8 takeaways from Trump's massive security breach

It opened his foreign policy process up to the light

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In case you missed the news which broke today, the Trump administration saw a shocking security breach last week. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other administration officials including Vice President J.D. Vance, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, and CIA director John Ratcliffe discussed then-upcoming military strikes on the Houthis in Yemen over Signal, a messaging app. And they did it after accidentally adding a famous American journalist to the group and then not noticing he was there for the duration of the discussion.

During the course of the conversation, according to Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist in question, they mentioned the name of a serving CIA officer and gave the precise sequence and timing of the strikes on Yemen - information that, in the wrong hands, could be used to endanger American military and intelligence personnel.

Conversations such as this are usually conducted on special classified systems, not officials’ cellphones, which can be hacked. Despite weaponizing Hillary Clinton’s unclassified private email server as an issue in the 2016 election, Trump and his officials have frequently engaged in insecure communications practices. Everyone who took part in this latest conversation likely broke numerous laws. For starters, they mishandled highly classified information and effectively leaked it to Goldberg by including him in the conversation.

But the story gets even crazier, because Goldberg has now published his account of the incident, and it includes details about the policy discussion that the people in the Signal chat had. And those details give some fascinating insight into the Trump administration’s foreign policy.

Let’s look at them:

1. Firstly, the conversation shows the divisions that exist within the Trump administration. Vance appeared opposed to the military strikes on the Houthis, whose attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea have raised shipping costs and endangered U.S. military personnel. Hegseth was more bullish. Other officials seemed undecided.

2. Even more notably, the officials seemed unclear what Trump really wanted them to do, which matches public perceptions that Trump tends to be indecisive and not give a clear policy direction to his administration. Vance even argued that Trump had been misled or was uninformed, saying: “I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now.”

3. Indeed, Vance’s reason for opposing the strikes seems to boil down to hatred of Europe, which matches his public posture. In the conversation, he portrayed the openness of shipping lanes through the Red Sea as a European issue which is basically unimportant to the United States. He also seemed concerned about the state of the economy - something that Trump and others have been publicly nonchalant about - warning that the attacks could lead to a spike in oil prices. All in all, the exchange gives the impression that Vance is trying to be the most MAGA voice in the administration, which is what we’d expect if he’s planning on going for the movement’s crown after Trump leaves office.

4. Hegseth, for his part, sounded surprisingly like the one globalist who had accidentally wandered into a MAGA meeting. He said there were two reasons for the strikes: “1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish[ing] deterrence, which Biden cratered.” Needless to say, MAGA enthusiasts tend not be too worried about “freedom of navigation” and are skeptical of the need for the United States to “establish deterrence” by getting sucked into Middle Eastern quagmires.

5. But now Hegseth sits in the Defense Secretary’s chair, these things probably look a bit different. Whether most of the oil is consumed in Europe or not, shipping through the Red Sea still matters for global oil markets, which means it affects the U.S. economy and the country’s ability to defend itself. And by firing on shipping in the area, the Houthis are constantly endangering U.S. military personnel - something that Hegseth would be held accountable for in the event of deaths and injuries. Funny how things look a bit different when you’re not just sounding off on Fox News.

6. Fascinatingly, we also saw how the administration is squaring this circle. According to the conversation, it seems to plan to act to reopen the shipping lanes, but then ask Europe and Egypt (through whose territory the Suez Canal runs) to pay for the operation later. But so far as we can glean from the chat, no-one has decided how that is going to work or whether these countries will even pay. It seems that they just received a vague directive from Trump to “reopen the shipping lanes” and now they’re trying to make it work.

7. The whole idea points to a bizarre situation in which the U.S. would be a kind of superpower-for-hire, only providing public goods like open shipping lanes if other countries pay for them. How to calculate those charges and how to separate the U.S. need for these public goods from everyone else’s need are unanswered and probably unanswerable questions. But the fact they are being asked at all suggests some more unpleasantness is probably coming Europe’s way soon.

8. Another thing that struck me about the conversation was the bullishness of the people involved. They sounded mightily convinced that they would be able to beat the Houthis into submission and reopen the shipping lanes at minimal cost, even though any objective analysis of the situation suggests this is going to be incredibly hard to achieve. They sounded like amateurs - the sort of amateurs who might conduct highly classified business on a private messaging app, in fact.

Thanks for reading America Explained. I’m bringing you this analysis only a few hours after the news broke - the sort of speed that is difficult when working with traditional media, which has many cumbersome layers of editing and review. If you find this speed useful, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support this newsletter. If you already did so, thanks for supporting independent media and making it possible to do what I do.