Trump has changed American foreign policy. Some of his best minds do not admit it publicly.

US national security officials met in this idyllic mountain retreat in Colorado in July in the past 15 years to speak openly about the greatest threats that the world faced. But this year’s Aspen security forum sometimes seemed to take place in a parallel universe where Donald Trump is not president.

In the past, interviews and out-of-the-story cats have made the headlines around the world for their understanding of what people who were leading the United States government thought of national security threats.

But Trump’s team boycotted the conference this year. And some of the former officials and experts who assisted seemed to minimize the dramatic changes that the Trump administration has already brought to foreign policy, a sign that some of the best experts in the country have not fought with the new world order that they are trying to build – or they are afraid of talking about it openly.

Those who could have explained what the president thought were nowhere.

Very few officials of the Trump administration have agreed to attend, and most of those who made – largely of military leaders – suddenly canceled the day before the conference. The Pentagon ordered them not to appear, claiming that the forum “promotes the evil of globalism, disdain for our great country and our hatred for the President of the United States.”

This burden is not only manifestly false but deeply ironic, because even before the cancellations, one could say that some of the group discussions in Aspen seemed calibrated to walk slightly around the historical changes brought by Trump to American foreign and commercial policy – even if these changes are contrary to the values that many participants have expressed their whole career.

Trump’s main initiatives with US national security implications – such as divert FBI agents to the application of immigration and the refocusing of terrorism for Latin American gangs – have not been mentioned. Serious developments were not, such as the exodus of national security experts from the intelligence community, the FBI and the State Department.

Some speakers seemed determined to avoid criticizing the president and his policies, even when Trump’s management of a problem directly contradicts their stated opinions.

Part of this was the fruit of good intentions – the Aspen Security Forum has always taken pain to be a safe space for both parties. In fact, several senior officials from the first Trump administration went to Aspen to appear in group discussions, notably the Director of the CIA, the Director of the FBI and two Homeland Security Secretaries.

But things have changed. The Trump administration does not only refuse to engage with perceived adversaries, but it uses the levers of power to punish them, from law firms to universities via individuals. More than one participant in the Aspen Security Forum admitted the file that the concern was generalized that the denunciation against Trump could harm their business or their professional interests.

The result was a meeting which, on occasion, seemed to be disconnected from the actions and policies of the Trump administration.

Consider foreign aid. Aspen Security Forum speakers have long praised the advantages of the American soft power, in particular foreign assistance. You are therefore expecting that some of them denounce the historical reduction by Trump of the American agency for international development, whose projected study could cost 14 million lives by 2030.

But a panel examining the subject received the title of Milquetoast, “the weight of the world: international aid and trade”. The moderator, Dafna Linzer of US News and World Report, presented the subject by asking the former director of the USAID Henrietta Holsman: “There are a lot of changes under President Trump in help and commerce, challenges and opportunities – how do you see the field?”

Fore was briefly direct, referring to the Trump cuts as a “typhoon that went through our ecosystem”, but it quickly evolved. The important thing, she said, is to look forward: “What are we doing now?”

While it was talking about the potential of artificial intelligence and quantum IT to make foreign aid more effective, the Atlantic reported that the US government had decided to encourage nearly 500 tonnes of food aid that had expired before it could be distributed.

When Edward Luce of the Financial Times asked the front, who served under President George W. Bush, how and when a foreign help in the United States could be rebuilt, she replied: “I think you can start now, and I think the administration will need it,” she said, adding that Trump will have to use it as a tool to achieve his objectives in the world and suggest. from the state Marco Rubio.

Later in the week, the Congress voted at Trump’s request to recover $ 8 billion in foreign aid which she had previously approved.

Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, an expert in Russia whose ideas could not be more diametrically opposed to that of Trump, celebrated the recent expressions of the president with Russian president Vladimir Putin during the war in Ukraine as a “turning point” and even disputed the suggestion that Trump had long had an “affinity” for Putin.

Rice, who created a much appreciated foreign assistance program during the Bush administration to fight HIV, also refused to criticize Trump’s help cups.

Other speakers were more blunt. Robert Zoellick, a former Reagan administration official and the two Bushs, has made no effort to hide his disdain for Trump’s trade and pricing policies, saying that they would increase costs, increase uncertainty for investors and undergo strategic relations with the Allies. A group of experts in China, including a member of the first Trump administration, has also largely agreed that the president did not have much strategy other than trying to bring the country to buy more American goods.

“I do not think he has a sense of the moral imperative of the United States at the head of the free world, democracy as a value,” said Elizabeth Economy, senior member of the conservative Hoover Institution.

Unsurprisingly, the strongest statements concerning the Trump administration came from two Democratic senators, Mark Warner and Chris Coons.

“We essentially see the destruction of 75 years of soft power in six months,” said Warner during a round table. The panel was supposed to include a republican senator, John Cornyn of Texas.

He canceled at the last minute, without explanation.

Subscribe to Project 47 Newsletter To receive weekly updates and an expert overview on the main problems and figures defining Trump’s second term.