What does Project 2025 have to say about US foreign policy?
Project 2025 is da bomb in Gilead.
A lot of attention has gone to the loony-right armchair revolution blueprint Project, launched by a bunch of Trump associates at a Trump-affiliated policy shop to generate plans for what they think will be a Trump administration. Are these the ideas that are informing Trump? Well, as much as he has been trying to run away from them recently, he hasn’t got any others. So that is why the document is getting so much attention.
Of course most of the attention has concentrated on what the authors of the document propose to do in domestic policy. That is, for example, what the comedian Kenan Thompson did in his appearance at the Democratic National Convention. It was set up as a comic sketch where he tells people in various jobs and other roles how the proposals in the document would affect them. This is fine, and the horror that the proposals in the document inspire are well answered by comedy.
What I haven’t seen is any kind of detailed discussion of what Project 2025 is proposing for foreign policy. There is not a lot there, and much of it is vague and superficial, but I have tried to pull out what I can. All of the quotations you see here are from the Project 2025 document published by the Heritage Foundation, and you can find that here: https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf. The document is organised by government department, to set out their suggestions for the people they expect to lead these, so I looked at four chapters: the ones on the State Department, on intelligence, on international media programmes, and on the US Agency for International Development.
The document is long but shallow, so I set out here the main ideas that are offered in it.
Subordinating civil service institutions to ideological goals
The first, overarching claim made in the chapter on reconstructing the State Department is sweeping: “A major source, if not the major source, of the State Department’s ineffectiveness lies in its institutional belief that it is an independent institution that knows what is best for the United States, sets its own foreign policy, and does not need direction from an elected President” (172). The statement is an exaggeration, of course, enough of an exaggeration to be empirically false. It is in fact the president and secretary of state who are responsible for formulating policy, with other officials, both appointed and career officials, providing information and advice, and contributing to implementation. What is being attacked here is the professional independence of people who gather and provide information and advice. “Focusing the State Department on the needs and goals of the next President“ (172) would mean curtailing the ability of civil service professionals to act as professionals.
The basic strategy for establishing control is simple: replace career officials who received their jobs for their expertise with political appointees who are given the jobs as rewards for loyalty. Or as the author has it, “assert leadership over, and guidance to, the State Department by placing political appointees in positions that do not require Senate confirmation, including senior advisors, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretaries, and Deputy Assistant Secretaries. Given the department’s size, the next Administration should also increase the number of political appointees to manage it” (173). If the strategy succeeds then there will be no way of getting unbiased information from State Department officials since “No one in a leadership position on the morning of January 20 should hold that position at the end of the day” (173).
Changes of this type ought to demonstrate the point that “Bureaucratic stovepipes of the past should be less important than commitment to, and achievement of, the President’s foreign policy agenda” (176). But here the discussion becomes confusing. In the first place it is not easy to guess what is indicated by “stovepipes” here. It is not a term used commonly to refer to much of anything other than, well, stovepipes, and maybe a quick method of making cakes. But there is something more confusing here. Clearly the focus is on advancing an agenda. But what agenda? No agenda is specified in the text.
Together with subordinating the professional civil service, Project 2025 also aims to undermine oversight of foreign policy by Congress. “This may lead to, for example, the President authorizing the State Department to engage with Members of Congress and relevant committees on certain issues (including statutorily designated congressional consultations), but to remain 'radio silent' on volatile or designated issues on which the White House wants to be the primary or only voice. All such authorized department engagements with Congress must be driven and handled by political appointees in conjunction with career officials who have the relevant expertise and are willing to work in concert with the President’s political appointees on particularly sensitive matters” (176).
Intimidating and controlling career civil service employees
Expressed positively, the document encourages appointed officials to feel free to establish political control. “The secretary must find a way to make clear to career officials that despite prior history and modes of operation, they need not be adversaries of a conservative President, Secretary of State, or the team of political appointees” (174). This is misleading, of course. The subtext of “need not be adversaries” is “must be supporters or lose their jobs.” This element of Project 2025 has been remarked upon frequently enough by other observers (including many who identify it, correctly, as a “blacklist” or “enemies list”) that there is no need to elaborate on it here.
Altering international commitments to conform to a political agenda
Another target of the Project 2025 agenda is the practice of respecting agreements that have been made by other states or that represent international norms but have not been ratifoed. As proposed in the text, “Upon inauguration, the Secretary of State should order an immediate freeze on all efforts to implement unratified treaties and international agreements, allocation of resources, foreign assistance disbursements, domestic and international contracts and payments, hiring and recruiting decisions, etc., pending a political appointee-driven review to ensure that such efforts comport with the new Administration’s policies” (174). The goal here is to assure that the United States will only respect international obligations that are consistent with the iddeological inclinations of people holding office, or expressed more formally, “He or she should direct the Secretary of State to freeze any ongoing treaty or international agreement negotiations and assess whether those efforts align with the new President’s foreign policy direction” (175).
It is not stated openly, but the intention here is to offer a pretext to refuse to comply with international standards on environmental protection, human rights, and gender equality (especially), but in general it represents an effort to give the next government licence to operate by its own parallel ste of standards that may or may not reflect those of the rest of the world and of international legal, scientific, and professional institutions.
Saying “China” when you mean “not Russia”
What the text says about the international orientation looks confusing and strange, but a closer examination reveals that this is because they are saying one thing while attempting to disguise what they mean. For example, the section on specific global issues begins ominously, declaring that “the next President must significantly reorient the U.S. government’s posture toward friends and adversaries alike—which will include much more honest assessments about who are friends and who are not.” (179). Okay, so there will be new decisions about who the friends and enemies of the United States are. Wouldn't you expect a declaration like that to name a few names? Well, it names a few enemies (China stands out), but not any friends. This is because the right wing remains embarrassed by who its international friends are.
So let's begin with the enemy. On China, the claims offered are sweeping. They claim that their domestic opponents are too cosy with China [“In addition, some knowingly or not parrot the Communist line: Global leaders including President Joe Biden, have tried to normalize or even laud Chinese behavior” (180)], but this is perhaps predictable ina n election document, even if it is a failed one. Have a look at what the document has to say about China itself, though. It makes the leap from ideological anti-Communism to ethnocentric jingoism, taking care to hide the move behind a little jargon. The Project 2025 authors say, “the PRC challenge is rooted in China’s strategic culture and not just the Marxism–Leninism of the CCP, meaning that internal culture and civil society will never deliver a more normative nation. The PRC’s aggressive behavior can only be curbed through external pressure” (180). Look at that closely: nobody really knows what is meant by vagu terms like “strategic culture” or “internal culture” or “civil society,” but the message is clearly enough that the rivalry is not about politics but about something historically older than and culturally transcendent to contemporary political conflict. So, bigotry shrouded with a little Huntingtonian language by people who imagine that their audience is composed of people who take Huntington seriously.
So that's China, what does Project 2025 have to say about Russia? Surprisingly little! The entire section on Russia takes up two pages (181-182). The whole section is devoted to the war in Ukraine. The document does not take a position but notes three competing perspectives held by people in the right wing, and further notes that “the conflict has severely weakened Putin’s military strength” (182).
You were expecting more? There isn't any more. The section concludes by inviting the imaginary new administration to “chart a new path forward that recognizes Communist China as the defining threat to U.S. interests in the 21st century” (182). That is to say, as long as China is declared to be the source of threat, Russia is not the source of threat. And so Russia has magically disappeared from its clients' view of the world.
For the rest of the world, being ideological but too vague to be meaningful
Considering the radical reassessment of friendships and enmities promised in the document, it has remarkably little to say about any actual friends or enemies. There is a section on “the Western Hemisphere” (they don't say where they think that is, but in the text it seems to indicate mostly Central and South America), warning that “the region now has an overwhelming number of socialist or progressive regimes, which are at odds with the freedom and growth-oriented policies of the U.S. and other neighbors and who increasingly pose hemispheric security threats” (183). These regimes, however, are not identified.
Parallel to the two pages on Russia, the text has two pages on Europe (187 – 188). They don't say much. There is repetition of Trump's old obsession with the notion that other NATO members do not pay enough [“The United States cannot be expected to provide a defense umbrella for countries unwilling to contribute appropriately” (187)]. The rest is about the consequences of Brexit, and what it Project 2025 has to say on that topic is weird.
First, Brexit is cast as an object in a conflict between two opposing blocs, of which one is the United States and the other is Europe. So the comment on trade comes accompanied by a warning: “trade with the post-Brexit U.K. needs urgent development before London slips back into the orbit of the EU” (188). Let's just repeat that last phrase once more, so that readers know that it is really there and is not a mistake: “before London slips back into the orbit of the EU.”
The imaginary global conflict betweenm the US and the EU provides the context for only mention that Central Europe gets in the text. Here is the whole thing: “in the wake of Brexit, EU foreign policy now takes place without U.K. input, which disadvantages the United States, given that the U.K. has historically been aligned with many U.S. positions. Therefore, U.S. diplomacy must be more attentive to inner-EU developments, while also developing new allies inside the EU—especially the Central European countries on the eastern flank of the EU, which are most vulnerable to Russian aggression” (188).
So there is Russian aggression after all? Or is it an editorial mistake? We will never know, and this is in fact all that Project 2025 has to say about Europe!
There is something compelling but also vague in the discussion of participation in international organisations. The section on that suggests that “Engagement with international organizations is one relatively easy way for the U.S. to defend its interests and to seek to address problems in concert with other nations, but it is not the only option” (190-191) – and it goes on to suggest withdrawing from WHO.
There is a gesture toward articulating a context in which the proposal for a reorentation makes sense. It is not entirely clear, and hides a lot behind unclear ideas like “effectiveness,” but here it is: “If an international organization is effective and advances American interests, the United States should support it. If an international organization is ineffective or does not support American interests, the United States should not support it. Those that are effective will still require constant pressure from U.S. officials to ensure that they remain effective. Serious consideration should also be given to withdrawal from organizations that no longer have value, quietly undermine U.S. interests or goals, or disproportionately rely on U.S. financial contributions to survive” (191). This looks a lot like a tactic without a rationale, but fundamentally it is consistent with what Project 2025 has to say about personnel and Congressional oversight. It says all policy should be subordinated to ideology.
Transposing radical right social policy to the international arena
The preceding point on international organisations sets the stage for an argument that is developed in much more detail in the chapter devoted to the US Agency for International Development. The clear message here is that the kind of approach to social policy that the right wing has developed together with religious fundamentalists in the United States should provide a model for how the United States interacts with societies in other parts of the world. Consistently with the inclinations of the author, this is cast in negative terms: “International organizations should not be used to promote radical social policies as if they were human rights priorities” (191).
Not everybody will know it or recognise the code that is used, but the main purpose here is to fight what the American right wing sees as a tendency to expand the domain of human rights to include new rights, some of which benefit people the right wing dislikes. And so the suggestion is offered that US aid policy “must promote a strict text-based interpretation of treaty obligations that does not consider human rights treaties as 'living instruments' both within the State Department and within international organizations that receive U.S. funding, including by making respect for sovereignty and authentic human rights a litmus test of personnel decisions and elections processes within international organizations” (192). The language here is taken directly from the report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights, a body appointed by Trump's secretary of state Mike Pompeo to generate a hierarchy of rights and determine which ones ought to be respected and which ones can be ignored (tellingly, high on their list was a “right to national sovereignty”). Kirona Skinner, who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the Department of State, was a member of the commission.
So if rights are off the agenda, what is on? Project 2025 invites future US policymakers to “forge a consensus among like-minded countries in support of human life, women’s health, support of the family as the basic unit of human society, and defense of national sovereignty” (192). All this should happen in the context of the demand that “The next Administration should take steps to ensure that future foreign assistance clearly and unambiguously supports the President’s foreign policy agenda” (194).
All these radical transformations are proposed against a perception that US foreign policy has veered off far in the opposite direction. So Project 2025 paints a picture of a US foreign aid policy that “promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism” (254), while it has also “been transformed into a massive and openended global entitlement program captured by—and enriching—the progressive Left” (254).
There are four specific issues on which the Project 2025 agenda concentrates here. First, energy. Project 2025 proposes that “USAID should cease its war on fossil fuels in the developing world and support the responsible management of oil and gas reserves as the quickest way to end wrenching poverty and the need for open-ended foreign aid. The next conservative Administration should rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs (specifically USAID’s Climate Strategy 2022–20307); shut down the agency’s offices, programs, and directives designed to advance the Paris Climate Agreement; and narrowly limit funding to traditional climate mitigation efforts” (257).
Second, Project 2025 proposes reversing measures that have been imoplemented to promote equality in the world. In the authors' view equality policy to date has created an environment in which “The upshot has been to racialize the agency and create a hostile work environment for anyone who disagrees with the Biden Administration’s identity politics. This pursuit of ideological purity threatens merit-based professional advancement for staff who do not overtly conform, hyperpoliticizes what should be a nonpartisan federal workplace environment, creates an institutionalized cadre of progressive political commissars, corrupts the award process, and discourages potential contractors and grantees that disagree with this radical agenda from applying for USAID funding” (258).
The preceding text refers to equality policy in general but in its thirs specific area of concern Project 2025 aims particular fire at policies designed to promote gender equality. The text claims that “past Democrat Administrations have nearly erased what females are and what femininity is through “gender” policies and practices” (258-259). If this sounds a bit alarmist (“what females are”??) that is because it is. The text claims that “The promotion of gender radicalism is anathema to the traditional norms of many societies where USAID works, causes resentment by tying lifesaving assistance to rejecting the aid recipient’s own firmly held fundamental values regarding sexuality, and produces unnecessary consternation and confusion among and even outright bias against men” (259). And so Project 2025 suggests that “the next conservative Administration should rescind President Biden’s 2022 Gender Policy and refocus it on Women, Children, and Families and revise the agency’s regulation on 'Integrating Gender Equality and Female Empowerment in USAID’s Program Cycle.' It should remove all references, examples, definitions, photos, and language on USAID websites, in agency publications and policies, and in all agency contracts and grants that include the following terms: 'gender,' 'gender equality,' 'gender equity,' 'gender diverse individuals,' 'gender aware,' 'gender sensitive,' etc. It should also remove references to 'abortion,' 'reproductive health,' and 'sexual and reproductive rights' and controversial sexual education materials.” (259). So possibly it would be fair to suggest that Project 2025 has it in for gender. And for sex. And for health. And for people.
Fourth, Project 2025 suggests a political realignment for US foreign assistance policy. First, it should ally itself with local movements to eleiminate reproductive choice and “stop U.S. foreign aid from supporting the global abortion industry, the next conservative Administration should issue an executive order that, at a minimum, reinstates PLGHA and summarily blocks funding to UNFPA but also closes loopholes by applying the policy to all foreign assistance, including humanitarian aid, and improving its enforcement” (261). Second, it should ally itself with religious institutions and “champion the core American value of religious freedom, which correlates significantly with poverty reduction, economic growth, and peace. It should train all USAID staff on the connection between religious freedom and development; integrate it into all of the agency’s programs, including the five-year Country Development and Coordination Strategies due for updates in 2025; strengthen the missions’ relationships with local faith-based leaders; and build on local programs that are serving the poor” (262). Third, it should ally itself with busniess and finance and “return USAID to a foreign aid model that leverages its resources to promote private-sector solutions to the world’s true development problems and end the need for future foreign aid” (269).
In short, Project 2025 proposes that the political formula which created the base of support for the radical right wing in the United States offers a good model for the way in which the United States should face the rest of the world. It might be useful to think of this as casting foreign policy as an expression of ideologically driven social policy.
8. What does it amount to?
To be honest, there is not a lot in the Project 2025 document for people who are interested in concrete questions of policy. The whole document demonstrates a strikingly superficial understanding of issues involved, completely without regard to how good or bad the proposals are. What there is of substance (as opposed to ideological posturing) in the document is mostly about subordinating policy to political control. It is striking to see the way in which the whole Project 2025 document sees the administration it is imagining as representing not the public but rather “the conservative movement,” which is referenced several times.
This is indicated in several of the chapters of Project 2025. The section on intelligence claims that the “intelligence function must be protected from bottom-up and top-down politicization” (212), but the proposals made are not about whether intelligence activity is politicized but in whose interest it should be politicized. The section on international media programmes is mostly dedicated to proposing ways to diminish the independence and integrity of journalists working for US-funded media organisations.
Beyond this the two main foreign policy messages are repeated frequently: 1) China is the enemy of the United States, by which they mean Russia is not the enemy of the United States, and 2) the social policy of the right wing religious fundamentalists in the United States should be exported to the rest of the world.
These are of course pretty bad ideas and there would be good reason to be worried if they were likely to be implemented. This of course depends on the result of the US presidential election in November 2024. From today's perspective, da kucnem u drvo, it looks like the worst is probably not likely to happen.
9. Who wrote it?
The chapters cited in this text are the work of four principal authors (in the footnotes they acknowledge assistance, but all of them claim primary responsibility for their overall chapters). Some are better known than others. What they all have in common is that they were all appointed to positions during the Trump administration and did not hold those positions (or any other positions) afterward.
I will do an additional segment (probably a video) in the next day or so sharing the interesting things I have found about the authors. For now just names and bios.
Kiron Skinner, who wrote the chapter on Department of State: https://www.hoover.org/profiles/kiron-k-skinner
Dustin Carmack, who wrote the chapter on the intelligence community: https://www.opensecrets.org/revolving-door/dustin-carmack/summary?id=84075
Mora Namdar, who wrote the chapter on interantional media programmes: https://www.afpc.org/about/experts/mora-namdar
Max Primorac, who wrote the chapter on USAID: https://www.heritage.org/staff/max-primorac
Stay tuned for a little bit more on these four authors.
and, here it is, the video I promised.