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Trump's Alpha Male Foreign Policy
. . .Just listen to Sebastian Gorka, the Breitbart propagandist and Hungarian ultranationalist turned White House national security aide. He’s been saying it loud and clear for a couple months now whenever he’s asked about Trump’s foreign policy and how the new president will shake things up globally: “The alpha males are back.” . . .
Now that he’s president, Trump has taken the gendered politics of foreign policy to a whole different level. As the Alpha Males slogan suggests, it’s both a worldview for Trump and his team—and a philosophy of who and how to get the job done. It helps explain why he’s staffed his national security team and the power positions in his Cabinet with brawny, uniformed military officers—and also his oft-stated regard for various authoritarian strongmen leaders, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Egypt’s Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi.
***
“Tough talk is quite easy. Bullying is quite easy,” says Wendy Sherman. “Getting something done in the world is quite complicated.”
“One of the lessons for the alpha males,” adds Michele Flournoy, “is to actually start with the facts.”
I asked Sherman and Flournoy, two of Washington’s most alpha of Alpha Ladies, to talk about Trump’s macho foreign policy—and what it’s really like to be a woman in the Situation Room—in an interview for this week’s edition of our new podcast, The Global Politico. Flournoy, the top policy official in Obama’s Pentagon, was in line to become the first woman secretary of defense had Clinton won the election; Sherman, who served as the chief negotiator of Obama’s Iran deal as his undersecretary of state for political affairs, was mentioned as a possible secretary in a Clinton administration. They were joined by Madeleine Albright, who became the first woman ever to hold the job of secretary of state when Bill Clinton appointed her to the post in his second term. . ."Tough talk is easy, but actually advancing American interests in a way that's smart is a lot harder.” (Michele Flournoy)
Now that he’s president, Trump has taken the gendered politics of foreign policy to a whole different level. As the Alpha Males slogan suggests, it’s both a worldview for Trump and his team—and a philosophy of who and how to get the job done. It helps explain why he’s staffed his national security team and the power positions in his Cabinet with brawny, uniformed military officers—and also his oft-stated regard for various authoritarian strongmen leaders, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Egypt’s Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi.
***
“Tough talk is quite easy. Bullying is quite easy,” says Wendy Sherman. “Getting something done in the world is quite complicated.”
“One of the lessons for the alpha males,” adds Michele Flournoy, “is to actually start with the facts.”
I asked Sherman and Flournoy, two of Washington’s most alpha of Alpha Ladies, to talk about Trump’s macho foreign policy—and what it’s really like to be a woman in the Situation Room—in an interview for this week’s edition of our new podcast, The Global Politico. Flournoy, the top policy official in Obama’s Pentagon, was in line to become the first woman secretary of defense had Clinton won the election; Sherman, who served as the chief negotiator of Obama’s Iran deal as his undersecretary of state for political affairs, was mentioned as a possible secretary in a Clinton administration. They were joined by Madeleine Albright, who became the first woman ever to hold the job of secretary of state when Bill Clinton appointed her to the post in his second term. . ."Tough talk is easy, but actually advancing American interests in a way that's smart is a lot harder.” (Michele Flournoy)
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/trumps-alpha-male-foreign-policy-214830
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