Incompetence is the point
Authoritarian leaders deliberately select subordinates for their stupidity
Everything I have ever written on the internet, I assume can be read by someone else. I don’t mean this newsletter, I’m talking about anything: an email, a WhatsApp message, a bank transfer. I’m not suggesting my private correspondence is so juicy, my writing so threatening or my bank balance so thrilling, that I’m being constantly monitored. Just that, a hostile government or cyber hacker could, if so inclined, see what I was doing online.
To that end, if I had a more important job – one where I frequently handled classified information and could order military personnel into battle – I would probably not use a commercial messaging app to share targeting information and the specific timings of attacks. But that is only one reason why I am not qualified to be Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defence.
Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief at The Atlantic, has written an article titled, ‘The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans’. That is because the Trump administration accidentally texted him its war plans. On 11 March, Goldberg received a connection request on Signal, a messaging app, from Mike Waltz, the US national security advisor. Two days later, he was added to a group chat called the “Houthi PC small group1.”
Goldberg was understandably sceptical about the group’s authenticity, wondering whether it might instead be a foreign disinformation campaign or a gadfly group seeking to embarrass him. Because, if it were real, that would mean the national security leadership of the US government, up to and including the vice president, was discussing – in detail – imminent war plans on Signal. Oh, and they had accidentally involved the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
Anyway, this is how Goldberg learned that the American military would be striking Houthi2 targets in Yemen, several hours before the rest of the world found out. Read the piece here3, not least for more evidence of the sheer level of disdain J.D. Vance has for European allies. But for now, I want to turn to an area in which I excel across multiple dimensions: incompetence.
There is a term you may not have heard in the classroom, but you’ve probably experienced in the workplace: negative selection. Again, I am indebted to the historian Stephen Kotkin for introducing me to it. Negative selection is the process by which authoritarians (and not a few chief executives) deliberately hire incompetent subordinates, in the expectation they will prove too dim-witted to bring the leader down. In such political systems, there is no more important case for stupidity than in the post of defence minister.
From a despot’s perspective, this is surely obvious. The defence minister is in charge of the armed forces, what with their guns, ships and fighter jets. It is not difficult to imagine how a talented, ambitious and hardworking individual could pose a threat to the leader.
And this, more than anything else, explains why Trump hired a former Fox News host as his Defence Secretary. And Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. And Steve Witkoff (in the words of BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner, a man who “knows very little about foreign affairs” but is a “New York property tycoon who plays golf with Donald Trump”) as Special Envoy to the Middle East.
It is about loyalty. Who could be more loyal to the leader than someone that could not possibly be employed in such a senior position by anyone else at any other time? These people will not betray you, not only because they couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery, but because they know they will never get another job.
And sure – all political systems have a loyalty programme. Even Theresa May kept Chris Grayling on. Problem is, this limited skillset is also why they ought not be trusted to run the most powerful military in the history of the world.
By the way, does “small group” not suggest the existence of a “large group”? In other words, how many US government Signal group chats are operating, just waiting to be viewed by foreign intelligence agencies?
The Iran-backed terrorist group’s motto is: “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam”
I’m one of those smug people with a subscription to The Atlantic, so this is a gift link
There are just no adults in the room. It's like they're playing a game of Risk through chat. As an American, I am concerned on so many levels. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on the European reaction to the Vancian disparaging put down of European allies.
BTW, I am not a member of any classified Signal groups, but I stacked your post with the suggestion at the top to share it that way. That caught me by surprise and I LOL. Fortunately, I had already swallowed my sip of coffee!
Hear, hear 😀✅