The deep divide lurking in Trump officials’ leaked group chat

The biggest story in America is, and should remain, the Trump administration’s accidental inclusion of Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg on a Signal group chat about planning airstrikes in Yemen.

This is not only colossally incompetent, but a scandal of the first proportion: Top officials, including the vice president and secretary of defense, discussing the most sensitive information on a commercially available app that is both easy for foreign adversaries to penetrate and seemingly designed to circumvent the public records laws that allow for scrutiny of their policy communications.

But this is more than just incompetent and scandalous: it’s revelatory. The chat logs give us an unusually unvarnished look into key players’ worldview, the kind of thing historians usually have to wait decades to access.

And what was said points to the incoherence of the Trump foreign policy project: a worldview that cannot decide on what it means to put “America first.” The Trump team, taking its cue from the president, is trying to pursue two contradictory visions at the same time — to maintain America’s status as the world’s leading power while also trying to scale down its international commitments. They want to simultaneously dominate the world and withdraw from it.

These contradicting views of what “America First” means — America as first among nations, or America scaling back to put its internal affairs first — were visible even before the new administration took office. The text logs confirm, in dramatic fashion, that the contradictions are shaping policy, producing an internal debate over war and peace that proceeds on bizarre and incoherent terms.

All of this suggests there is no coherent Trump foreign policy doctrine. And there likely never will be.

Waltz created the Signal group to discuss implementing the president’s directive to take a harder line on the Houthis, an Iranian-backed militant group in Yemen. Since the outbreak of the Gaza war, the Houthis have been firing missiles at ships near Yemen in order to attack international shipping. Specifically, they have targeted a commercially vital route that runs through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait off Yemen’s coast to the Suez Canal and then, from there, into the Mediterranean and Europe.

At its peak, the Houthi campaign was doing meaningful damage to the global economy. But the pace of attacks had slowed dramatically over the past year thanks to a combination of the shipping industry changing routes, a multilateral military campaign weakening Houthi capabilities, and the Houthis declaring a pause during the Gaza ceasefire. The Houthis, in short, simply aren’t the threat to global commerce they used to be.

So why bomb them at all?

This was the subject of the most substantive exchange Goldberg revealed, one initiated by Vice President JD Vance. The administration, Vance suggested, was “making a mistake” by launching the airstrikes at this moment. In his view, the Houthis are not really an American problem.

“3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary,” he writes. “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices.”

Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, agrees with Vance on Europe: ”I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s pathetic.” However, he argued, “restoring Freedom of Navigation” is “a core national interest” — and only the United States had the military capabilities to do meaningful damage to the Houthis.

These short comments reveal two very distinct underlying assumptions about the world.

Vance seems to think the United States should narrowly focus only on things that immediately affect it, and do virtually nothing that benefits other nations more even if they’re American allies. Hegseth, by contrast, believes that the United States has truly global interests — that America benefits from maintaining freedom of navigation, and thus it can and should fight to keep global trade flows unobstructed.

There is, in theory, nothing wrong with members of the White House team disagreeing ideologically. In fact, it can be healthy.

But when these disagreements are this irreconcilable, the president needs to step in and make a decision as to which one will define policy going forward. And this president can’t.

For nearly a decade now, Trump himself has long advanced both a transactional view of American foreign policy — the Vance “what’s in it for me?” approach to world affairs — while insisting that America remain the dominant global power, one whose might sets the term for world affairs. The fact that these approaches counsel fundamentally different approaches on different issues like Yemen never appears to cross his mind.

You can see this on display in the chat logs when Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s most trusted advisers, intervenes in the Vance-Hegseth debate.

“As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement,” Miller writes. “If Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”

Miller, seemingly speaking on behalf of the president, is trying to have it both ways. Yes, the United States should be policing the world’s shipping lanes, but it also should be providing an itemized bill to countries that benefit and figuring out how to extract payments if they won’t cough up.

Yet the entire argument for why the United States should be protecting global shipping is that it’s a genuinely global concern. When the Houthi attacks were at their peak last year, the disruption to the shipping industry affected prices and supply chains everywhere. That’s how things work in a global economy.

You can argue, coherently, that these disruptions are not significant enough to warrant the use of deadly force. That’s a reasonable position, if one I might not necessarily agree with.

But what you can’t argue is that the shipping disruption is a problem worth killing for and that America should be charging the Europeans for it as if they’re the only people that benefit. The Miller-Trump position isn’t just mafia-esque: it’s incoherent.

It’s an incoherence born out of a deep refusal by everyone involved to recognize that Trump’s belief in America being great and awesome is at odds with his belief that being deeply involved in foreign affairs is a mug’s game that allows our allies to take advantage of us.

Once you start to see this contradiction, it’s visible across Trump’s foreign policy. It’s part of why, for example, his rationales for imposing tariffs on Canada are constantly shifting and mutually contradictory. And it’s why there never will be a coherent Trump doctrine: because the man who would create one has no interest in doing even a cursory examination of the tensions in his own ideas.