By SCOTT RITTER*

Donald Trump has learned his lesson. The revolution began on his first day in office by destroying the establishment that Europe was counting on to contain Trump.

“The man has blown my mind. He’s a warrior-poet in the classic sense. I mean, sometimes he’ll, uh, well, you’ll say hello to him, right? And he’ll just walk right past you, and he won’t even notice you. And then all of a sudden he’ll grab you, and he’ll throw you in a corner, and he’ll say, did you know that “if” is the middle word in life?”

“If you can keep your head when everyone around you is losing theirs and blaming you, if you can trust yourself when every man doubts you – I mean, I don’t, I can’t – I’m a little man, I’m a little man, he’s, he’s a big man. I should have been a pair of jagged claws running along the bottom of silent seas…”

1.

lately I have been asked to try to understand Donald Trump and the first three weeks of his presidency. And, more specifically, to comment on the drama that has unfolded in Munich over the past few days. As I stumble through the mental gymnastics of trying to explain the inexplicable, my brain takes me to Francis Ford Coppola's classic film, Revelation Now, and the character of the “nameless photojournalist” played maniacally by Dennis Hopper.

In a world filled with newly murderous townspeople, with killers in war paint and dressed as soldiers posing in the background, Hopper's character tries to tell the disbelieving Captain Willard (played magnificently by Martin Sheen) that the madness he sees around him represents a portal to a higher plane of thought.

Just ignore the truth your eyes are sending to your brain. “The heads,” the anonymous photojournalist tells Willard. “You’re looking at the heads. Sometimes he goes too far. He’s the first to admit it.” The anonymous photojournalist is derived from the character Harlequin from Joseph Conrad’s classic novel, Heart of Darkness, from which Francis Ford Coppola shaped the twisted narrative of Revelation Now.

The Harlequin is a Russian sailor who served as Kurtz's only European companion in the months leading up to the arrival of Marlow's steamship. What Marlow sees as evidence of insanity, the Harlequin explains as part of Kurtz's grand design, incomprehensible to anyone who has not lost their own mind in the reality separate from Kurtz's universe.

When I was asked to explain Donald Trump, I felt as if I had been cast as Harlequin, asked to interpret the anonymous photojournalist’s ramblings to a world of ignorant, disbelieving Marlows and Willards. Trying to explain what happened in Munich over the past few days is like trying to explain an acid-fueled trip down the rabbit hole with Alice.

You can’t. Especially for those who didn’t pay the bill and joined you on that magic carpet ride. “Understanding Trump” is an exercise in futility for those who still choose to see the world through the prism of what passes for normality. Who believes in norms defined by established practices? There is nothing normal about Trump. And he is disrupting established practices at a pace that belies understanding. There is no room for established practices anymore.

It's a revolution, darling.

And if you don’t get that, then nothing makes sense. I’ve been riding Donald Trump’s magic carpet for some time now, convinced that the alternative to this journey into the heart of American darkness was nothing less than nuclear Armageddon. I didn’t drop the acid. I’m the equivalent of Marlow and Willard, except I have the longevity of a Harlequin or an anonymous photojournalist when it comes to seeing patterns in chaos.

I've been on Donald Trump's trip since 2015. And here's my take.

2.

The Munich Security Conference is an annual conference on international security policy that has been held in Munich since 1963. Its motto is “Peace through Dialogue.” Although the Munich Security Conference attracts a global audience, it caters almost exclusively to a transatlantic audience, to acolytes of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU). The role of the United States has been to serve as an authoritarian mentor, nodding approvingly from the front rows of the audience and sending high-ranking officials to address their European subordinates from the podium of power.

The Munich Security Conference is a kind of audition, where Europe's political and security elites strive to share the stage with a member of the establishment American who will pat them on the head, give them a treat, and tell them what a good job they are doing. In the post-Cold War era, Europe has allowed itself to be uniformly influenced by this master-servant dynamic. The Munich Security Conference was born out of the pragmatic caution shown by its founder, Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzin, a co-conspirator in the plot waged by Count Claus von Stauffenberg to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944. Von Kleist envisioned the Munich Security Conference as a forum to promote peace in Europe, to use dialogue as a mechanism to prevent a future European war.

Von Kleist’s vision, however, faltered in the face of the United States’ post-Cold War ambition to sustain its role as the world’s sole remaining superpower, using transatlantic and European institutions such as NATO and the European Union as enablers of continued US hegemony through the uninterrupted implementation of the “rules-based international order.” The hypocrisy of the West—NATO, the European Union, and their overlord, the United States—was masterfully exposed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2007 during his brilliant keynote address at the Munich Security Conference.

But the elites who gather at the Munich Security Conference are not there to be lectured or taught, but rather to promulgate U.S. strategic objectives, disguising them as European initiatives born of European values. Except, as anyone who has studied the dynamics of the Munich Security Conference knows – there are no real European values ​​anymore. The once laudable goal of avoiding a repeat of World War II on European soil has been replaced by a mindless and slavish echo chamber of American imperial warmongering.

Serbia. Libya. Afghanistan. Ukraine.

The Munich Security Conference has become nothing more than a rubber stamp for U.S. foreign and national security policy. Today’s European values ​​are nothing more than a veneer of artificiality, the equivalent of a spoonful of sugar to help Europeans swallow the bitter reality of their collective servility. Any student of America, however, would have noticed the American people’s growing discontent with the endless wars promoted and promulgated by the so-called Congressional Military-Industrial Complex (CMIC), which President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address in January 1961.

The American establishment allowed itself to be consumed by the predatory practices of the Congressional Military Industrial Complex. The American people did not. And starting in 2016, the American people began to let the establishment know that they would no longer tolerate these predatory policies, which infected every aspect of American life. The Trump Revolution began in 2015, when he descended the escalator from his castle in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for President of the United States. And it has not stopped since.

Donald Trump destroyed the corrupt edifice of classic Republican politics by winning the 2016 Republican primary. His victory in the 2016 presidential election sent shockwaves through the establishment, which spent the next four years undermining the Trump Revolution at home and abroad. And for the next four years, under the auspices of its poster boy, Joe Biden, the establishment used every tool of the establishment’s dirty tricks (including politically motivated prosecutions on multiple fronts and, possibly, assassinations) to prevent Donald Trump’s resurrection.

3.

But the revolution was real, something the establishment chose not to believe, and Donald Trump—against all odds—won a second term as the most powerful man in the world. Only this time he had learned the lessons of the past. That he could only trust people who came from his personal orbit, not the former servants of the deep state. That the institutions of power that were deeply embedded in the vast unelected bureaucracy that ran America, regardless of who was in charge of the executive branch, were the enemy. And that as president, he had virtually unlimited power to enact the changes that the American people demanded.

Donald Trump appears to have incorporated aspects of John Boyd’s OODA loop into his strategic thinking. John Boyd was an Air Force fighter pilot who believed that if you took control of an aerial dogfight—a dogfight—by getting your opponent to react to you, you would win every time. Boyd called this “getting into the enemy’s decision-making loop,” which he broke down into a four-phase cycle he called the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act).

If you could implement the OODA loop faster than your enemy, then you would be “inside” their decision-making loop. And they would die. The key aspect of the OODA loop is the “loop” – this was not a single exercise, but a series of connected actions, each feeding into the other. You took an action and then observed the enemy’s reaction. You orient yourself to the reaction and decide which option is best before you act.

The enemy now reacts. And the cycle repeats. Until the enemy dies.

The goal is to not give up once you’ve fought, to keep the enemy reacting to your actions until you have him where you want him. In Munich, we see Donald Trump’s classic adaptation of the OODA loop to destroy his enemies in NATO and the European Union. Now, at this juncture, some might ask, “Wait a minute. How did NATO and the European Union become Donald Trump’s enemies?” The answer is quite clear – because they are an extension of the established US elites that Donald Trump has declared war on.

These are the European elites who conspired against Donald Trump during his first term, who longed for former President Barack Obama while delaying the enactment of Donald Trump’s reforms in the hope that the American election cycle would purge Trump from the American political scene. These are the people and institutions who redoubled the pressure on American bellicosity, allowing themselves to fall into the Ukraine trap, which was designed to destroy Russia for the sole benefit of the United States, destroying Europe in the process. The Europeans, ever submissive, were too blinded by their willingness to serve to see that they were just as much sacrificial lambs as Ukraine.

And just when it looked like Donald Trump would emerge victorious, it was the Europeans – in NATO and the European Union – who conspired with the Joe Biden administration to “Trump-proof” their policies, hoping that they could, once again, simply survive four years of Trumpism while the US establishment contained and undermined Donald Trump at home. But Donald Trump learned his lesson. The revolution began on day one by destroying the establishment that Europe had been counting on to contain Trump.

The Justice Department, which was so effectively weaponized during Donald Trump’s first term and deployed to destroy him in the four years since, has been emasculated. The intelligence community, which the senior Democratic senator, Chuck Schumer, once boasted had “six ways to destroy Donald Trump starting Sunday,” has been handed over to Tulsi Gabbard, who will control it. The American foreign policy establishment has been exposed as a gigantic money-laundering scheme focused more on regime change than foreign aid.

And the US Congress is implicated in all of this.

Donald Trump decapitated the very establishment that Europe was counting on to contain him. That’s what happens in revolutions. And then Donald Trump turned his attention to Europe.

Keep in mind that in Donald Trump’s world, Europeans—especially their twin institutions, NATO and the European Union—are not allies but enemies. Trump’s new defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, traveled to NATO and warned Europe that things were not business as usual, and that Europe’s perceptions about important issues like the war in Ukraine were, in fact, misperceptions.

No NATO for Ukraine. No return to the 1991 borders with Russia. No American troops in Ukraine. No NATO cover for any European “peacekeeping” forces that might be sent to Ukraine. And Europe was paying for everything from now on.

4.

Enter the OODA loop. Pete Hegseth was the initiator. Europe scrambled to respond. Enter Vice President JD Vance.

His speech at the Munich Security Conference was not conceived as a work of rhetorical genius that would go down in history for its eloquence and intellectual insights. It was a potboiler in the European punch bowl, a deliberately provocative jab at political norms designed to inject chaos into the sense of order on which Europe thrives. While Europe had struggled to respond to Hegseth’s provocation, it now had to adjust to the frontal assault on its sensibilities that J.D. Vance had unleashed.

The OODA loop was in full operational mode. Whatever the Europeans had thought the Munich Security Conference would be—perhaps the forum for a forceful response to Pete Hegseth’s insults—fell apart as they scrambled to respond to new insults hurled by J.D. Vance, who openly questioned Europe’s role as a partner to the United States.

For the European elites gathered in Munich, who had spent their entire adult lives perfecting their roles — individually and collectively — as America’s obedient servants, to suddenly be told that they were bad boys and girls with whom America no longer identified was too much.

Munich may be remembered for JD Vance's unorthodox – indeed, revolutionary – performance.

But the Munich experience is best summed up by the sight and sound of Christopher Heusgen, the chairman of the Munich Security Conference, breaking down in tears as he closed the Munich Security Conference, overcome by the reality that Europe has never been more than a tool of American power, and now there is a different American master who has decided that Europe is no longer useful as a tool. In the wake of the Munich disaster, Europe is struggling to respond to the new reality that manifested itself during this Munich Security Conference.

As French President Emmanuel Macron gathers his European allies to craft a coherent response to Donald Trump’s apostasy in Ukraine, Donald Trump has dispatched a high-level negotiating team led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Saudi Arabia, where he will meet with a similar high-level team from Russia led by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to negotiate an end to the conflict in Ukraine and a resumption of US-Russia relations, which would mean the end of the relevance of NATO and the European Union. Neither the European Union nor Ukraine have been invited to the table.

5.

How do I explain Munich?

It is a revolutionary application of John Boyd’s OODA loop, a masterful case study of disruptive politics conducted in an atmosphere of chaos brought about by the disintegration of deeply rooted political institutions on which the world relied for stability. It is a bitter trip down the rabbit hole, chasing a White Rabbit who stops at nothing to explain what is happening.

It’s a magic carpet ride into the unknown, piloted by a man who long ago stopped caring about the things we’ve all come to believe serve as central aspects of our lives. It’s the opening salvo of revolutionary change experienced by people who don’t understand revolutions and aren’t prepared for one to happen around them.

It's beautiful in a horrible way.

It's Donald Trump personified.

“Did you know that man really likes you?” the anonymous photojournalist tells the disbelieving everyman, Captain Willard, in the final apocalyptic scenes of Revelation Now. " He He likes you. He really likes you. But he’s got something in mind for you. Aren’t you curious about that? I’m curious. I’m really curious. Are you curious? There’s something going on here, man. You know something, man? I know something you don’t. That’s right, Jack. The man’s clear in his mind, but his soul is crazy. Oh, yeah. He’s dying, I think. He hates all this. He hates it! But the man is a—he reads poetry out loud, okay? And a voice—he likes you because you’re still alive. He’s got plans for you. No, no. I’m not going to help you. You’re going to help him, man. You’re going to help him. I mean, what are they going to say when he’s gone? Because he dies when it dies, when it dies, he dies! What are they going to say about him?”

Welcome to the Revolution.

Originally published in News Consortium

Scott Knight, a former intelligence officer in the United States Marine Corps, he was the UN's chief weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991-98. Author of, among other books, Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika (ClarityPress).

Translation: Arthur Scavone.

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