The NatSecWonk I Know

In person, Jofi Joseph, the author of caustic and controversial Tweets, was a mild-mannered wonk who skipped on the snark. A look at the White House staffer who was fired over his anonymous Twitter handle

He really was a wonk.

I know Jofi Joseph, the former White House national security staffer fired last week for his snarky and sometimes bilious tweets under the handle @NatSecWonk, and in person he was nothing like his obnoxious Twitter persona.

On Twitter, Joseph railed against the humorless stiffs of the foreign policy establishment. About a Council on Foreign Relations event he once tweeted: �Is the Guiness World Record for largest density of tools in one room about to be broken?�

That was a bit like the wrench calling the hammer a tool: Joseph was a deeply-rooted denizen of that CFR world, a foreign policy professional who specialized in the technical realm of nuclear nonproliferation. He even married another expert in the field. And in person�although I found him pleasant and likeable�he was much like those �tools�: mild-mannered, highly intelligent, and seemingly snarkless. Over lunch or coffee he was less interested in trashing colleagues than in diving deep on Iranian centrifuge capacity or deterrence theory in a post-Soviet world. Consider this email he sent me in response to something I�d written a few years ago:


Not wonky enough for you? Here he is on whether interdiction can stop proliferation. And here he is criticizing George W. Bush�s Iran policy: �There is an alternative course, one that worked well in the 1990s, and that is the lost art of coercive diplomacy: combining incentives and punishments to coerce recalcitrant regimes into making the right decisions.�

It�s hard to reconcile that dry academic voice with the one behind infantile, sometimes outright hateful tweets about Liz Cheney�s weight, how a former senior Bush aide is a �dumb blonde airhead,� and the alleged venality of various Washingtonians�including some of his close colleagues�even if he did occasionally offer useful observations. (�Repubs stuck w/ Bush on an Iraq land invasion out of loyalty long after it began to hurt bad. Democrats won�t stick w/ Obama on air strikes,� he tweeted in early September.)

�The whole thing surprises me,� says a White House aide who often worked with Joseph. �He was always nice and helpful to me when I had questions about really complicated non pro[liferation] issues. The whole thing is sad.�

In one of my last communications with Joseph, he mentioned that he was soon leaving the White House for the Pentagon�s office of Acquisitions, Technology and Logistics. �Just waiting for the last churn of bureaucracy,� he wrote in an email. It all sounded very dull.

That same day, unknown to me, he was tweeting as NatSecWonk with the author of a parody account spoofing Elizabeth O�Bagy, another foreign policy analyst who�d recently been fired in a scandal:

�You�re attractive enough -screw coffee, how about a drink?�