Suspicion about covert operations and soft power used to be mostly the purview of the left. No more.
In his podcast studio, Joe Rogan sat for three hours, cigar smoldering and brow furrowed, as his guest held forth about the dark history of America’s influence abroad.
The highlights were familiar to any left-wing critic of American power: The U.S. Agency for International Development’s involvement in the Southeast Asian heroin trade in the 1970s. The Central Intelligence Agency’s infiltration of the American left. “Rogue U.S.A.I.D. operations in Cuba.” And the windfalls American oil companies have reaped from “U.S. regime change efforts.”
But Mr. Rogan’s guest on the Feb. 12 episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” was not a Marxist professor or a muckraking Intercept writer. He was a former speechwriter in President Trump’s first administration named Mike Benz, whose work has been cited regularly by Elon Musk as justification for shutting down U.S.A.I.D., the 64-year-old foreign aid agency.
“The MAGA movement is fighting the ghost of Ronald Reagan,” Mr. Benz said, referring to the former president’s support for international development.
Amid all the radical moves early in the second Trump presidency, this might be the most literally radical: the borrowing of historically left-wing critiques of American power to justify the right-wing ambition of dismantling longstanding government agencies.
For decades, influential thinkers on the left have criticized American soft-power programs, covert operations and military presence abroad as parts of a particularly American form of imperialism: one that subverts the popular will of other countries’ citizens to serve the interests of the U.S. government and multinational corporations while also producing dangerous consequences — unfettered presidential power, diminished civil liberties — at home.