How to Explain the Deep State to Someone Who Refuses to Believe It Exists
If you ever worked in a restaurant or the military or any big organisation, you know what the Deep State is.
In the years when I was in college, I, like many Americans, spent a lot of time working in restaurants. When I took a year off to travel around the US, I expanded my experience base in the “hospitality” industry even more.
In just about every restaurant or bar I worked in, there was at least one “senior” server — a waiter or waitress who was older, wiser, and more experienced than everyone else on staff. They were the ones who knew which tables were most popular; which shifts on which days were the most lucrative for tips; how to please customers to maximise those tips. They knew which ice machine was the least temperamental; where to pull the freshest bread from; how to make little modificartions to the plates to increase cuastomer satisfaction.
They knew the kitchen staff and the busboys; they could get special favours and priority help from them when needed.
They also knew which were the best places to sneak a clandestine cigarette — or, in some cases, a shot of vodka.
These “veteran” servers had ZERO interest in climbing any sort of employment ladder. They had little respect for managers, and even less respect for owners. They knew that every time the restaurant changed hands, new management would come in. But that was OK by them — they just did their work and made sure that the food got served hot and the drinks got served cold, and that they got their usual gratuities from happy customers — even if they sometimes had to bend the rules and work despite orders and rules from Management.
That is what the Deep State is. It is a sort of “permanent state” that functions in the same way, consistently and with the benefit of experience, regardless of what sort of “Management” may be in the White House.
We have all seen movies where the valiant non-commissioned officers — usually called “Sarge” or “Gunny” are the ones who hold the unit together, doing their best to keep their soldiers alive — even while the “officers” made bad decisions and jeopardised the lives of their troops.
The Deep State actors see themselves like those heroic noncoms — getting the job done despite the politicians to whom they technically must report. A sergeant knows that the second lieutenant he reports to will get promoted up and out of his unit eventually (if he doesn’t get killed first), so he says and does whatever he needs to keep the “LT” happy, all the while doing what he knows to be the right thing — regardless of what the lieutenant says.
Likewise, the Deep State denizens know that Administrations come and go, and that the appointees who are responsible for their department are only there as a stepping stone to a higher position in government. They are thus not as emotionally or professionally invested in the work as much as the people who have been doing it for their entire careers.
In short: it is up to these members of “permanent Washington” to keep the wheels of Empire rolling and the axles of American power greased — no matter who the Commander in Chief may be at any given time.
“Valuing the Deep State”
Francis Fukyama, the renowned political scientist famous for his “End of History” work, has written a nine-part series on the advantages, dangers, and complications of what he calls “bureaucratic autonomy”. In this series of articles, entitled “Valuing the Deep State”, Fukuyama makes the case that “a high-capacity, professional, and impersonal state is critical to the success of any society”.
Democracy, the will of the people, Congressional oversight, etc. just stand in the way of efficient governing, according to Fukuyama, and the US needs to find “the proper balance between autonomy and democratic accountability”.
When the Deep State becomes dangerous
There is, however, a time when the Deep State becomes dangerous. When the permanent staff of the Empire start pursuing their own ideological objectives, then everything goes badly wrong.
When the cadre of permanent staff in Washington all become proponents of a specific ideology, then there is very little that can stop them: they know how everything works; they know how to get things done; they know where the bodies are buried; they are necessary in ways that the political appointees above them are not.
Over the past decades, we have witnessed two types of Presidential Administrations: those that were sympathetic to — and indeed often run by — the Deep State, and those that, to varying degrees, sought to resist the Deep State.
Examples of the latter included the Administrations of John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, whereas the former were those of Lyndon Johnson, George W. Bush and Joe Biden.
Obama and Trump took on “the blob” — and lost
Ben Rhodes, the top aide to then-President Barack Obama, is widely credited with labelling America’s foreign policy establishment “the blob.” According to Vox:
“With that term, now ubiquitous in Washington, DC, he sought to lambaste both Democrats and Republicans who generally followed the same internationalist playbook since 1945…”
Although both men would protest the comparison, one can say that both Trump and Obama were similar in at least one respect: they each tried to take on the blob.
Obama took office promising to end the war in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He also promised to close the Guantanamo prison facility in Cuba.
He accomplished none of these things in his 8 years in office.
Iraq dragged on, with the rise of ISIS metastasising into a larger Middle East conflict. Afghanistan continued despite efforts to extricate US forces. And Guantanamo still houses detainees from the so-called “War on Terror”, held now for decades without charges.
President Donald Trump also went against the blob. He ran on a platform of disengagement and non intervention, and wanted to also end the war in Afghanistan. He even issued a direct Executive Order to pull all the US troops out of Syria.
Trump was unable to accomplish these goals.
In each of these cases, the blob seems to have prevented these Presidents from doing what they wanted to do, and what the American people wanted them to do.
Bush, Clinton and Biden embraced the blob
The existence of the Deep State can also be evidenced by the Presidents who were willing to work with “the blob” to accomplish the Neocon goals of the permanent state.
George W. Bush, for example, was perfectly happy to pursue the Deep State’s Neocon war agenda to maximise US hegemony. He seized upon the tragedy of the 9/11 attacks to establish an authoritarian state at home (via the Patriot Act) and launch a “War on Terror” abroad that essentially put the United States on what the Carnegie Endowment called “a permanent war footing”.
In this endeavour, he was supported and guided by his Vice President, Dick Cheney, a true Deep State denizen who was willing to use all the pernicious forces of what he called “the dark side” to ruthlessly accomplish the goals of his fellow Neocons and expand Presidential power to the max through his theory of the “unitary executive” — a belief that the President of the United States has complete and utter autonomy through an autocratic Executive Branch that cannot be blocked, thwarted or even slowed down by Congress of the Courts.
Cheney was in turn supported by a network of Neocons calling themselves the “Project for a New American Century”. The PNAC manifesto called for the US to embark on a series of wars of conquest, to seize and hold key areas of the globe that would provide the US with critical resources as well as a platform from which to project military power.
By embracing the unitary executive theory, President Bush could do whatever he wanted, without needing the approval of the Congress. This was perfect for the Deep State, and allowed Bush to quickly start wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.
Biden likes the blob
Joe Biden is another example of a “pro-Deep State” President. Unlike his predecessor and former boss, Barack Obama, Biden is and always has been a committed Neocon who never met a war he didn’t like.
Whereas Obama had criticised the Iraq War as “dumb” and even gave a major policy speech against the war in 2002, Biden has been a consistent cheerleader for the war, and even defended his support for the war years after most people had acknowledged that it was a mistake.
When the Deep State becomes deadly
The first use of the term “conspiracy theory” arose during the investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith wrote that the term entered everyday language in the United States after 1964, the year in which the Warren Commission published its findings on the Kennedy assassination, with The New York Times running five stories that year using the term.
These “conspiracy theorists” posit that the CIA was behind the assassination, because JFK was determined to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds” after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
Indeed, the theorists point to the fact that Allen Dulles, the ex-head of the CIA, whom Kennedy had fired following the Cuban fiasco, and who was a mortal enemy of JFK, somehow got a seat on the Warren Commission investigating Kennedy’s death, and so was in a position to “cover up” the Deep State’s involvement.
The CIA is a prime target for such conspiracies, as the agency is well-known to operate in defence of the interests of Corporate America and its billionaire oligarchs — whether it be through organising a coup d’état, funding and arming “rebels”, or targeted assassination.
I covered these “covert actions” in my earlier article: “It’s not Russia. It’s not China. The United States is the World’s Terrorist.”
Kennedy’s refusal to turn the Bay of Pigs operation into a full-scale invasion of Cuba had enraged the American business interests who had been thrown out of Cuba when Castro took over. It is thus no wonder that the CIA tried to kill Fidel Castro over 630 times.
The conspiracy theorists say that, since CIA was already specialised in killing national leaders, it is certainly plausible, if not likely, that they would be the ones to plan and execute the assassination of the President of the United States.
Is Trump on a Deep State hit list?
Donald Trump is a self-described, self-proclaimed enemy of the Deep State. Whether you believe in the “permanent administrative state” or not, Trump does, and he is planning to destroy it.
“Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state,” Trump told his audience at a rally in Waco, Texas — a place that has its own history and experience with Federal and FBI overreach.
Indeed, the recent attempted assassination of Donald Trump cannot help but hearken back to the JFK murder. Once again we are being asked to believe that a “lone gunman” was responsible, when reports of multiple shooters are already coming in. Once again lapses in security are being explained away by “failure” and “incompetence”.
And of course those who question the official narrative are being immediately dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” spouting “disinformation”.
In this case, however, the conspiracy theorists have plenty of proof to show that the Deep State was really out to get Trump. Regardless of whether you believe the 2020 election was legitimate, what has happened over the past 8 years has been damning.
We learned that Trump was right: the FBI had lied 17 times to a FISA court in order to get permission to “tap” into and monitor the Trump campaign communications 2016.
We witnessed two attempts to remove Trump from office via impeachment. Both failed, but the attempts were unprecedented.
We saw the “Russiagate” hoax exposed for what it was: a plot by the Hillary Clinton campaign and a network of shady operatives in government and media to delegitimise and destroy Trump. We know the FBI knew it was a lie but covered up the evidence.
We have seen an embarrassing cavalcade of spurious lawsuits and “trumped up” criminal charges levelled at Trump, with an outlandish 34 “felony convictions” handed down.
And yet, each attack on Trump, each phoney, pearl-clutching scandal, each case of “lawfare” and politically motivated prosecution, has only served to make Trump more popular.
To put it bluntly: the Deep State is running out of options for “neutralising” Trump. It is therefore plausible, if not likely, that they would seek to terminate his campaign “with extreme prejudice”.
Case study: Victoria Nuland
Perhaps the most effective way to explain the Deep State is to examine one of its “prime” operatives, Victoria Nuland. As Edward Welsch observed of Nuland’s career arc: “There is hardly an American foreign policy debacle during that time that doesn’t include Nuland in its list of conspirators”.
Indeed, when Eric Boehm at Reason Magazine wrote “How the Past 4 American Presidents Helped Escalate Tensions in Ukraine”, he perforce singled out Victoria Nuland as the common thread running through much of the “diplomatic missteps” since the Clinton Administration.
Victoria “Toria” Nuland came to the Deep State through the usual American elitist channels: she attended prestigious New England “prep” schools and the Ivy League’s Brown University. She then went on to take up residence in the swampy environs of Washington DC.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Nuland worked in the central office of the State Department, the Council on Foreign Relations, and then in the U.S. permanent mission to NATO, but really got her big break in 2003 when she became the principal Deputy National Security Adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, a committed Neocon like herself.
Her Neocon politics didn’t just define her professional life, however. She married Robert Kagan, a founding member of the Neocon PNAC and regarded as the foremost neoconservative thinker in the US.
Nuland cut her Deep State teeth orchestrating the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004. This was one of the flurry of regime change astroturfed “colour revolutions” organised by the CIA, NED, USAID and US State Department.
One US expert close to Nuland described how she ran the Orange Revolution in Kiev:
“For her, it was a very important event — the transition from a post-Soviet model towards democracy — so if you talk about U.S. participation, Nuland in particular was one of the main actors behind the scenes on our side.”
While Nuland is known to have a soft spot in her heart for Dick Cheney, she also had no problem working for Democrats. Indeed, she had an almost unbroken career path under both Democratic and Republican administrations, with the notable exception of the Trump Administration, which kicked her out of the government and forced Nuland to take a civilian job as CEO of the Center for a New American Security, a Neocon think tank.
Once Barack Obama came into office, however, it was back to “business as usual”. It turns out that the Orange Revolution succeeded only temporarily in installing a pro-Western, pro-EU, pro-NATO government in Kiev. The Ukrainian Presidential elections in 2010 saw the ouster of the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko in favour of the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych.
So Victoria Nuland set about planning a coup d’état in Kiev.
As I described in my article, “Nine Years Ago, Democracy Died in Ukraine”, the US State Department, led by Victoria Nuland, arranged the violent coup backed up by Neo-Nazi militias, which forced Yanukovich to flee for his life.
The preparations were caught on an intercepted phone call between Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, the US Ambassador to Ukraine.
“I think we’re in play”, Pyatt says breezily.
The two go back and forth about who should have what position in their new Ukrainian government. They obviously have no regard for the European Union and are seeking to undermine and circumvent the EU’s attempts at peace.
“Fuck the EU!” says Nuland petulantly at one point.
Below is a recording of that phone call.
Once Yanukovych had fled, Nuland and the US set up a ruling coalition with the three party leaders who had signed the “Agreement” with Yanukovych. This “junta” ruled until July of 2014.
The cabal of coup plotters is shown in the photo below:
Nuland warns Putin of “surprises”
As I explain in my article, “Of Course Ukraine Was Behind the Moscow Terror Attack”, I present the evidence that the US and Nuland were involved in planning and/or authorising the terrorist attack on the Moscow Crocus concert venue.
On February 22, 2024, Nuland gave a talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Bill Gates-funded defense and national security think tank (and a CIA cutout), in which she said:
“With the $60 billion supplemental that the administration has requested of Congress…Ukraine will be able to fight back in the east, but it will also be able to accelerate the asymmetric warfare that has been most effective…”
In addition, Nuland could not help but utter some menacing words aimed at President Putin:
“And as I said in Kyiv three weeks ago, this supplemental funding will ensure Putin faces some nasty surprises on the battlefield this year”.
A few weeks later, ISIS-K, a known creature of the CIA, conducted their terrorist attack in Moscow.
“Unhappy Surprise” for Trump as well
Nuland, it seems, just cannot help but make menacing but prescient comments about terrorism. In an interview just days before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, Victoria Nuland warned Putin of another “surprise”:
“I don’t think Donald Trump is going to become President…If that’s what Putin’s betting on, he’s going to get an unhappy surprise, I think”
Deep State personified
When people scoff at the Deep State they usually ask “who are they?”
You can answer: as one example, Victoria Nuland.
But there are others: John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, John Negroponte, William Burns to name just a few. One could even say that the entire membership of the Atlantic Council are also Deep State operatives.
If someone still resist the argument for the existence of the Deep State, have them read Francis Fukuyama’s “Valuing the Deep State” series, in which he argues that a Deep State doesn’t just exist; it is a vital part of society:
“While [a] state must be responsive to the society it serves, it also needs to retain a degree of autonomy if it is to function properly. Understanding the proper balance between autonomy and democratic accountability is a complex question…”
Fukuyama is correct: we should not get bogged down in arguments over the existence of a Deep State, or what Fukuyama calls a “high-capacity, professional, and impersonal state”. Rather, we should concern ourselves with what Fukuyama calls the “complex question” of what that state does in the real world.
#End.
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interesting. She married a blob and then morphed into one herself
I suppose I was dealing more in Hollywood cliches but I was a G7 stationed in Darmstadt Germany (32nd AADCOM) for two years in the 80’s, so maybe my experience was different from yours.