Signalgate, Natsec Ideology's Contradictions, and Yemen

U.S. violence against the world's poorest countries continues even though it doesn't work - so it's not surprising that the Trump team doesn't take the rules too seriously.

With the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump declaring that they’re moving on from “Signalgate” - the sloppy use of group chats to discuss highly classified information about striking Yemen, and the even more sloppy inclusion of Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg in those chats - I have a few thoughts on why the scandal doesn’t seem to be fundamentally rocking the Trump administration. And I have a few additional thoughts about the ongoing U.S. war on Yemen.

Signalgate for me crystallizes some of the contradictions in what might be called “natsec ideology” - the elevation of national security to a hallowed and hyper-prioritized venture, and the distortion and exaggeration of the idea of national security into a doctrine of surveillance, pre-emptive strikes, and simmering shadow wars. Under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, that ideology (objectionable though I have always found it) had some ideological cohesion. Bush’s own political fortunes soared and then crashed, of course, but both his administration and Obama’s managed to preserve a great deal of gravitas around the idea that there were vast, dedicated cadres of professionals working around the clock to keep America safe.

There are now three major cracks in that ideology:

1. The justifications for overseas violence are becoming highly abstract: I think there were a few moments (the early 2000s, and the mid-2010s) when large numbers of Americans were panicked about the prospect of terrorism personally affecting them. But now is not one of those moments. Not only did 9/11 take place before many living Americans were old enough to remember it or witness it, but many of the architects are dead, al-Qaida has gone through numerous transformations, the Islamic State rose and fell and, though it still exists, it has limited purchase on the American consciousness at this point. Even the attacks of the mid-2010s - Orlando and San Bernardino - are mostly forgotten. A whole narrative arc has largely ended, in other words. And now, the attacks of 10/7 are somewhat receding in public consciousness too, I think, and there are relatively few Americans who could capably explain how Yemen is connected to the situation in Israel and Gaza, or who could make a convincing case that the Houthis/Ansar Allah are disrupting global shipping in a way that matters directly to Americans. Meanwhile, the overseas conflicts that make up the War on Terror and its long, long hangover have gone through many permutations. A degree of abstraction has set in. For everyone except for hardcore believers in natsec ideology, these wars are background noise at most, and they’ve been going on so long that in a way, it’s unsurprising to see high-level officials acting very cavalier about these operations. It’s hard to make natsec ideology into an eternal sacred mission if the actual threat level is low and if the violence is effectively out of sight and out of mind for most Americans.

2. The Biden team had no major foreign policy successes: The Democrats, since Obama, have positioned themselves as the grown-ups, the real natsec pros, etc. But the long pedigrees and impeccable credentials of the Biden team (President Joe Biden himself, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, etc.) collapsed upon contact with reality. From Afghanistan to Ukraine to Gaza, the Biden team faced crisis after crisis, responding in ways that ranged from the poorly executed (Afghanistan) to the unsustainable (Ukraine) to the disastrous (Gaza). It is hard to sustain the argument now that natsec professionals are good at natsec. The sloppiness of the Trump team is shocking and just as disastrous, but the natsec enterprise itself has lost its gravitas.

3. The mediatization of natsec ideology glorifies rule-breaking: A host of television shows and movies have worked to sell the American public on (a) the War on Terror and (b) the CIA and the military’s elite units, the “operators.” That sale has been tremendously successful, as evidenced for example by the wide influence that Navy SEALs now enjoy in the fitness industry, the motivational speaker circuit, etc. But media products again and again glorify rule-breaking; the cinematic ideal is the “operator” who takes matters into his own hands, and the secondary enemy in films is often the supervisors and the bureaucrats back at headquarters. Land of Bad, to take just one example, is all about individual initiative and toughness, not about rules and protocols. So when the top officials flout the rules, they’re spared the full force of public rebuke because the public is already primed to accept that “real men” don’t follow the rules. Natsec ideology is now awkwardly suspended between the idea of a highly professionalized enterprise and the idea of a cowboy venture. And as individuals, Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, all lean into that image of rugged individualism - lame though it may be to me, it’s familiar to many.

Meanwhile, all of this spells continued tragedy for Yemen. Many commentators have argued/objected that amid Signalgate, the media’s focus on the group chat has crowded out serious discussion of the lives of Yemenis. Here is Phyllis Bennis in The Nation, putting the matter clearly:

The biggest threat—that has already resulted in real lives lost—is being ignored. And that is the threat to the lives of Yemeni people—who, how many, how many were children, we still don’t know—being killed by US bombs across the poorest nation in the Arab world.

The US bombing of Yemen—always referred to as “bombing the Iran-backed Houthi rebels” to avoid acknowledging that, like in Gaza, the bombs are dropping on civilian infrastructure and civilians already facing devastating hunger—had begun under the Biden administration in January 2024. Like Israel’s bombing of Gaza, US bombs, drones, missile strikes sometimes managed to kill someone who was part of the Houthi military wing—officially known as Ansar Allah—or destroyed some piece of military equipment. But, like Israel’s assault on Gaza, the US bombing of Yemen took place across the country—in major cities including the capital Sanaa, the port city of Hodeidah and numerous other towns, where ordinary Yemenis live. And those US bombs killed those ordinary Yemenis.

Here we could add a fourth contradiction in Natsec ideology - U.S. officials’ periodic acknowledgment that overseas violence does not work but that the U.S. will keep doing it anyway. Biden said as much in January 2024 - that bombing Yemen would not fundamentally deter the Houthis/Ansar Allah. And from the Trump administration’s chat, I think it’s clear that various top officials (a) understand that these strikes are highly abstract to the public and (b) don’t actually see much urgency around doing strikes at any particular moment or for any particular goal. It’s just intermittent violence with narrow tactical objectives, lacking any serious strategy or theory of change. And with Yemen, I’d argue that’s been the case all the way back to the Bush administration. The notion of “deterrence” has appeared all along, whether deterring al-Qaida or deterring the Houthis/Ansar Allah, but “deterrence” is a vague and to some extent un-measurable concept, making it an elastic justification for sporadic strikes.

In short, then, I think Signalgate is an indication that the overarching foreign policy framework of the U.S. for the last quarter century no longer takes itself completely seriously. The most thoughtful parts of the leaked chat have to do with managing optics and messaging, not with actually weighing whether the strikes will accomplish anything (let alone whether they’re the right thing to do). Perhaps the scandal will acquire renewed momentum and actually take down some members of the Trump team, but right now it’s looking like they’ll survive it, politically. I think that’s because there’s something of an acknowledgment that much of natsec is really just very violent theater. Of course it’s bad and dangerous to have communications about military operations on a poorly secured and monitored group chat, but ultimately these operations represented one of innumerable incidents of the world’s strongest military power bombing one of the world’s poorest and most devastated countries. I’m not sure how much would be fundamentally different if the Trump team had had the same conversation on live television.