeni case, this has materialized as strikes without strategy and a propagandistic touting of policy wins before they are even achieved. As such, the administration’s method is ignoring potential avenues for shaping the conditions impacting the lives of Yemenis that would lead to a strategic and political defeat for the Houthis and produce a lasting win for broader security in the Red Sea region.
The thickening fog of tactics and propaganda in Trump’s foreign policy | Middle East Institute
