American partners in Asia expressed relief Thursday that at least the chaos is now fully legible. What began as a state visit to discuss trade imbalances concluded, participants noted, with the United States successfully demonstrating that its foreign policy operates on no principle more binding than the President's immediate atmospheric conditions.
The summit, airing on Washington Week With The Atlantic in partnership with NewsHour Productions, WETA, and the magazine that once published "The Case for Reparations" but now mostly worries about the discourse, found its most revealing moment not in any communiqué signed but in what Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker whose prior coverage of the Trump administration has spanned two entirely separate constitutional crises, identified as the visit's inadvertent contribution to allied clarity. "There was an enormous amount of trepidation looking in advance of the summit," Glasser argued, deploying that particular construction of "trepidation" as an atmospheric condition rather than a response to specific policy, which itself suggests something about the genre conventions of political analysis in this period. The trepidation, we are to understand, hovered; it did not attach to any particular dread-object.
What the summit delivered, by Glasser's reading, was the formalization of what had previously required interpretive labor: the President's operating assumption that "no matter what's written on paper, no matter what laws are passed by Congress, there's no permanent commitments or alliances, as far as he's concerned." The phrasing is worth attending to; we are not told that the President has no permanent commitments, but rather that none exist "as far as he's concerned," a construction that preserves the epistemic modesty of the observer while nonetheless locating the entire apparatus of American treaty obligations within the radius of a single consciousness. This is, in its way, a radical aesthetic proposition, reminiscent less of conventional statecraft than of Wittgensteinian solipsism as refracted through the cable news cycle; the world is, after all, everything that is the case, except where the case has not personally impressed itself upon Donald Trump.
The panel assembled by Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, whose own 2016 essay "The Obama Doctrine" ran to some fourteen thousand words and included a memorable scene in which the forty-fourth President compared himself to a fictional character from a 1960s novel about the Vietnam War, included Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, whose beat has now encompassed three administrations and an impeachment without any apparent diminishment of his capacity for the neutral declarative. What the panel achieved, by the conventions of the form, was a stabilization of the event into manageable narrative units; the summit was not, in their telling, a departure from American diplomatic tradition so much as an acceleration of tendencies already visible in the Bush administration's unilateralism and the Obama administration's pivot, a framing that serves the essential function of making the present moment legible as history rather than as rupture.
And yet the honest character in this drama, the figure whose motive becomes visible through the very attempt to describe it neutrally, is perhaps Goldberg himself, or rather the institutional position he occupies; the editor of a magazine founded in 1857 to promote abolitionist principles, now presiding over a partnership with NewsHour Productions and WETA to deliver Friday evening analysis of a President who has made clear that he does not read, to an audience that has made clear that it does not expect him to. The form persists; the "check your local listings" that concludes the editor's note operates as a kind of incantation, invoking the infrastructure of public broadcasting as if the infrastructure itself could compensate for the content's essential unmooring. Which is, finally, the deeper subject of the Washington Week panel: not what was said in Beijing, but the ritual of saying something about it, the weekly obligation to generate articulate response to events that increasingly resist the grammar of articulation.
The summit really clarified things for our allies in a way that three years of public statements somehow hadn't. There's something almost reassuring about the total transparency of the incoherence.
The Drell quote, which no transcript will confirm but which the tone of the coverage makes imaginatively available, captures the essential operation of the political analysis industry in this period: the conversion of dysfunction into genre, the transformation of alarming unpredictability into a recognizable form with its own conventions and its own calming familiarity. What Trump has made clear, the panel agrees, is that nothing is clear; what the panel makes clear, in turn, is that this clarity itself can be made the subject of analysis, can be situated within longer histories of alliance formation and dissolution, can be assigned to Washington Week's established format of four panelists and a moderator and a weekly podcast available wherever podcasts are consumed. The trepidation, in the end, attachés to nothing; it simply persists, an atmospheric condition of the form.