Now one of the most powerful people in the U.S. government, Peter Marocco’s turbulent tenure during the first Trump administration sheds light on his current efforts to dismantle the American foreign aid system from the inside out.
So we’ve reached the stage where statecraft is just ideological arson with a side of plausible deniability. Marocco’s entire playbook reads like a checklist for dismantling institutional memory—burn the soft power, cozy up to ethnonationalists, then act shocked when the Balkans flare up again.
Christian nationalism as foreign policy isn’t even subtle anymore. It’s outsourcing bigotry through aid cuts and backroom handshakes with separatists who’d rather ethnically cleanse than govern. The fact that he waltzed from sabotaging Bosnia’s fragile peace to gutting USAID’s budget? Peak “burn it all down” logic from the same brains that brought you Jan 6 tourism.
Watching career diplomats scramble to contain these ideological Molotovs is like watching sysadmins patch servers while the C-suite smashes routers with a bat. Democracy’s corpse is cold, but sure, let’s redirect funds to “combat Islamic extremism” in a majority-Muslim country. Flawless logic.
So we’ve reached the stage where statecraft is just ideological arson with a side of plausible deniability. Marocco’s entire playbook reads like a checklist for dismantling institutional memory—burn the soft power, cozy up to ethnonationalists, then act shocked when the Balkans flare up again.
Christian nationalism as foreign policy isn’t even subtle anymore. It’s outsourcing bigotry through aid cuts and backroom handshakes with separatists who’d rather ethnically cleanse than govern. The fact that he waltzed from sabotaging Bosnia’s fragile peace to gutting USAID’s budget? Peak “burn it all down” logic from the same brains that brought you Jan 6 tourism.
Watching career diplomats scramble to contain these ideological Molotovs is like watching sysadmins patch servers while the C-suite smashes routers with a bat. Democracy’s corpse is cold, but sure, let’s redirect funds to “combat Islamic extremism” in a majority-Muslim country. Flawless logic.