Responding to Michael Anton in a piece accompanied by Edward Luttwak

I’ve seldom had the opportunity not only to respond to an article by someone who I admire, like Michael Anton, but to have it as a companion piece alongside one written by my lifelong hero, Edward Luttwak.

The American Mind, published by the Claremont Institute, invited me to write a piece on a divisive strategy for the President to take against his political opponents and their very unnatural and unstable alliance.

With the brain trust of General Petraeus (John Nagl and a colleague) militarizing the 2020 political campaign in a putschkrieg to goad the US armed forces to overthrow President Trump, I thought it would be appropriate to apply the divisive operations theory that I developed for the Army Special Operations Command. (I developed it to fill gaping holes in the Counterinsurgency Manual that Nagl had authored.)

Here’s the first part of my piece in the November 2 issue of The American Mind. I wrote the article in September and circulated it samizdat among certain policymakers.

‘To stop the coupsters, divide and conquer’

Joe Biden has stumbled into handing President Donald Trump an inadvertent gift. If he plays things right, Trump can splinter the unnaturally broad coalition against him and turn state and local Democrats against their own party’s national machine.

Biden has backed himself into a lose-lose situation that’s ripe for autumn picking. Far past his prime, Biden is now a Trojan Horse for extremists backed by a virtual Manchurian Candidate running mate.

His handlers have built a tactical alliance so extreme that, with a little push from the president, it will collapse and the broad center of the electorate will be his.

Excessive focus on a rival’s strength misplaces priorities and saps resources and morale. So let’s put aside Joe Biden’s greatest political assets—the permanent federal bureaucracy, the Swamp that feeds off the taxpayer, the mainstream media, most big labor unions, community organizing networks, and so forth—and look at the vulnerabilities.

Here we can identify the weak nodes for our unorthodox president to exploit in the time remaining before—and after—November 3rd. By striking at those weak nodes to make Biden’s central support base collapse, Trump can win a second term to take on the unaccountable bureaucracy, the Swamp, and those dependent on both for their very survival.

Click here for the rest of the article in The American Mind.