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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2024
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I don't know what you mean by "technical" here. There are several contexts where it is used academically. For example, here in Turkey the term is pretty ubiquitous when discussing the 80s ultranationalist, anti-communist state bureaucracy. It's certainly in several of the English language political and international relations glossaries I've read.
I don't dispute that US politics is complicated and has many democratically elected players who shape policy. That's why I put "deep state" in quotations, because the concept fits much more loosely when discussing US foreign policy bureaucracy.
After all, when Trump got in, he fired a whole lot of State Department workers, raising fears that he was crippling it by removing indispensable experts. But what's interesting is that his move was considered unprecedented, which sort of goes to prove the point that these individuals are embedded into US foreign policy and kept on as a matter of necessity or simplicity even if their overall strategic and moral outlook is detrimental to US interests and the world.
Not that Trump made any improvements, he just replaced them with incompetents, extremists and yes-men.
And you're right, it was Ben Rhodes who coined "the blob". No need to be rude, my point still stands. I am not a Trump supporter at all. His administration was a collosal failure for the Mid East's future, but unfortunately the current crop of Democrats have taken after him on nearly all issues - from JCPOA to normalizing MBS to letting Israel run amok.
Ah, I didn't realize you were coming from a non-American perspective. I can't speak for the usage of the term in other places, but here in America it was not in academic usage outside of discussions on conspiracy theories, where people in those circles would use it to refer to the part of the US government they suspected of orchestrating the assassination of JFK.
Trump's firings were not exactly unprecedented, either. Gerald Ford presided over an event that became known as the Holloween Massacre, where he did significant reshuffling within the DoD. Nixon, Reagan and Clinton also did their fair share of firings when they felt it was necessary. What made Trump special was the sheer hostility he demonstrated to the government he was supposed to be running, preferring to make decisions directly instead of delegating by frequently leaving leadership positions unfilled, and installing sycophants when necessary.
The idea that there was some entrenched resistance to him is his propagandistic spin on the idea that our Separation of Powers restrain the President, preventing him from performing any actions that would be deemed illegal by Congressional law, of which there were many. Until the recent SC ruling that granted our President a king-like immunity anyway.
He's a professional salesman, though, it's best not to fall for his bullshit and thinly veiled desire to run the country like a family business or cartel, with concentrated power in a single figure.
Trust me, we in this region know exactly what Trump means by "run the government like a business" - it means superficial transactionalism. I was living in the Gulf during his presidency, and everyone knew the Saudis were trying to buy him on the cheap LOL! In fact, that's why some people in the region want him back, hoping that his unpredictablility, stubbornness, contempt and seeming aversion to getting the US into a war may actually lead him to snub Israel or at the least make it reconsider whether the US would follow it into a regional war. As it stands, I can't blame them for thinking that. You cannot imagine the rage and anxiety that this latest massacre of Lebanese by Israel has created.
Yeah, that's unlikely when such a high percentage of his fanbase is Christian Nationalist, doing their best to fight back against their perceived evils in favor of Judeo-Christian rulership, while very conveniently forgetting that Islam is part of that same religious tree.
They're probably right that he wouldn't follow Israel into a regional war, but I doubt Biden would either. Someone should remind them that despite Israel fighting many, many wars with US support, we have never deployed ground forces alongside them. We simply have no obligation to do so.
Shooting down some missiles is one thing, sending arms sure, some drone strikes whatever, a lot of Americans still strongly support Israel and don't mind all that. But putting our forces into ground combat would be broadly unpopular here.