Speaking of Farces

The secret of his success is that it's a secret.

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) August 17, 2025 at 4:23 PM

Speaking of farces, there's a story about the origins of the Trump-Putin Alaska summit that started circulating a week or so ago in the German tabloid Bild: in Steve Witkoff's August 6 meeting with Putin, he came away with the impression that Putin was proposing to have Russian troops "peacefully withdraw" from the territories they've partly occupied in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia as part of a ceasefire agreement, in return for Ukraine leaving Russia in control of some territory they had held since 2014, maybe Donetsk: this would be the basis of Trump's claim on August 8 that there would "be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both."

Needless to say, this was not on offer; the best guess is that Putin said the Ukrainian troops could "withdraw peacefully" from Kherson and Zaporizhzhia and the Russians wouldn't attack them as they left, and Witkoff heard it wrong. By the time Trump spoke on the 8th (one of his deadline days for dealing out the "consequences" that Putin was supposed to suffer if he failed to agree to a ceasefire), Witkoff had spoken with European officials that morning and understood that he'd been mistaken and there was no chance of a deal, but the invitations had already gone out and been announced on Russian media. 

But it's not clear that anybody told Trump about that; he went through with plans for a festive breakthrough meeting in Anchorage, with the red carpet and military flyover, the tête-à-tête meeting between the two with only interpreters present (first time since Helsinki!), the luncheon "in honor of his excellency President Putin", and a nice tchotchke for the Russian leader, the "desk statue" of a bald eagle, and schedule featuring three Trump interviews for Fox News.

Haute Diplomatie

 

Russia Pyotr Veliky missile cruiser makes port call in Tartus, Syria, 2023, via Countercurrents.

Let me get this straight? Trump dithers on about the situation in Syria and his concern is what's best for Russia?

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— Joyce White Vance (@joycewhitevance.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 8:31 AM

Here's the rest of it. It is ironic, of course, that he criticizes Obama for staying out of Syria and then calls for the same course of action. But his focus is on Russia. Not the US. Not the Syrian people. Russia.

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— Joyce White Vance (@joycewhitevance.bsky.social) December 8, 2024 at 8:33 AM

Couple of thoughts:

Obviously, Trump did not write this. The thinking is banal, but it's moderately complex and coherently designed toward a single main idea, as Vance notes, the question of how the Syria events will affect Russia. Completely different from Trump's "weave". Also not a subject to which our narcissist-in-chief is likely to devote that much consideration, with participants who aren't his own enemies—and while Russia might be considered one of his friends, he doesn't usually talk about his friends in this tone, as having made a mistake. He's usually "saying nice things" about his friends in return for their saying nice things about him, not speculating about them in this detached way.

Netanyahyu's Other War. III

 

Following the Israeli strike in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, October 28, 2024. Photo by AFP via Times of Israel.

At a certain point Biden reached a conclusion: that the only way to stop the Gaza war and prevent a wider war all around the Middle East was to get rid of Netanyahu. I don't know when that happened, though an incident reported by Franklin Foer looks to me like a likely candidate, in late 2023, when Biden was entreating Netanyahu to turn over to the Palestinian Authority the tax money that Israel collects in the West Bank to finance the PA's work, such as it is (I'm not going to claim it's a very effective government), but Netanyahu doesn't care about the fact that it's the PA's money: on December 23

Biden called Netanyahu with a long list of concerns, urging him to release tax revenue that Israel owed to the Palestinian Authority, the government in the West Bank, which Netanyahu was always trying to undermine in his quest to prevent the establishment of an autonomous, fully functioning state there.

“You can’t let the PA collapse,” Biden told him. “We’re going to have a West Bank catastrophe to go with the Gaza catastrophe.”

As Netanyahu began to push back, Biden couldn’t contain his pique and barked into the phone, We’re done.

They wouldn’t speak again for almost a month.

That rhymes, in a way, with the story of Biden's worst blowup with Netanyahu, back during his vice presidency. That was about the West Bank too, as remembered by Michael Hirsh in Politico Magazine:

Netanyahu's Other War. II

Dadanite statues dating back to 4th to 1st century B.C.E., found in a funerary temple in Al-‘Ulā, Saudi Arabia, March 2024. Photo by Ali Lajami, via Wikimedia Commons.

The prisoner exchanges of November, five weeks into the war, as I wrote at the time, seemed aimed at a broader purpose than simply freeing the hostages captured by Hamas: permanent peace, on a scale most of the world had stopped imagining, towards which this was a step. Biden had signaled it himself, in a Washington Post op-ed the week before the exchanges began:

for over a month, the families of more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas, including babies and Americans, have been living in hell, anxiously waiting to discover whether their loved ones are alive or dead. At the time of this writing, my team and I are working hour by hour, doing everything we can to get the hostages released....

The Palestinian people deserve a state of their own and a future free from Hamas. I, too, am heartbroken by the images out of Gaza and the deaths of many thousands of civilians, including children. Palestinian children are crying for lost parents. Parents are writing their child’s name on their hand or leg so they can be identified if the worst happens. Palestinian nurses and doctors are trying desperately to save every precious life they possibly can, with little to no resources.

In fact, the program was to move toward the outcome US and Saudi negotiators had been envisaging in Doha, before the war began: while the Israelis stubbornly refused to think about what the end of the war might look like, Biden had already imagined it; a plan already existed, in some detail, with the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia providing the political-diplomatic framework within which the Palestinian state could be constructed from the bottom up, from infrastructure to social safety net, as we now understand, though my readers may have thought it was kind of fanciful at the time, and I didn't really have any evidence of the kind Foer has now provided.  

As long as the hostages were being released, the cessation of hostilities could be maintained, the food and water supply in Gaza could be replenished, the health system restored, a ceasefire evolve into a genuine peace; the release of Palestinian detainees from Israeli jails would supply the makings of a political class to replace not only Hamas but also the elderly and corrupt rulers of the old Palestinian Authority, often seen as Israeli puppets. And then there was the political economy, as Biden said:

The Gaza News Is Biden News

All of a sudden this morning the Gaza ceasefire seemed to be back in the air. I was determined not to let them sucker me again

but right now an awful lot of things really seem to be happening, starting with yesterday morning's Biden-Netanyahu call, which went on for half an hour, according to NPR, and during which, according to the White House readout,

President Biden and the Prime Minister discussed ongoing efforts to finalize a ceasefire deal together with the release of hostages, as outlined by President Biden and endorsed by the UN Security Council, the G7, and countries around the world.

The leaders discussed the recent response received from Hamas. The President welcomed the Prime Minister’s decision to authorize his negotiators to engage with U.S., Qatari, and Egyptian mediators in an effort to close out the deal. 

or going back beyond that to Tuesday's reports in The New York Times and Jerusalem Post that the Israeli military leadership is starting to get seriously fed up with Netanyahu's apparent insistence that they should have to fight two wars simultaneously, against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and demanding that the government start prioritizing getting the hostages back, even if it means accepting Hamas's terms and withdrawing from Gaza entirely, and apparently saying so sort of openly, to The Times:

China

 

Nine-Dragon Wall, Beihai Park, Beijing, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is a very fraught time in the history of Chinese-American relations, as I hardly need to point out, with everybody needing to recover from the distortions of the Trumpery, when the US was ruled by an ignorant emperor whose mind was entirely focused on the irrelevant—nice playdates with their emperor, fighting over the balance of trade, and blaming them for the coronavirus—leaving them a more or less free hand in stealing intellectual property, militarizing the South China Sea, competing with the US for allies in the Asia-Pacific, Africa, and Latin America, and violating human rights around the country's perimeter. While their rulers must be relieved at the prospect of a period of predictable stability, they know they will be coming in for harsher trade conditions

“Despite Trump’s claim that “trade wars are good, and easy to win,” the ultimate results of the phase one trade deal between China and the United States — and the trade war that preceded it — have significantly hurt the American economy without solving the underlying economic concerns that the trade war was meant to resolve. The effects of the trade war go beyond economics, though. Trump’s prioritization on the trade deal and de-prioritization of all other dimensions of the relationship produced a more permissive environment for China to advance its interests abroad and oppress its own people at home, secure in the knowledge that American responses would be muted by a president who was reluctant to risk losing the deal.” 

and heavy criticism from the Biden administration, as in reaction to this week's news stories from culturocide in Xinjiang, where they are breaking up families of Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minority groups by shipping young people to jobs thousands of miles away where they won't be able to speak their languages or practice their religion, to killing democracy in Honk Kong.

There wasn't a process

Another example of Trump "joking", from April 2018:

“And by the way, John Bolton is here and we’ve just had a very big successful hit,” Trump said.

As Trump attempted to go on with his talk he was cut off by continued applause and a standing ovation.

“Hey John, that’s pretty good. I didn’t expect that. I’m a little jealous. Are you giving him all the credit?” Trump asked the audience. “You know that means the end of his job."

Unsurprisingly, John Bolton didn't do his job as National Security Adviser, or even seem to know what the job was, according to Brett McGurk, a veteran of the Bush, Obama, and Trump national security teams who resigned in protest last December ("In response, Trump wrote that he did not know McGurk and questioned if McGurk was a 'grandstander'," says Wikipedia) on NPR yesterday morning:

I think two problems with John Bolton's leadership in this job - there is both a process problem - he didn't really run much of a process. He didn't really try to facilitate the Cabinet secretaries to give the president options and advice. But then he had a policy problem because he has a very maximalist view of America's role in the world with a very minimalist president. So you just had all these contradictions from the start. And they really came to a head yesterday....

And I really can't speak to the, you know, the internal dynamics of what it was like between them day to day. But I do know there just - there wasn't a process. And without a process in which the national security adviser is harnessing all the incredible expertise around U.S. government to give fair warning, to give options to the president and to protect our country - that's really what this is about. So protecting our country - most important job in the world. And this chaos is just - it's extremely serious and puts our country at risk.

He seems to have thought he was supposed to be the president's personal opinionist and could safely ignore everybody else's opinions, and since the president found his opinions disagreeable, that wasn't going to get anybody anywhere. Bolton's incomprehension of everything beyond scrambling for personal advantage and calling for one country or another to be bombed is what makes me doubt very strongly that his book will be worth reading. He's an officious, self-serving, bloody-minded fool.

Which doesn't make Trump a good person simply by contrast. Tiresome as it is for people like Lawrence O'Donnell (see Steve M's post) to lionize Bolton just because Bolton is having a fight with Trump, it's even worse when everybody from Glenn Greenwald to NPR's Rachel Martin tries to force the formulation of the Bolton-Trump disagreement in terms of "hawk" vs. "dove" putatively instantiating "right" vs. "left". While Bolton has always been a hawk in the cliché sense to the point of parody, no doubt, his opposition to Trump is better expressed in the terms McGurk used:

MCGURK: Well, I mean, in some - the president is a, at heart - and this is what I talked about, a maximalist foreign policy with a minimalist president. In part, the president doesn't want to be involved in these things. He doesn't want to be much involved around the world.

MARTIN: Doesn't want to be involved in U.S. endeavors around the world or he personally doesn't want to think about them or both?

MCGURK: Well, both.

Trump's opposition to war is that you don't always get what you want (he'd be fine with the Iraq War if we'd "gotten the oil") and it's "tough", involving imagery that makes him uncomfortable. He admires Putin for seizing Crimea, but when he thinks about acquiring Greenland he'd rather just write a  check. Plus the problem of having allies, and working with them, which he really can't stand at any price. He loves what he thinks of as diplomacy, but that's just celebrity playdates, from the opening handshake competition to reading his beautiful thank-you note in the afterglow and telling the press that his relationships are very good. Anything like work, and the risk of the other guys thinking he's dumb, just makes him crabby.

For the Record: June 4

Image by vienman.com via Taiwan News and an excellent discussion of George H.W. Bush's failure to respond to the Tiananmen killings.

On the eve of the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, I got embroiled in an idiotic Twitter war discussing the Chinese president with a transatlantic mob of conservatives who have recently found that they object to the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang province being forcibly "re-educated" into Xi Jinping Thought and the decisions of the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, after being completely indifferent to it for years, and my tweet went a little viral:

Xi's a horrible person but he knows how to behave himself in public. Never tells the host country who to pick as prime minister, for instance, or talks about whether the local princesses are nasty or not.

— See Pinned Tweet (@Yastreblyansky) June 2, 2019

Trump's a garrulous old fool who can't control his tongue and keeps insulting people left and right. You should hear what Khan's predecessor as mayor said about inviting him to London--guy called Boris https://t.co/JdDwGRTdg1

— See Pinned Tweet (@Yastreblyansky) June 2, 2019

An awful lot of people decided I was trying to say that Xi Jinping was a nicer person than Trump, and haughtily informed me that Xi is in fact a bad man.

My Dad Went to Hanoi and All I Got Was This Lousy Evidence That I'm in a Smurfing Conspiracy

Image via Medium.

Smurfing, or structuring, being the crime of making a financial transaction in a one-bit-at-a-time way sequenced and parceled so as to evade reporting requirements, like the $35,000 checks cut by the Trump Organization to Michael Cohen all through 2017 paying him back for his payoff of one of Trump's one-night stands (illegal under campaign finance law whether Trump repays it or not), of which we saw two on TV yesterday, one with Junior's signature on it.

He wasn't lying when he showed us your signature on that Stormy Daniels check, Junior. And that's another one of your little crimes, too, structuring payments, isn't it? You might want to keep your head down for a while.

— Shame On You Gym Jordan (@Yastreblyansky) February 28, 2019

Poor Junior!

Meanwhile, North Korea. Nicholas Kristof deals out some conventional wisdom ("After the Trump-Kim Failure"):

What Happened

Emperor Napoleon welomes Tsar Alexander to the floating pavilion on the Neman near Tilsit, 25 June 1807. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Interpreting what happened yesterday in Helsinki is handicapped by the news media's reluctance to consider whether Donald Trump is guilty of something or not. Which is totally understandable! They're not supposed to judge! But they can't even allow themselves to consider what kind of crime we'd be talking about with any specificity, and this leads to a kind of sentimental muddling of the story, as in this report from The Times:

“You have been watching,” said the disembodied voice of Anderson Cooper, “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president at a summit in front of a Russian leader that I’ve ever seen.”

Perhaps Mr. Cooper had briefly forgotten the mores of his profession — stolidity and a Cronkite-ian cool — in the heat of a surreal live event: a public pas de deux on Monday between President Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, in which the president criticized United States intelligence agencies and declined multiple opportunities to blame Mr. Putin for interfering in American elections.

Disrespect for the intelligence community? Failure to blame? Is it having inappropriate beliefs, that Putin knows more than the IC or is more reliable? Is it disgraceful to have those beliefs, or is it stupid? Or is it disgraceful or stupid to express them, would a decent president keep his weird beliefs silent?

Is the United States Necessary?

With all respect, don't see why they expect me to think this picture represents something real.

I don't know why I let it happen, but I keep getting enraged by the emerging consensus that Emperor Trump did something positive to bring about whatever is going on on the Korean peninsula, from the wingnuts calling for him to be given the Nobel Peace Prize right away (don't wait for the Norwegians to do it, just steal Obama's and give him that one) to Mr. Magisterial David Sanger offering his balanced appraisal to readers of The New York Times:

President Trump insists that his own actions are responsible, that his threats of “fire and fury” and, more important, his intensified sanctions, forced Mr. Kim to this moment. He is partly right: Mr. Trump has shown an energy in confronting North Korea that President Barack Obama never did.

But disarmament experts who watched the Korean leaders meet in the DMZ agreed that Mr. Kim had been driving the events.

"Shown" being the operative word there: Obama certainly didn't tweet threats of nuclear war or offensive nicknames to the wider public. He did what he did quietly, without checking with David Sanger first, and Sanger still can't forgive him for that. He prefers a White House like that of George W. Bush or the current occupant flooding the press with 50 or 60 lies a day to one that puts him on a low-calorie diet of truth, in modest quantities.

But it isn't even the implied insult to Obama that bothers me: it is, once again, the continuing inability to recognize that South Korea has anything to do with it, or even exists.

For the Record: Nunberg but the Brave

Sam Nunberg, via blogfriend Featguth.

Mr. Pierce, reacting to that subpoena from Mueller to some mook demanding all his correspondence since November 2015 with practically everybody on the Trump campaign including the emperor-to-be himself, thought it was interesting that Pence wasn't on the list:

Maybe Pence wasn't on the list because it was his subpoena. Just a thought.

— YastronomicalOdds (@Yastreblyansky) March 5, 2018

Obviously I was wrong, it was just old Trump campaign flunky Sam Nunberg's subpoena apparently, perhaps the spur to today's interesting meltdown.

I think Nunberg has been doing this stuff for a while, as a matter of fact. In November, just after Manafort's first indictment (only 12 counts, and not even any tax evasion! those were the days of innocence!), he was calling up Vanity Fair:

 “Here’s what Manafort’s indictment tells me: Mueller is going to go over every financial dealing of Jared Kushner and the Trump Organization,” said former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg. “Trump is at 33 percent in Gallup. You can’t go any lower. He’s fucked.”

He was also the one who made up the story about Chris Christie being commissioned to purchase the president's McDonald's order (two Big Macs, two Filets-o'-Fish, and a Diet Coke). That was Nunberg's job, and once the campaign marooned him in a McDonald's somewhere because he was taking too long. Now he's starting to get his revenge. Or something. Calling up Jake Tapper and Katie Tur and Ari Melber and telling them how Carter Page is a scumbag (oh and also he definitely colluded with Russia), and Donald Trump "probably did something", at least that's what heard from Bannon (and incidentally knew about the Veselnitskaya meeting a week before it took place, were you interested to hear that?).

So the long and short of it is that I'm probably going to end up watching TV all night. Some of the day's Tweets below the fold:

For the Record: Windy Olympics

Mr. Vice President and Mrs. Pence in their matching jackets in Pyeongchang, painfully aware that the baleful eyes of Madam Kim Yo-jong may be on them. Screenshot via Fox.

It's a good thing that the South Korean and North Korean athletes are competing together, as a single country in a slightly half-assed way, and an even better thing that the South Korean president Moon Jae-in is contemplating a meeting with mad North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. To say that is not to say that Kim Jong-un is a good person, and I'm getting a little cheesed with rightwingers suggesting that it is (though I'd agree with them that CNN's crush on the dictator's sister Kim Yo-jong is, ah, unnecessary):

1. Since people are being willfully obtuse in interpreting this tweet, I'm going to delete and spell out, slowly, why North Korean charm offensive is surprisingly successful. pic.twitter.com/io7hN1PuXw

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) February 11, 2018

To me, it is the South Koreans who are especially winning this initiative, and last night I tacked on a couple of additional details to Jeet Heer's thread:

This gives the political maneuvers a transcendent emotional value for the public. It's not just maneuvering. US always fails to understand this, but this time much worse than usual.

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 11, 2018

And then spent the rest of the evening happily watching non-Korean skaters, and in the morning there was sour-assed Ben Shapiro, still whining, and his fans:

Decertification

Interior of the Armenian Apostolic Cathedral of the Holy Savior (completed 1664) in Isfahan, Islamic Republic of Iran, via Wikipedia. 

Shorter Bret Stephens, "Donald Trump Takes a Hostage", October 14 2017:

Some people think Trump should have certified that Iran is in compliance with the JCPOA simply because Iran is in compliance with the JCPOA. What kind of dubious argument is that, for heaven's sake?

When the Republican legislators stuck that provision in the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA) of 2015 requiring the president to certify every three months that the Iranian government was in compliance with the agreement, they meant it for the specific purpose of torturing President Hillary Clinton, presumably; every 90 days she'd have to come out and say the Iranians hadn't started building a bomb yet and the whole Republican noise machine would come out to gin up a scandal about Iranian cheating, including your figures of respect like, ah, Mr. Bret Stephens, who was working the beat for his WSJ readers in July 2016, with the most elegant and arcane information sources, and Marc Thiessen picking it up for the American Enterprise Institute for those of us who don't go behind WSJ's paywall:

For the Record: Tweet-Length Sentences

"Let's make the world great again—together!" Danilovgrad billboard, January 2017, via Business Insider.

Officials are preparing Trump for meeting with Putin by giving him 'tweet-length sentences' https://t.co/yIldIWCk5T via @bi_politics

— Becki L (@MAlib4eva) July 5, 2017

#PutinPrep Will Putin be your new best friend? Could be! But remember nobody respects you if you're easy! #HardToGet will get respect. https://t.co/Fao8uwB0aH

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 5, 2017

Don't panic, Tom!

Breakfast in Korea. To the surprise of one Vice reporter, it's what's for dinner!

Seems like a long time since he's hit one out of the Friedmanian lunacy park like this:

Solving the Korea Crisis by Teaching a Horse to Sing

And the exotic (not that exotic) dateline:

SEOUL, South Korea — Some stories have to be experienced to fully grasp — the Korea crisis is one of them. I arrived in Seoul on the evening of May 28. As I was dressing for breakfast the next morning, I was jarred by a news alert ringing on my phone: North Korea had just fired a short-range ballistic missile that had landed in the sea off its east coast.

Grammar salad in the first clause ("stories" is the subject of passive "be experienced" but not the active "grasp" that follows it, and when you're trying to parse it you start wondering if stories have to be experienced like Jimi Hendrix—"Has this story ever been experienced, well I have"—and you're in a state of collapse before you get to the first dash), and the implication, because we do know what he means, that he doesn't expect us to understand the story he's about to tell.

The emperor at war: Update

Via Indian Express.

Yep, that Yemen raid was a clusterfuck:

U.S. military officials told Reuters that Trump approved his first covert counterterrorism operation without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations. As a result, three officials said, the attacking SEAL team found itself dropping onto a reinforced al Qaeda base defended by landmines, snipers, and a larger than expected contingent of heavily armed Islamist extremists.

It was what the rest of us call carnage, a horrible scene. Probably 30 killed, including at least 10, maybe 15, women and children, among them that 8-year-old Nara al-Awlaki. "A White House official" insists that the Obama administration had vetted the operation thoroughly, but there's no reason to think he's telling the truth. (I'm guessing right here that it's Spicer, who allows himself to be quoted by name boasting about how successful the mission was.) It's not funny, but everything Trump does has the structure of classic comedy, in which the hubristic villain trips on the banana peel of his own cruelty and vanity. It's just that in real life so many of the good people whose lives he affects are damaged and crushed.

Meanwhile Flynn is threatening Iran with some kind of red line the nature of which he doesn't specify very clearly, Trump is threatening to send a punitive expedition to take care of "bad hombres" in Mexico, and he's apparently managed to enrage the prime minister of Australia, America's most loyal ally over the past century. Just doubled down on that on the Twitter machine:

Do you believe it? The Obama Administration agreed to take thousands of illegal immigrants from Australia. Why? I will study this dumb deal!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2017

They're also not thousands of illegal immigrants but 1700 boat people refugees entitled to asylum (mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan) who somehow got lost in the South Pacific, generally held in horrible prison camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

Steve M will tell us this isn't going to cost him anything with his base, and he's right as usual, but I don't think his base can really help him out much at this point. I think his base is going to be crawling back into their woodchuck holes and we're going to be hearing a little less from them, unless it's when they're protesting against the taking away of their Obamacare. And the Republican establishment will happily throw him under the bus if they think he's not helping them, which I can tell you is just going to get clearer every day. It's going to be awful, but hideously entertaining.

West of Eden: Trolling from the Times

Image via All Hat No Cattle.

The good news is that the more educated Iran trolls, such as the New York Times's David Sanger and Michael Gordon (remember him?), have finally pretty much acknowledged that the JCPOA deal will prevent Iran from building a nuclear device over the next 15 years; they don't quite come out and say it, but they've pretty much stopped suggesting it won't. The bad news is that they're doubling down on the "problem" of what might happen in 2031:

the flip side is that after 15 years, Iran would be allowed to produce reactor-grade fuel on an industrial scale using far more advanced centrifuges. That may mean that the warning time if Iran decided to race for a bomb would shrink to weeks, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis by Robert J. Einhorn, a former member of the American negotiating team.

Critics say that by that time, Iran’s economy would be stronger, as would its ability to withstand economic sanctions, and its nuclear installations probably would be better protected by air defense systems, which Iran is expected to buy from Russia.

Critics are wrong:

White House Fool Report: Flashback to 2013

Ubungo Plaza Symbion Power Plant in Tanzania in July. The ball is a sOccket, which collects the kinetic energy expended in playing with it, and can then be used to charge an LED. Image via PopSugar.

Yesterday Nancy LeTourneau at Washington Monthly was summarizing Obama's diplomatic technique as it emerges from recent interviews he's given to Max Fisher, David Remnick, and Thomas "Mystax Mirabilis" Friedman:

Getting your paragraph right by staying true to your North Star, combined with the self-confidence to take calculated risks, creates openings that can lead to transformative change.

Decades from now we’ll be bearing the fruit of openings this President has made possible with that kind of wisdom.

Today she takes up the same theme with particular reference to the ongoing progress reported in last week's Times that may be leading to a resolution of the Syrian conflicts through rapprochements with Russia and Iran and the development of a pressure on Bashar al-Assad that Assad won't be able to resist (it won't push him, at least not immediately, out of government).

It strikes me that I had some ideas along these lines in something I wrote a couple of years ago about his governing style in general (applied to the then big issues of the Syria "Red Line" maneuvers and the nomination of a new Fed chair), suggesting it ought to be analogized to soccer rather than NFL football:

In soccer, nobody is an exclusively offensive player, or exclusively defensive either (even the goalkeeper puts the ball into play). Opportunities to score are extremely rare, and the players spend most of their time trying vainly to create them while preventing the opposition from doing the same. Opportunities for a set-piece score are rarer still; while the set-piece plays are lovely to watch and fascinating in the way they alter the situation, they generally fail, and most goals are driven through a hole in the configuration that just appears, seen by no one but the striker, and will disappear again almost instantly if it isn't caught: like the chance to shoot a coffee cup off the roof of someone's car from a train window. In football, if the commentator says, "Now for the field goal attempt," odds are about one to one that there will be a field goal attempt after the commercial break. In soccer, any such prediction would be as foolish as Dylan Byers.

It would be wrong to say that President Obama is playing 11-dimensional soccer; it would be more accurate to say he is playing an undetermined number of simultaneous soccer games taking place on a single field. Or three or four fields at most. He needs to set up the situations without knowing exactly what he is going to do with them when the time is ripe.

It was a pretty good piece! And clever in the discussion of Syria policy back then to foresee how it might reverberate into the kind of huge development in Iran that we have just been seeing, and which we now see may echo back to Syria.

The Ambassadors

Detail from Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors, 1533, copied by Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve.

From the Most Corrupt President Ever department:

You may have gotten an enjoyable giggle last week from Jon Stewart on some of the incompetents that President Obama has nominated to represent our country in the capitals of Hungary, Norway, and Argentina (among who knows how many others). But the reason we watch Stewart, you know, is that his comedy often provides a truer picture of what's happening than the Villagers do, and when you find him in agreement with the Washington Times, Fox, and an extremely purse-lipped Washington Post, that could be a sign that he's missed his bus and jumped into a cab share with a dangerous crowd.

Every US president naming the hundreds of ambassadors and ambassadorial officials that lead American foreign policy implementation all around the world nominates a [jump]