Analyzing Analysis Part 1: Why I Don’t Bother Tracking the Stupid Shit That Jason J Smart Keeps Saying
- john raymond
- 1 minute ago
- 2 min read
I do not ignore Jason J. Smart because he lacks access, credentials, or visibility. I ignore him because his analysis fails at the only standard that matters in asymmetric warfare: correct attribution of intent once ambiguity has collapsed.
At this stage of the conflict—post-confirmation, post-pattern, post-exposure—continuing to model President Trump as a confused participant rather than an aligned actor is not caution. It is error.
The core failure. Jason J. Smart understands Russia. He understands propaganda. He understands how authoritarian systems exploit Western norms. Where he fails—consistently and decisively—is in closing the loop when the evidence demands it. He remains trapped in a pre-confirmation analytic posture long after confirmation has arrived.
This is not a disagreement over tone. It is a disagreement over state update. In serious analysis, facts change priors. When they do not, the analyst is no longer analyzing; he is preserving a narrative.
What Smart keeps getting wrong. Smart’s Trump framing relies on three exhausted crutches: incompetence, narcissism, and manipulation. Each was defensible once. None survives repetition plus exposure.
Once an actor:
Takes actions that predictably harm the alliance,
Repeats those actions after the harm is explained publicly and privately, and
Continues after intermediaries are exposed transmitting adversary-aligned positions,
intent must be inferred. This is not ideology. It is minimax logic. When harm is the consistent output, intent is the parsimonious explanation.
Smart refuses this inference. He continues to describe traps, temptations, and miscalculations—language that assigns agency everywhere except where it belongs. The result is analysis that sounds sober while functionally anesthetizing its audience.
Why this matters. In asymmetric warfare, misattribution is defeat. Treating a hostile actor as merely erratic produces guardrails and patience. Treating a hostile actor as hostile produces containment and denial. Smart’s work pushes readers toward the former when the latter is required.
This is not a semantic quibble. It affects:
How journalists hedge instead of state,
How policymakers delay instead of counter,
How alliances rationalize fracture as friction.
An analyst with reach who under-assigns intent does real damage, even if unintentionally.
The charitable defense—and why it fails. The usual defense is that accusing a sitting president of witting alignment is “too strong” without absolute proof. That standard is not applied anywhere else in strategic analysis. We infer intent from behavior constantly—especially when dealing with adversaries. Refusing to do so here is not rigor; it is special pleading.
Once the pattern is established, insisting on perpetual doubt is not skepticism. It is denial dressed up as professionalism.
So no, I do not bother reading Jason J. Smart. That is because his work, at the point where it matters most, is predictably wrong. He sees the battlefield. He sees the propaganda. He sees the damage. What he refuses to see is the actor responsible for stitching those elements together.
In asymmetric warfare, the cost of that refusal is not academic. It is strategic. And I have no time for analysts who, when the moment comes to name the threat, look everywhere except straight at it.