Failure to swing

Via.

Bizarre little logic glitch in Friedman today, reporting an email from David Rothkopf of Foreign Policy in which Rothkopf writes:

“not only did we overstate the threat [signaled by 9/11], we reordered our thinking to make it the central organizing principle in shaping our foreign policy.”

This was a mistake on many levels, Rothkopf insisted: “Not only did it produce the overreaction and excesses of the Bush years, but it also produced the swing in the opposite direction of Obama — who was both seeking to be the un-Bush and yet was afraid of appearing weak on this front himself” — hence doubling down in Afghanistan and re-intervening in Iraq, in part out of fear that if he didn’t, and we got hit with a terrorist attack, he’d be blamed.

That doesn't sound like a "swing in the opposite direction". That sounds like failure to swing.

Friedman's main point, as happens startlingly often recently, especially when he's writing about foreign policy or Israel (Israel is domestic policy any more, like a psychotic in-law to whom you keep giving rent money that he spends on meth), is reasonably sane, riffing off the thesis of Rothkopf's newly published book, National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear, that we have been terrorized into incapacity:

Argues Gautam Mukunda, a professor at the Harvard Business School and author of “Indispensable: When Leaders Really Matter,” our overreliance on fencing, so to speak, since 9/11 has distracted us from building resilience the way we used to, by investing in education, infrastructure, immigration, government-funded research and rules that incentivize risk-taking but prevent recklessness.

Old Bernie Sanders would agree with most of that, not to mention Obama and the rest of the Democratic Party, but what Friedman has about partisanship is a kind of religious horror, so he literally can't see the partisan character of the ideas.

Rothkopf's book, meanwhile, sounds like a real hatchet job, judging from the enthusiastic encomium in the Moonie Times, explaining how much better G.W. Bush was than anybody thought, and how much worse Obama is by the same token, all because of the damn pendulum. But that's probably not a very judicious assessment; from the excerpt Rothkopf ran in his magazine, under the title "The Pendulum and the President", it seems that he is picturing a very peculiar pendulum, that swings only in one direction, catastrophically, and then, merely calamitously, vacillates in the other:

Our reaction to being attacked was so overheated, so ill considered, of such scale, and so broad in its unintended consequences that it became more defining, constraining, and damaging than the original event to which it was intended to respond. It was a second-order catastrophe. The desire to get out of it ultimately led Barack Obama, the president who was effectively elected to get out of it, to "double down" in Afghanistan to make the political point he was not "weak on terror." That in turn became a third-order calamity. The desire to move away from conventional means of fighting our enemies, and embrace instead drone warfare, cyber-attacks, and more special forces operations violating the sovereignty of other states than any previous post-World War II president, produced fourth- and fifth-order calamities.

Or if you prefer, it's the pendulum of bipolar disease, from exuberant lunacy to anxious, reality-based paralysis. But please note that what you want in the case of the bipolar individual isn't some kind of split-the-difference wash, a person who is only a little depressed and a little delusional at the same time. Being healthy means having some energy and having a connection with reality.

"Suck-on-This" Friedman, secretly aware of how much better things are than they were back when he was on the cheerleading squad, is inclined to give Obama a bit of a break:

I have sympathy for President Obama having to deal with this mess of a world, where the key threats come from crumbling states that can be managed only by rebuilding them at a huge cost, with uncertain outcomes and dodgy partners. Americans don’t want that job.... I don’t think Obama has done that badly navigating all these contradictions. He has done a terrible job explaining what he is doing and connecting his restraint with any larger policy goals at home or abroad.

If Friedman can understand Obama to that extent—that the policy is restrained and that the restraint has connections with goals of the liberal kinds old Tom describes, then Obama is actually doing a much better job of explaining than I had thought.

No reason, I just wanted to hear this.