Cromwell

The chief diplomat known as Rex.

He can’t tell the country what’s next.

There isn’t a plan

That the world understands.

When the war comes, it’s all hands on deck.

When I was in school, we had annual elections for a class president.  The idea, I suppose, was to give the students some experience with the democratic process, but, in reality, it was nothing but a popularity contest.  The winner had no power and no real responsibilities.  All he won was a title that he could enjoy for a year.

I think Trump views 2016 in much the same way.  He won the popularity contest, so he should be able to take a four year victory lap.  Governing doesn’t really enter into the picture at all.  It shows.

It’s the sixth century.  The Christian Western Roman Empire has fallen.  Pagan barbarians are running amok, and civilization as the Romans have known it is crumbling.  Devoted Christians head for the hills, or the deserts, or any place secluded in order to protect and renew their faith in the face of evil and ignorance.  They save civilization, thrive, and ultimately prevail.

The author of “The Benedict Option” sees the modern world in much the same terms, with secular humanists and gays in the role of the victorious barbarians. He advocates withdrawing from the world to the maximum extent possible, creating networks of Christian culture, and preparing for better times ahead. Don’t be fooled by Trump’s victory, he says;  we have lost the culture war, and there is no political solution to our problems.

I agree that it is a mistake for Christians to put so much of their energy into political “solutions” that typically only revolve around banning abortion. Otherwise, I find the author’s analogy to the terrors of the sixth century to be grossly overblown, and his response to be misguided.  Christian culture is still much more pervasive than he thinks, and issues regarding sexual preferences are far less important to the average person on a day-to-day basis than he appears to believe.  The odd piece of legislation preventing bakers from discriminating against gays doesn’t require a complete withdrawal from the world.

Christians are losing the culture war because their message has not been persuasive to the general public either at an emotional or an intellectual level. They have the same opportunity to persuade their opponents as anyone else. They should try to use it.  Creating a positive message, and sounding less like Ted Cruz, would be a good start.  Pope Francis seems to understand that, even if his right-wing opponents don’t.

Things ultimately got better for Christians not because they withdrew from the world, but because missionaries and martyrs fully engaged with it.  You could call it the Patrick Option.

Pundits on all sides of the spectrum are applauding the strike on Syria, but wondering what it means for our Middle East policy as we move forward.  Are we now trying to bring about regime change in Syria?  How is that to be accomplished?  Different voices within the Trump Administration are telling us wildly different things, and nobody knows what happens next.

What these people fail to understand, for some reason, is that Trump likes chaos.  It is a governing tactic.  It permits him the maximum amount of freedom of action.  It lets him sell himself to the highest bidder.  It leaves everyone guessing.  It makes him an American version of Putin.

Get used to it, and don’t pay any attention to what he says until he signs on the dotted line.  In this case, the missile strike was solely for the purpose of making him look like a strong and unpredictable leader in the face of repeated failures at home.  It does not mean we’re going to change course in Syria.

As I noted last week, the CDs may be a bit on the boring side, but they’re the bedrock of a stable democratic system.  To the right, they offer respect for traditional values and authority; to the left, they bring a genuine interest in the condition of the middle class and the poor.  They aren’t bomb throwers.  They never vote to shut down the government.  Both parties can make deals with them.

The instability in our system since 2008 is largely due to the decline of the CDs within the Republican Party, which in turn is mostly attributable to the failures of the George W. Bush Administration.  Can they be revived?  Yes, under the following conditions:

1.  Trump, who is the antithesis of a CD, has to fail.  You can probably take that to the bank.  A post-Trump GOP will have to look to the CDs for competence and gravitas.

2.  The CDs need to disentangle themselves from the Bush fiasco.   Bush campaigned as a “compassionate conservative,” but his monumental failures had nothing to do with his CD ideology.  The tax cut and deregulation program that helped lead to the recession were PBP, not CD, measures.  You can make a case that the Bush attempt to democratize the Middle East flowed naturally from CD principles, but you can also argue that CD military interventions logically would only be for humanitarian purposes.  In other words, a CD foreign policy is not necessarily neoconservative.

3.  The CDs need a friendly coalition partner.   There will never be enough CDs for them to govern alone.  Their traditional alliance with the PBPs brought us the regressive Bush tax cuts.  Can the deal between the two factions be renegotiated on better terms for the CDs (i.e., tax cuts more targeted to the less fortunate), or must the CDs make a deal with the Reactionaries, as suggested by Ross Douthat? That remains to be seen.

Thanks to Obama’s decision to illegally plant cameras and microphones all over Mar-a-Lago, we have a complete record of the Xi/Trump meeting.  Here are some of the highlights:

Xi and Peng arrive and step out of their enormous limousine.  Trump and Melania are there to meet them.

DT:  There’s my Chinaman!

XJ:  I’m not a Chinaman.  I’m Chinese.

DT:  You know I don’t have time for that political correctness crap.

XJ:  It’s not politically correct.  It’s just correct.

DT:  Whatever.  Turns to Peng.  You must be Ping!  I’ve heard about you!  You’re hot!  Not quite a ten, like Melania, but you’re hot!  Welcome to my home!

Stunned, but not wanting to cause an international incident, Peng remains silent.

DT:  Well, enough pleasantries.  Why don’t you girls go off and freshen up while we menfolk talk business?

Melania and Peng leave, commiserating about what jerks their husbands are. Trump takes Xi on a tour of the club.

DT:  I have to say, I admire the way you manage to keep control over fake news in your country.  We could use a Great Firewall here, too.  And I wish we could lock up my enemies here, like you do.

XJ:  Like Bo Xilai?

DT:  Bo who?

XJ:  Bo who will never see the light of day again.

DT:  I get it.  It’s like a knock-knock joke.

XJ:  Another proud Chinese invention.

They finish the tour.

DT:  So, what do you think?  Isn’t it great!

XJ:  It reminds me of the Forbidden City, but less tasteful.

DT:  What do you mean?  Look at all the gold in here!

XJ:  That’s my point.

DT:  So, do you want to go play golf?

XJ:  Golf is a bourgeois sport.  I don’t play.

DT:  Trust me, my courses are so expensive, the bourgeois can’t afford them.

XJ:  I’m sure it would be fun, but I have to get ready for our meeting.

DT:  OK.  See you later tonight.

The two meet later that night.

DT:  We’ve got some issues to discuss with you.

XJ:  Fire away.

DT:  First of all, there’s North Korea!  You need to get your boy under control, or else!

XJ:  Or else what?

DT:  Or else we send in the bombers!  I’ll do it, you know!  I’m a strong, unpredictable leader!  Just ask Assad!

XJ:  Yeah, we’ve heard about that.

DT:  You’ve got thirty days to deal with him.  It’s up to you.

XJ:  Look, we don’t have any more use for Fat Boy than you do.  It’s not that easy to keep him under control.  Every time we find someone we can use as an agent there, they kill him with an anti-aircraft gun.  We’ll do our best, but I make no promises.

DT:  Whatever.  Let’s move on.  We need to do something about the trade deficit.

XJ:  What do you have in mind?

DT:  Well, for one thing, you can do something about intellectual property.  Your people need to stop ripping off Hollywood.

XJ:  But I thought you and your party hated Hollywood.  Every time one of our people sells a pirated DVD, we’re sticking it to Meryl Streep!  We’re actually doing your dirty work for you.

DT:  Good point.  Cross that one off the list.  What about your fill islands in the South China Sea?

XJ:  They’re for purely peaceful purposes.  In fact, we’re going to turn them into resorts.  Here’s a rendering of one of them.  Shows Trump a rendering of a Trump International Hotel on one of the islands.

DT:  Hey, great idea!  And I bet I wouldn’t have any trouble getting permits for seawalls, either!

XJ:  Guaranteed.

DT:  OK, cross that one off the list.

XJ:  We have some issues with you.

DT:  Like what?

XJ:  Well, first of all, there is the One China policy.

DT:  We have china all over the club.  Who cares how many pieces there are? One China, a thousand Chinas, who cares?

XJ:  We also want you to keep your commitments under the Paris Agreement.

DT:  You mean the climate change thing?  It’s just a hoax you created to keep us under your thumb.  Those days are over.

XJ:  Look, we’re really serious about doing something about climate change.  We have a lot to lose, and our people don’t like living in smog.

DT:  I love the smell of coal dust in the morning.  It smells like. . . money.  And votes.

XJ:  This isn’t a movie.

DT:  Everything’s a movie.  My whole administration is a Batman movie.

XJ:  We’re obviously not going to get anywhere on this.

. . . . . . .

Xi and Peng leave.  Xi is relieved that Trump didn’t start World War III.  Peng is just happy he didn’t grope her.

 

 

No, I don’t mean for Iran or North Korea, but the ambiguity in the title should tell you something about the current state of American policy.

Try to divorce the question from the partisan issues of the day, and ask yourself:  is it really a good idea to empower 41 senators to stop a Supreme Court nominee who is otherwise qualified for the job?  In my opinion, the answer is no;  in fact, I would apply that standard to all personnel matters.

Legislation is a different matter;  there is a point to requiring a supermajority for changes in policy, as opposed to the filling of jobs.  The bottom line, however, is that I don’t regret the outcome of the Gorsuch vote.

People don’t generally remember this now, but the Thatcher government was extremely unpopular prior to its victory in the Falklands.  Given all of his failures at home, will Trump view North Korea as a similar opportunity to force all of his critics to shut up?  I don’t see how he can resist.

Of course, Argentina didn’t have the ability to kill millions of innocent bystanders in the process, but to Trump, that is probably just a detail, and he isn’t one to sweat the small stuff.

If Trump has an ideology, other than self-glorification, it’s about “winning;”  if you don’t believe him, just ask him.  And yet, his campaign was built around an appeal to people who have lost ground as a result of social change and globalization.  He is a “winner” surrounded by “losers.”

I suppose he would say that his “losers” are really “winners” who were screwed over by myopic, self-interested coastal elites.  If so, the obvious response to the man behind Trump University would be, “Takes one to know one.”

I don’t believe for a minute that the attack on the Syrians is intended to foreshadow any kind of dramatic change in US Middle East policy.  The attack is simply an attempt to send a message to Xi, Kim, Putin, and the rest of the world that Trump is a strong,  wildly unpredictable leader, and you had better not mess with him.

Will it work?  I doubt it.  Kim fires missiles into the sea all the time, to no obvious effect.

So Trump claims that he’s appalled by the latest Syrian atrocity, and he intends to do something about it, but he won’t tell us what his plan is.

Right.  Just like his secret plan for defeating IS.

My guess is that he will either: (a) do nothing; or (b) try to use the incident as some sort of leverage with Putin and the Syrian regime to get something he wants.  More likely, the latter.

The Chinese leadership is clearly determined to keep dangerous western ideas such as universal human rights under strict control.  The problem, of course, is that Marxism-Leninism, the ostensible ideological basis for the regime, is itself a western idea.

How can this contradiction be resolved?  Perhaps the Chinese can discover that Marx and Lenin had Chinese ancestors.  Why not?  They claim golf was invented in China, too.

Maybe Marx and Lenin were Chinese in a previous life.  That would count.

Democrats fight to protect the entitlements of the elderly, and Republican generally want to cut them, but the elderly vote predominantly for Republicans. How can this be explained?

As a group, the elderly tend to be more socially conservative than the rest of society, and so gravitate towards the GOP’s message of protecting Christians and the white patriarchy.  By and large, in spite of plenty of evidence to the contrary, they do not appear to believe that Republicans will actually vote to cut their entitlements  when push comes to shove;  perhaps they believe they have too much clout for that to occur.

Their faith will be tested during the next four years.  True, Trump has promised not to cut Social Security and Medicare, and his first “budget” was consistent with that commitment.  He is surrounded by people who feel otherwise, however. Social Security and Medicare “reform” probably won’t occur during the next four years, but you would be foolish to take that to the bank.

Obama acknowledged the need to cooperate with Sisi against terrorists, but he kept him at arm’s length, for two reasons:  first, due to human rights concerns; and second, because we don’t want to be associated too closely with Sisi if and when he fails.  Trump has no such qualms.  To Trump, the Middle East is a simple place:  the problems are instability and terrorism; the good guys are strong men; and the bad guys are anyone who wants to change the status quo.

Leaving aside the message this sends about American values, the fact of the matter is that blindly supporting strong men isn’t going to work.  What happens if there is a real revolution in Egypt?  Are we going to send American troops to shoot at the crowds in order to keep Sisi in power?  Are we going to call on the Russians to help us?

American public opinion would react violently to that scenario, but, if Trump has the courage of his convictions, it could happen.

 

The current Polish government–reactionary, nationalist, ruthless, and paranoid–is the ideological soul mate of the Trump Administration.  And yet, the Poles view Trump with a large degree of trepidation.  Why?

Simply put, Trump was elected to make America, not Poland, great again.  He would have no qualms whatsoever about cutting a deal with Putin to the great disadvantage of the Poles if it served narrow American interests, as he defines them.

Therein lies the contradiction between the nationalist and the internationalist strains of Bannonite thought.  You can’t rely on a coalition of right-wing nationalists in different countries to work together in a clash of civilizations with Islamic extremists, because, by definition, they’re all out to screw each other for the benefit of their own country.