The View from the Bridge
A retired four-star admiral doesn't usually spend his mornings thinking about fairy tales.
When you have spent decades on the bridge of a destroyer, looking out at the gray, churning expanse of the Pacific, your world is defined by cold steel, sonar pings, and the hard reality of physics. In the Navy, facts are buoyant. If you ignore the depth of the water or the speed of the wind, the ship sinks. It is a binary existence where clarity is the only thing keeping thousands of sailors alive.
But lately, Admiral Mike Mullen, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has found himself reaching for a storybook to describe the state of American governance. Specifically, he has been looking at Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
He isn't talking about tea parties or talking cats. He is talking about the total inversion of reality.
When Donald Trump discusses national security and economic policy, Mullen sees a leader who has stepped through the looking glass. It is a place where words mean whatever the speaker chooses them to mean, where logic is discarded for whim, and where the fundamental rules of the world are treated as optional suggestions.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Consider the way we usually talk about trade.
In the world above ground, a tariff is a tax. It is a cost paid by the person bringing goods into a country. If a toy company imports plastic blocks from overseas, they pay the tax, and then—to keep their lights on—they charge the parents in Ohio or Florida more for those blocks. This isn't a theory. It is math.
But in the "Wonderland" of the current political cycle, the narrative has shifted. The claim is that the foreign country pays. It is a sleight of hand that ignores how money actually moves across borders. To an old sailor like Mullen, this isn't just a policy disagreement. It is a fundamental break from the charts we use to navigate the economy.
If you tell a navigator that North is actually South, you aren't just giving them a new perspective. You are ensuring they hit the rocks.
The Shrinking Room
There is a specific kind of vertigo that comes with watching a leader ignore the advice of his generals and advisors.
In the story, Alice eats a cake and grows too large for the house; she drinks from a bottle and shrinks until she is drowning in her own tears. Policy, when detached from evidence, creates that same sense of disorientation. We see it in the way international alliances are treated.
For seventy years, the United States has stood at the center of a web of treaties. These aren't just pieces of paper. They are the physical deterrents that keep regional brushes from becoming global infernos. They are the reason a generation has grown up without the shadow of a world war looming over every breakfast table.
Mullen’s concern is rooted in the "rabbit hole" effect: the tendency to chase a singular, shiny object—like isolationism or absolute protectionism—without considering where the tunnel ends. When you threaten to pull out of NATO or abandon long-standing partners, you aren't just "shaking things up." You are removing the ballast from the ship.
A ship without ballast doesn't just sail faster. It capsizes.
Through the Looking Glass
The most dangerous part of the Alice metaphor isn't the confusion. It’s the Queen of Hearts.
"Sentence first—verdict afterwards!" the Queen shouts. It is the ultimate expression of power over process. In a healthy democracy, the process is the point. You gather intelligence, you debate the merits, you consult the experts, and then you act. It is slow. It is often frustrating. But it is grounded in a shared reality.
When Mullen looks at the proposed "Alice in Wonderland" policies, he sees a desire to skip the middle steps. He sees a world where the "verdict" (the desired outcome) is announced, and the "sentence" (the facts) are forced to fit it.
Imagine a hypothetical family sitting at their kitchen table. Let's call them the Millers. They aren't interested in geopolitical theory. They are trying to figure out why their grocery bill has climbed 20% in two years. They are told that massive tariffs will bring back jobs and lower costs. It sounds like magic. It sounds like the "Eat Me" cake that will solve all their problems.
But the Millers don't live in Wonderland. They live in a world where costs are passed down, where trade wars lead to shuttered farms in the Midwest, and where uncertainty prevents small businesses from hiring. For them, the rabbit hole isn't an adventure. It’s a pit.
The Logic of the Mad Hatter
There is a scene in Carroll’s book where the Mad Hatter explains that he is "stuck" in time. It is always tea time. He is trapped in a loop of his own making, unable to move forward because he has offended Father Time.
We see a similar loop in the rhetoric surrounding national debt and tax cuts. We are told we can spend more, tax less, and somehow end up with a surplus. It is the political equivalent of the Hatter’s tea party—an infinite loop of impossible promises.
Mullen, who has managed some of the largest budgets in human history, knows that the numbers eventually have to balance. You cannot run a military, maintain a nuclear triad, and secure a border on the fumes of "belief." You need a stable currency and a predictable tax base.
When policy becomes a performance, the people tasked with executing it begin to lose their way. Generals don't know which orders are real and which are tweets. Diplomats don't know if the treaty they signed yesterday will be shredded by dinner. This is the "nonsense" that Mullen fears. It creates a vacuum of leadership that our adversaries are more than happy to fill.
The Grin Without the Cat
Perhaps the most haunting image in the story is the Cheshire Cat, which vanishes slowly until only its grin remains.
"Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin," thought Alice; "but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!"
In our current landscape, we are seeing the "grin" of prosperity—the soaring stock market numbers, the catchy slogans, the rallies—without the "cat" of a stable, long-term foundation. We are celebrating the surface while the structure underneath is being eroded by a refusal to engage with the world as it actually exists.
The Admiral isn't an alarmist. He is a man who spent his life studying "the threat." He knows that the greatest danger to a nation isn't always an invading army. Sometimes, it is the slow, steady drift away from the truth. It is the moment when a country decides that reality is whatever the person behind the microphone says it is.
The Waking Dream
At the end of the book, Alice wakes up. She realizes the Red Queen was just a deck of cards and the trial was just a dream. She returns to the riverbank, to the rustle of the grass and the mundane reality of her sister’s voice.
But for a nation, waking up isn't that simple. There is no riverbank to return to if the institutions are broken. There is no sister's voice to guide us back if we have spent years shouting over one another in a hall of mirrors.
Mullen’s warning is a call for a return to the "boring" world of evidence-based policy. He is asking us to remember that the ocean doesn't care about our narratives. The wind doesn't blow in a certain direction just because a politician says it should.
We are currently standing at the edge of the hole. The colors inside look vibrant. The promises sound like music. It is tempting to jump, to believe that we can grow as big as we want or shrink our problems down to nothing just by wishing it so.
But the Admiral is standing on the bridge, looking at the charts, and he sees the rocks. He knows that once you fall far enough down the rabbit hole, the only thing left to do is pray that you hit something soft on the way down.
The problem is, in the real world, the ground is always hard.
