Eli Lake has a thorough profile of Michael Anton, who heads the powerful office of planning in the State Department under Secretary Rubio. Anton has also taken a lead on issues with Iran. Most readers will know Anton from the Flight 93 Election essay.  Lake’s profile focuses on tracing the man who has traveled from the heart of the foreign policy establishment under Bush to perhaps a leading spokesman for the MAGA foreign policy.

I think Lake is basically correct in identifying that Anton is neither a neoconservative “primacist” nor a “restrainer” — the two seeming poles of the Republican foreign policy debate. Anton is closer to a Jacksonian, although I would say he is also quite sensitive to the prestige and honor of America in far-flung regions.

Anton has that rare quality in Washington of being a perfect gentleman in person and a ferocious polemist when pen is in hand. I’ve seen him slandered in public and try to engage even the most mendacious critics on the merits. I engaged him in a debate about the 2020 election, and I would say he beat me, given my preference in 2024.

I would add one angle to Lake’s profile, which is Anton’s identity as a Californian, and I don’t mean that as an entrance into a discussion of West Coast Straussianism. What I mean is he is like so many other Californians who have come to Trumpism; he has almost a sense memory of the middle-class paradise that existed in California, one bolstered and shot through with not just burgeoning new fortunes, but burgeoning new industries and technology. But at some point, the future that California was building flipped from utopian to dystopian. If something haunts Anton, it’s the sense that institution-builders have been replaced by rent-seekers, that men of vision have been iced out of leadership in favor of ideological hatchet men and harridans. Increasingly, America relies on a few truly virtuous decision-makers rather than on a widely shared pioneering ethos.

I don’t agree with Anton on everything in foreign policy. He would probably be even quicker to assert that he doesn’t agree with me. But I still trust him on the big issues facing our country geopolitically. I know, in print, he strikes some people as a man with his hair on fire.  But I know him to be sober, judicious, loyal, and disciplined in any endeavor.