Cromwell

In the US, Netanyahu is generally viewed as a sort of Churchillian figure:  a great bulldozer of a man fighting doggedly to protect his island from a horde of Arab savages.  In Israel, the perception is completely different;  he’s a slippery, and somewhat corrupt, figure who poses as the indispensable conflict manager between a right that wants to bite off more than it can chew and a hopelessly naive left.  He doesn’t have any great vision for the future, but he believes in slowly changing facts on the ground in Israel’s favor while doing just enough to keep the right, the left, and the rest of the world at bay.

Anyone who reads this blog knows I can’t stand the man, because, as an American, I despise his identification with the Trumpist right and his apparent feeling of moral entitlement to dictate our country’s foreign policy, even while he is taking billions of dollars of our money.  If I were an Israeli, however, I admit that I might feel differently.  There is no denying that Israel’s strategic position has improved in some respects during his tenure as PM, and that any visionary alternative to “conflict management” would carry serious risks.  The real question for Israel is whether kicking the can on issues involving Hezbollah, the Palestinians, and the country’s Arab minority is sustainable in the long run.

I don’t think it is, but if you’re an Israeli voter, it’s the path of least resistance.

Regardless of the military outcome, it won’t be us.  Our vital interests in the Middle East are limited to preventing terrorism within our borders and maintaining the flow of oil.   Defeating Iran will accomplish neither.

It won’t be China, which still depends on Middle East oil.  Expect the Chinese to engage in frantic efforts to mediate the conflict.

It probably won’t be Iran, which lacks the resources and expertise to win the war.  The best they can hope for is a political/strategic victory.

It could be the Israelis and Saudis, but that depends on our willingness to impose regime change on Iran.  Merely engaging in a “cut the grass” effort with regard to Iranian nuclear and missile facilities won’t satisfy them, because it won’t stop Iran’s efforts to control Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen.

No, the real and unquestioned winner will be Vladimir Putin, because: (a) the war makes Russia’s oil more valuable; (b) America will be further estranged from its allies, who won’t support the war; and (c) he may well be able to exact a price in exchange for his neutrality.

Has Trump considered that?  Almost certainly not.

Life in the time of Trump

He’ll meet with Kim Jong-un.

They’ll talk of Dennis Rodman

And make nice when it’s done.

My guess is that they’ll make a deal.

Trump doesn’t hate the man.

He’ll claim a Nobel Peace Prize

And prepare to fight Iran.

It’s hard to find issues of bipartisan agreement these days, but both parties would agree that Kim, like his predecessors, is a brutal dictator with no respect for human rights who should not be trusted with nuclear weapons.  As a result, every effort short of war should be made to force him to give up those weapons.  To the extent that there is a dispute, it is only about whether war is necessary if all else fails.

Donald Trump operates outside of this consensus.  It appears that he kind of likes Kim, who is, of course, a fellow strong man and thus a kindred spirit.  He clearly has no interest or concern about Kim’s treatment of the North Korean people.  Finally, North Korea doesn’t run a trade surplus with the US.  To Trump, China, Japan, and South Korea, which do run large surpluses, are the real enemies in Asia.

Kim undoubtedly sees the negotiations as an opportunity to play the US card against China.  You can imagine Trump dreaming of a deal which:  (a) confounds his political foes; (b) makes him look strong and unpredictable; (c) reduces American defense costs; and (d) frees him to start taking firm action against America’s trade adversaries.

If it were someone else, the Reactionaries would scream about a deal of this nature.  If Trump makes the deal, they will just accept it.  After all, if Trump can normalize Putin, why not Kim?

The T Magazine in yesterday’s NYT contained a series of articles about the dramatic changes that took place in New York in the early 1980’s.  While I rarely spend much time reading T Magazine, which tends to be dominated by ads for strange-looking, expensive clothing and dull minimalistic furniture, I found this genuinely interesting.

There is a natural human temptation to treat the present as if it were inevitable, and will never change.  Studying the past tells us that isn’t true.  Change is happening constantly, every day, often in ways we don’t recognize at the time. What appears to be important today is frequently just a footnote to what really matters in the long run.  And virtually nothing is written in stone; history is the product of an infinite series of human choices and some events that are unpredictable and beyond our control.

And so, for example, the war with Iran is not inevitable; if and when it comes (much more likely the latter), it will happen because Trump, Netanyahu, and MBS want it, not because it couldn’t be avoided.

The Democratic Party, since the Civil War, has always been a coalition of victims struggling against an establishment of businessmen and white Protestants.  For about a hundred years after the war, the coalition consisted of workers (largely immigrant and Catholic), struggling small farmers, and southern whites.  While the last group actually enjoyed a monopoly of power in their region, they felt like victims because they had lost the war and seen their “country” occupied.  The defense of slavery and the rights of African-Americans did not, of course, enter into this narrative at all; to southern whites, the war was a noble defense of a traditional way of life, dominated by agriculture, against soulless, imperialistic Yankee industrialists.

The Democratic Party slowly came to embrace the claims of African-Americans from the late 1940s through the 1960’s.  They had a much better claim to “victimhood” than the southern whites, who consequently changed parties and became Republicans. As a result, both parties are largely controlled by groups who claim to be victims today.  That is the principal reason our politics have become so vitriolic.

When the news that the FBI had reopened its investigation of Hillary Clinton prior to the election without telling Congress or the public leaked, the GOP predictably went berserk.  Trump and all of the talking heads on Fox News argued daily,  even hourly that Clinton was not a legitimate president and should be driven out of office by all means necessary–not completely excluding violence.

Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan saw an opportunity and agreed.  In spite of Clinton’s genuine efforts to work with them, they essentially shut down Congress, other than to conduct bogus investigations and hold hearings on impeachment. No Clinton nominees were confirmed.  The government shut down.  Finally, Congress refused to lift the debt ceiling, the government defaulted, and interest rates skyrocketed.  When Clinton fought back by trying to conduct business as usual, litigation ensued.  Violent demonstrations were taking place all over the country.  It was the worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War.

All of this could easily have happened if Comey had gone by the book and kept his mouth shut.  It’s easy now to criticize him for failing to be even-handed, but it is a mistake to downplay or disregard his concerns for the health of the system, because they were completely legitimate, given the character of the leaders of the GOP, the demands of Fox News, and the attitudes of the Reactionaries.

Obamacare was the product of a long and tortured legislative process.   It was oversold in some respects, and the MSM gleefully ran lots of stories about the relatively small number of losers.  Technical mistakes in the roll-out and relentless partisan opposition made matters even worse.  As a result, the program made a bad first impression, and remained unpopular for years, in spite of its successes in increasing coverage and lowering costs. However, when a concerted effort was made to repeal it, the public became more aware of its virtues, and its popularity increased dramatically.

Sounds like the tax cut, doesn’t it?  There is a cautionary message for Democrats here;  just because the public correctly continues to be skeptical about it doesn’t mean that anyone will welcome a tax increase when push comes to shove. Parts of the bill were egregious (i.e., the extent of the corporate tax cut and the treatment of pass-through businesses) and should be rolled back, but most of the changes in the individual rates and the treatment of deductions should probably remain in place.

Richard Nixon and Donald Trump shared a number of personality traits, including the following:

1.  Thin skin;
2.  A chip on their respective shoulders;
3.  A lack of respect for the truth;
4.  Tactical flexibility;
5.  A loathing of the MSM; and
6.  A willingness to abuse power.

The differences are also striking, however.  Nixon had far better reason to carry the chip on his shoulder than the millionaire developer’s son.  He violated legal and political norms, but he at least understood them and pretended to respect them.  Most importantly, he was an experienced politician who knew what he was doing. Basic competence, alas, is not one of the man on golf cart’s attributes.

Richard Nixon was the first Republican culture warrior.  Prior to him, the GOP consisted of PBPs, CLs, and a few CDs; the Reactionaries, for historical reasons, were Democrats, which gave the Democrats a huge advantage on a national level. Nixon’s dog whistles on issues of race and culture started a major shift in the system.  After his resignation, however, Carter was elected, and things appeared to be returning to normal.

Reagan changed everything.  He brought swagger and a direct appeal to white Christians to the GOP.  The Reactionaries, and the remainder of the CDs, changed parties and voted for him.  That’s where we are today.

It comes as no surprise that Comey thinks Trump is a liar.  What’s more interesting is that he thinks many of the lies are pointless.  Is he right?

No.  The lies that aren’t intended to deceive serve a purpose, too.  Some of them are intended to bind his supporters closer to him.  Some of them are designed to force people to choose sides.  Some of them are expressions of dominance over the people around him.  Finally, some of them appear to be efforts to pump himself up, like a salesman talking to himself in the mirror in the morning.

That doesn’t make them any less deplorable, however.  The norm must continue to be that our head of state tells the truth.  If we don’t continue to call him out when he lies, that could change, and we will be much the worse for it.

My wife and I went to see an excellent local production of “Cabaret” last week.  I had never seen it on stage before; it struck me as being more raw, powerful, and directly political than the movie.  It’s timely, too;  you can’t avoid thinking about American culture wars when you watch the interactions between the characters in the cabaret and the Nazis.

A large part of the problem with our culture wars is that both sides identify themselves as victims.  How can that be overcome?

With some humility and honesty.  The blue side has prevailed in the culture wars. They need to understand that the righteousness of their cause is not as self-evident as they think, to show more tolerance of traditional culture, and to avoid pressing their advantage to the limit.  The red side, for their part, needs to understand that their lost ability to impose their values on others is not “oppression,” that they are not the victims in this story, and that any hope of using the political system to bring back the golden age of white Christian patriarchy is going to backfire spectacularly with the American public in the long run.

In other words, demography tells us that tomorrow does not belong to them.

On the new secretary named Mike.

There isn’t a whole lot to like.

Enabling Don

Means that all hope is gone.

We’ve no fingers to stick in the dike.

The first phase of the war is nearly over; Assad has regained control over virtually all of the urbanized areas in the west, and the IS “caliphate” is just about finished.  Humanitarian, political, and great power issues loom.  Here are the major issues, with my predictions:

1.  Will Israel engage in a major shooting war with Iran?  No.  Netanyahu’s end game is to fight Iran to the last American, not the last Israeli.  He’s just a few months away from getting his wish.  Why screw it up now?

2.  Will the Turks succeed in setting up a small buffer state in north Syria?  Yes. The Kurds don’t have the military clout to stop them, and the other major powers don’t care.

3.  Will Assad succeed in regaining effective control over the entire country? Doubtful.  The Russians have already accomplished their objectives; they aren’t going to subsidize wars in the desert that create the potential for conflict with the Americans.  Iran and Hezbollah are already stretched to the limit.  There is only so much he can do on his own.

4.  Will America fight, negotiate, or withdraw?  It’s Trump, so who knows?  Probably all three at once.

Ross Douthat had a column in the NYT about two weeks ago in which he divided GOP thought on foreign policy into four groupings:  neoconservatives (use force to promote American values abroad); paleoconservatives (isolationists); realists (national interests prevail over values); and hawks (use force as a first option for almost any reason).  His model has merit.  The questions for today are:

1.  Do his divisions correspond to my four GOP factions?
2.  Where does Trump fit in?

My responses are as follows:

1.  Yes, they do.  Neoconservatives are CDs.  Paleoconservatives (a small minority) are CLs–think Rand Paul.  Realists are, of course, PBPs.  The connection between Reactionaries and hawks is a little more tenuous, given that the Reactionaries tend to turn against lengthy wars which involve “nation-building,” but Reactionaries do tend to respond as requested to displays of swagger.
2.  The only thing you can say for sure about Trump is that he isn’t a neoconservative.  He loves bluster, but he hates nation-building, and he definitely wants to use American military and market power to make deals that involve money.  The inconsistencies that plague our foreign policy are largely attributable to this confusion.