The Real Signal of Signalgate

Note that Round 2 voting of the Dispawtcher closes today at 8 p.m. E.T.!

I’m not going to get into yet another semantic argument about the difference between “war plans” and “attack plans” or the distinction between “state secret” and “classified,” or the incredibly convoluted theories of how Jeffrey Goldberg incepted his phone number into the national security adviser’s phone with his eldritch powers. 

Nor am I going to dwell on the hypocrisy of Republicans and conservatives who have spent 20 years raining sanctimonious—and justified!—scorn on Democrats for not taking the rules of classified material seriously. This is a real sacrifice for me, because I am a veteran of the Golden Age of such dunking. I’m not talking about Hillary Clinton’s home-brewed server. Those were good times. I’m referring to that joyous moment, that feeling of pure pundit rapture comparable to waking up to a pony by the Christmas tree, when it was revealed that former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger (AKA “Sandy Burglar”) had stuffed his socks and pants with classified material. Such were the joys.

But let’s not kid ourselves, this colossal screw-up is like a watermelon on a batting tee for anyone who wants to score cheap, but deserved, hypocrisy points Gallagher-style.

All of these issues are at once fair game and catnip for cable television fights and Democratic stemwinders. That’s not to say that, by the rules of partisan food-fighting, administration defenders aren’t free to say that Democrats and liberal media shills have no credibility on these issues. If you ignored or made apologies for Hillary Clinton’s behavior but are now scandalized by Pete Hegseth’s or Mike Waltz’s, you’re just on the other side of the same double standard.

But the price for defending the administration’s behavior here is to accept that you have no credibility either. The only objectively defensible position is to admit the administration screwed up, too. Indeed, American politicians and senior officials from both parties have behaved outrageously for decades, and neither side has clean hands. Elites, starting with Trump, Clinton, and Biden, have flouted rules that would, at minimum, ruin the careers and perhaps the lives of rank-and-file military and intelligence officials. 

I often say that media criticism is the lowest form of punditry. What I mean by that is not that media criticism is illegitimate or unjustified, but that it’s just so easy. I feel similarly about a lot of the arguments over this story. The talking points are so obvious they kind of write themselves. Moreover, while I think the aforementioned double standard is a very serious issue, even if partisans seem to care about it only when it’s a convenient cudgel for beating up the other side, it’s not going to get fixed any time soon. 

This controversy, sadly, will seem like old news very soon. That’s not a good thing, but it seems obvious to me that in days—maybe hours—Donald Trump will do something else that everyone will scream and yell about. And we’ll move on to that. 

Meanwhile, I think the most significant thing about Jeffrey Goldberg’s revelations will reverberate for decades to come. 

The regrettable irony of this fustercluck is that the people most culpable for the scandal everyone is talking about—the sloppy handling of sensitive materials and military deliberations—were the best actors when it came to the actual policy discussion. Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and Joe Kent, Trump’s pick to run the National Counterterrorism Center, revealed that they are quite serious in their fundamental animosity toward our European allies and more than a little contemptuous of the idea that America should ensure freedom of the seas, among other things. 

Before I get into the weeds on this, let me illustrate my point in terms everyone—at least everyone with good taste in movies—can relate to. Let’s take things Godfather style. 

The Corleone rule.

Early in the movie, Don Coreleone and his closest advisers have a meeting with Virgil Sollozzo, a drug distributor. In the course of the conversation, Sollozzo tries to reassure the Don that his financing would be backed by the rival Tattaglia family. 

“You’re telling me the Tattaglias guarantee our investment?” Sonny Corleone interjects. 

Immediately, Don Corleone shuts Sonny down. Everyone in the room knew that Sonny screwed up, and Don Corleone apologized to Sollozzo for his son’s impertinence. “I have a sentimental weakness for my children, and I spoil them as you can see,” the Don says, in Brando’s gravelly tone. “They talk when they should listen.” 

Afterward, the Don says to Sonny, “What’s the matter with you …? Never tell anyone outside the family what you’re thinking again.”

It was too late. Sonny’s eight words, plus a little body language, was enough to signal to Sollozzo that Sonny was hot for the deal and that the old man was an impediment that needed to be removed. That’s the setup for the whole film. 

The true failure.

Okay, now imagine you’re a foreign leader or senior policymaker in another government. You read this chat. What have you learned? Two things. 

First, you’ve learned the thing that everyone is talking about. The Americans, at the most senior level, are fundamentally unserious about “OPSEC,” or operational security. There’s a reason why Goldberg ended his first piece on this whole thing with a quote from Hegseth, who is, I will note again for emphasis, the secretary of defense: “We are currently clean on OPSEC.”

It is axiomatic that when these assurances are printed verbatim in The Atlantic, because an uninvited journalist was in the chat, you are not “clean on OPSEC.” The relevance for our allies has nothing to do with the ensuing partisan fights on cable TV. It’s that intelligence sharing with America, their most important ally, is risky. 

But that first lesson pales in comparison to the second lesson: “Holy crap, these people mean it.” 

You may not have noticed, but Trump and his surrogates don’t always mean what they say. They also exaggerate and pander, promising things they don’t necessarily think they’ll follow through on or accomplish as easily as they make it sound. This is not unique to them, of course. It’s the stuff of politics generally. 

So there was at least a chance that for all of the administration’s anti-European, anti-alliance rhetoric, they didn’t actually mean it. Even if you believed that Trump was sincere, you might have clung to the hope that Trump was surrounded with grown-ups who understand the dangers of blowing up our alliances and America’s role in the world. 

Now, all doubt has been removed. Vance didn’t want to take out Houthi jihadist pirates and terrorists that have fired on American shipping and military assets over 100 times. Why? Because: “I just hate bailing Europe out again.” 

Hegseth, to his credit, wanted to act immediately, but he still placated Vance. “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.” Later, Stephen Miller chimed in on the side of action, per the president’s order to open the sea lanes, but he added that America needs to present Europe with a bill for services rendered. “… if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”

Now, you can agree with all of this. You can also agree that Sonny was right to want to take Sollozzo’s deal. My point is that we do not benefit from the world knowing this.  

You can also make the case that foreign governments already knew the Trump administration was serious about its public statements, because they confirmed them privately. That’s a big part of what ambassadors do: They report home about what’s really going on. Ditto intelligence agencies, military liaisons, etc. That’s undoubtedly true, to some extent. 

But now foreign politicians can’t pretend otherwise, and neither can American ones. Everyone’s maneuvering room, politically, has shrunk. European governments are furious and outraged over the contents of the group chat. No doubt adversary governments are tickled and using this to their advantage.  

Imagine you’re a pro-American foreign minister or parliamentarian who has been reluctant to give up on America or side with anti-American domestic factions. This chat makes it clear, at minimum, that it would be foolish to rely on America. Even if you think, as Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and others do, that they can play nice for the duration of the Trump administration and then work to repair relations once he’s out of office, the fact that America will remain just one election away from this kind of administration means, strategically, America is unreliable over the long term. This leak has made the job of people who want to be our friends harder and the jobs of people who don’t easier. Why? Because those people are politicians—or answerable to politicians. And those politicians are answerable to voters who are now far more certain that our government loathes them. Telling those voters that they’re wrong has just gotten much more difficult. 

Future historians won’t care very much about how Jeffrey Goldberg ended up in a group chat or what it said about our national security hygiene. They very likely will look back on this moment as a watershed moment. It doesn’t signal the moment that Trump and his team have decided to dishonorably blow up alliances crafted over generations. It signals the moment that the rest of the world realized they meant it. 

A lot of people think that the reason high level conversations are conducted in sensitive compartmented information facilities (SCIFs) and the Situation Room is to protect classified information. And that’s true. But it’s not the only reason. Some conversations are kept secret for the simple reason that you should never tell someone outside the family—or Situation Room or Oval Office—what you’re really thinking.

So, go ahead and bicker about whether the information in the chat was merely “sensitive” rather than “classified.” That’s not unimportant. But it pales in comparison to the significance of the revelation that Donald Trump, a man who has made his contempt for our allies well known, is also surrounded by people who share that contempt and seek to nurture it.  They not only have contempt for our allies, they have contempt for any conception of national honor that leads us to aid our allies without being able to bill the beneficiaries. You can scoff at such notions of honor. But as a matter of realpolitik it helps if the world doesn’t know what our leaders really think. 

The real security failure isn’t that Jeffrey Goldberg found out the exact time the rockets would fly over Yemen, or that these guys hypocritically broke the rules and used Signal because it was convenient. It’s that our alliances were gravely wounded, and the ability of leaders of goodwill to mend them has been greatly diminished.