The Departure of Army Secretary Dan Driscoll from the Pentagon this week has touched off another wave of speculation over the rivalries in the Trump administration and whether the “Rubio faction” is behind it. It’s complicated, as my colleague Connor Echols and I talk and write about this week at Responsible Statecraft.
Pete Hegseth has been on his own tear in the Pentagon, purging generals, admirals and top civilians since his role ‘Signal Gate’ last year. But putting aside the defense secretary’s personal loyalty agenda, there is a common thread across other firings and unexplained (and protest) resignations throughout other areas of the Trump government: people who have raised alarms about the war policies, who had come in on a realism and restraint agenda, are disappearing from the scene.
Connor and I spoke to a number of sources with intimate knowledge of what one person called a full on “war” against Vance allies in an effort to re-impose a neoconservative foreign policy agenda on what is forming up to be the future post-Trump Republican party.
Please read our latest on RS here, and watch our discussion this week!
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is Editorial Director of Responsible Statecraft and Senior Advisor at the Quincy Institute. She was a regular news writer and reporter for Antiwar.com from 2009 to 2014. She served for three years as Executive Editor of the The American Conservative magazine, where she had been reporting and publishing regular articles on national security, civil liberties, foreign policy, veterans, and Washington politics since 2007. From 2013 to 2017, Vlahos served as director of social media and online editor at WTOP News in Washington, D.C. She also spent 15 years as an online political reporter for Fox News at the channel’s Washington D.C. bureau, as well as Washington correspondent for Homeland Security Today magazine.
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