New World Order

It’s hard to argue with Anatol Lieven’s observations about the demise of the liberal order [“The Mask of Imperialism,” Easy Chair, March]. After the United States expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait in early 1991 and the Soviet Union collapsed later that year, the American foreign-policy community, composed primarily of liberal internationalists, sought to redeem the world. This resulted in a series of catastrophic failures that have sapped the United States of both its resources and its credibility.

Yet in drawing what is by now a rather pedestrian conclusion about the changing world order amid the past thirty years of American overreach, Lieven makes one particularly dubious assertion. It’s unclear why he identifies the war in Gaza and Israel’s attacks on Beirut as the death knells of the liberal order. The nature of the war will be debated for decades to come, and many Lebanese and Syrians do not mourn Hassan Nasrallah’s demise. Lieven’s claim seems to offer more of a political statement than rigorous analysis. Why not trace things to March 2003, when George W. Bush ordered Operation Iraqi Freedom, or to the spring and summer of 1994, when the Clinton Administration ignored the genocide happening in Rwanda?

Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of Lieven’s essay is his call for a “realist internationalism.” To paraphrase Gramsci, the old order is dying, but the new one has not been born. The interregnum is an opportune moment for analysts and policymakers to pursue novel ideas about America’s role in the world, but Lieven leaves his reader wanting. We know whom he doesn’t like—neocons, liberal internationalists, and Israel—but while he does share what he believes should be the United States’ core foreign-policy considerations (climate change, denuclearization, and so on), he fails to state what a Washington policy addressing these issues would look like.

Steven A. Cook
Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations
Washington

Haste and Waste

Andrew Cockburn makes a convincing case for why President Trump’s efforts to tame the federal bureaucracy, like those of so many before him, will ultimately fail [“Rage Against the Machine,” Letter from Washington, March]. From my experience as a former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, I’ve found that career officers tend to resist any task that exceeds the scope of their department. If you explain your goals and state the risks of not pursuing them, however, they will respond—but you have to repeatedly reinforce these changes. Treating officers with respect, heeding their counsel, and taking them into your confidence will only increase your chances of success. These strategies require public-administration skills, a qualification that few, if any, of Trump’s appointees appear to have.

Trump and Elon Musk have presented their bureaucracy-bashing as a key to reducing the federal budget deficit, arguably the most critical issue facing the United States. As Cockburn notes, Musk “has blithely predicted that $2 trillion can … be lopped off the federal budget through the elimination of ‘wasteful spending.’ ” But entitlement programs and debt service represent more than 72 percent of the federal budget, while only 12 percent is devoted to discretionary spending—where virtually all of the present cuts are taking place—and even less of it, about 6 percent, to the cost of the federal workforce. Bureaucratic waste, fraud, and abuse are not bankrupting the U.S. government; benefits going to the American people are. Slashing these would only provoke mass opposition from those on the receiving end (many of whom voted for Trump), collapse Trump’s approval ratings, and yield a Democratic takeover of Congress next year.

Andrew S. Natsios
Executive Professor, Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University
College Station, Tex.

From the obscure offices of untapped bureaucrats buried deep in the bowels of Washington, Cockburn has once again concocted that alchemical miracle known as news. His assessment is based not on the slack-jawed idolatry of elite-media toadies, but on sources nobody else thought to ring up and poke. He may wish to revisit his forecast on Ukraine, and it does look like some important gears in the machine may have been smashed altogether. But the reporting not only stands, it lights the way for other journalists on how to short-circuit the flood-the-zone media strategy that Trump has found to be a ravishing success. By asking not “what is the latest horror?” but “which of these horrors is real?,” we can begin to see the true contours of our bureaucracy, its reinforcements and its vulnerabilities, instead of the shadow cast by MSNBC upon the wall. The great muckraker I. F. Stone wrote, “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.” The same can be said of shithead reporters who make their bread off the sensationalism fueling Trump’s rise. Fortunately for us, reports indicate Cockburn isn’t using.

Daniel Boguslaw
Brooklyn, N.Y.

I enjoyed Cockburn’s hopeful, naïve, but not particularly prescient assessment of the power of the deep state to withstand Trump’s chaos. To be fair, he couldn’t have had any idea that Trump’s actions would be this illegal and insane. Who could have imagined that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency would simply start blowing things up without meaningful pushback from the new Cabinet secretaries (who might be inclined to protect their turf), Congress (which appropriates funds and designates how they are spent), or the courts (which, although they have issued stays and orders to resume the flow of funds, have stymied Musk’s efforts only partly)? Cockburn’s unnamed source thought DOGE would open with a hiring freeze. No: Musk’s chain saw has turned out to be very real.

Kit Carlson
East Lansing, Mich.

Andrew Cockburn responds:

It’s interesting how often Trump and his critics agree with one another. Both he and Kit Carlson confidently assert that he is already achieving his goals. Both are impressed by the dramatic activities of DOGE’s Muskrats and other attacks on the bureaucracy. But both should perhaps ready themselves for a change in the tide. The courts, as I predicted, are proving a substantial impediment to the Trump agenda; Cabinet secretaries, as I predicted, are pushing back against the obstreperous Musk, leading to Trump’s March 6 directive significantly restricting the eccentric billionaire’s power over their departments. As Andrew Natsios correctly reminds us, Trump–Musk initiatives are unlikely to make more than a barely perceptible dent in overall federal spending, while the deficit will quite certainly continue to grow. Trump himself complains that the mass deportations he promised are not taking place, while his advances and retreats on tariffs are a telltale reminder of his proclivity to withdraw in the face of determined opposition. Daniel Boguslaw suggests I may wish to correct my assertion that Trump will fail to end the war in Ukraine. I hope that I was wrong and he is right.

Tuning In

Matthew Sherrill explores the innovations in music design in his dispatch from the 2024 Guthman Musical Instrument Competition [“New World Symphonies,” Miscellany, March]. I understand the appeal of well-constructed, eye-catching pieces of gear; as a double bassist, I’ve often been approached while carrying mine on the subway. But I was struck by Sherrill’s mention of Jean-François Laporte’s “Mantra,” a “twenty-odd-minute recording of a compressor cooling a hockey rink,” which happens to be an immensely beautiful record. I’m sure many people have seen a Zamboni before, but who has really listened to one? Who has given it this amount of reverence? Perhaps new symphonies are already being made by the rustling of the trees and the sounds of everyday machinery.

Jack McGuire
Astoria, N.Y.

Corrections

The January Harper’s Index incorrectly stated that 3,100,000 kilowatt-hours of energy could power an estimated 287,000 U.S. households for a year. In fact, it could power an estimated 287 households for that period of time.

In “New World Symphonies” by Matthew Sherrill [Miscellany, March], the name of an AI music generator was misspelled. It is Suno, not Sumo.

We regret the errors.