From R2P to FAFO: the return of Trump and the end of politics of "plausible deniability"

Written for Kosovo Online by Srdjan Garcevic, founder of The Nutshell Times

Richard Grenell, the US special missions envoy and one of the few high-ranking members of the first Trump administration to be serving in the new one, did not parse words in his assessment of Albin Kurti, who he blamed for trying to destabilize the region being "untrustworthy".

This refreshingly honest appraisal comes after many attempts on Kurti's behalf to sabotage the participation of the most popular Serbian political party in Kosovo and Metohija in the upcoming election, as well as using a mix of lawfare and brute force against the Serbs. While Grenell noted that Kurti has fallen out of favor with the entire international community, as well as the US Democratic establishment, up until now, it was rare to hear such a frank assessment, which will hopefully be followed by concrete steps to limit the still significant US financial and political support for Priština authorities.

However, even the phrasing was a pleasant departure from the usual prevarications we got used to in the past years, where "both sides" have always been asked to pay for Kurti's disastrous policies and ideas. While Grenell's famous directness did not endear him to the German government during his time as the US Ambassador to Berlin, it has become the norm of the new administration in its internal and foreign affairs, breaking from the tradition of "plausible deniability," which has marked the US and Western politics of the past few decades.

This change of tack is not just rhetorical. The dismembering of USAID, an institution which (in)famously combined real help to those in need with some rather nefarious dealings - from regime changes and media influence operations to outright support of torture and work with terrorists - to further own goals, shows that the new admin sees more benefit in realist politics - as people call it the "FAFO doctrine" - than in what was the previous norm of seeking "plausible deniability" for everything that is done. Moreover, the new administration's ambitious goals, which conform to what they promised in the election, whether in terms of decreasing spending and migration or putting the first human on Mars, are in stark contrast with the small-minded policy wonk tinkering approach to politics that was lionized in drab shows like "The West Wing," reached its apex under Obama and which is still the norm in Europe.

The importance of this cultural shift cannot be overstated. It is a rollback of what James Burnham identified back in the 1940s as the "managerial revolution", in which the states are taken over by networks of educated bureaucrats who end up making them brittle and inefficient rather than prosperous and just. The generations of social science students and those going into politics were indoctrinated into thinking that the height of ambition was the rule behind the veil of procedures serving their own ideological ideas. They were warned against the evils of actually serving their citizens' needs (democracy was recast as scary populism) and propagandized to cast their own interests as interests of humanity as a whole by using the language of idealism. Most importantly for the Balkans, the former USAID administrator, Samantha Power, helped coin and popularize the "responsibility to protect" (R2P) doctrine for humanitarian intervention. While in theory, the US military swooping in to save people around the world from genocide (ever more loosely defined) sounds noble, in practice, it was used as a pretext for involving and expanding the power of the US foreign policy bureaucrats, while often harming communities which were supposedly "protected," costing the US taxpayers billions with little benefit and, of course, undermining global stability.

The new FAFO approach is both transparent and, ultimately, honest about its "unknown unknowns" - we will find them out! It cannot be worse than the previous order which consistently failed to deliver both on its ethical and material promises.