Turkey Trot

 

Illustration via Quartz, April 2017.

I'll get to Trump in a minute, but first: imagine you're Vice President Joe Biden, August 2016, on an official visit to Turkey five or so weeks after the coup attempt in Turkey that July, and President Erdoğan gets you under a tree at some point and starts complaining about this state-owned bank, Halkbank, that the New York Southern District is investigating for evading US law by smuggling billions of dollars' worth of gold and other commodities into the sanctioned Islamic Republican of Iran—they've already indicted a guy, Reza Zarrab, and Erdoğan claims the whole thing is a hoax invented by his enemy the cult leader in Pennsylvania, and can Biden please get Obama to make it go away by firing the US attorney in the case, Preet Bharara, and the judge, and extradite the cult leader because he's the one who did the coup as well?

(It's also widely believed in a variety of places that the cleric in question, Fethullah Gulén, had in fact nothing to do with the coup, which Erdoğan has been using in the four years since as a kind of personal Reichstag Fire enabling him to move against all sorts of perceived enemies, depriving them of their livelihoods and public voices and jailing tens of thousands, and Erdoğan's regime has been credibly accused of a practice not at all distant from Vladimir Putin's or Donald Trump's of "post-truth politics".)

We know how Joe responded to the last bit, thanks to this big Times report by Eric Lipton and Benjamin Weiser, and also because the answer is publicly available: with a courteous, but firm no: Sorry man, but no can do:

My Vote Is a Precious Thing

 

Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, in the Washington Post:

In 2016, I never considered voting for Donald Trump. The Johnny-come-lately Republican and his nasty schoolyard jibes seemed to me the worst degradation of American politics.

Well, yes, though she didn't do anything to stop him from getting elected in 2016,

"[W]hile I will never vote for a Democrat in wolf’s clothing like Trump, I will also never vote for a candidate as dishonest, as rapacious, as Hillary Clinton," Pletka told Politico's Michael Crowley in an email. "My vote is a precious thing."

and started softening on him the weekend before Election Day, wriggling toward Just-the-Tip-Trumper status,

Donald Trump is probably going to lose the election Tuesday. For many Republicans and conservatives, that will be a blessed release from an annus horribilis. But we will make a fatal error going forward if we do not acknowledge what Trump got right and attempt to fix the problems that enabled his hostile takeover of the GOP.

Consider the Trump themes that resonated deeply with tens of millions of Americans: We don’t win anymore. We have no strategy to fight our enemies. Our allies aren’t paying enough freight. Defense cuts and feckless leadership are projecting American weakness. Trade deals help only some Americans. Washington doesn’t work. Separate the bill of particulars from Trump the person, and the reality is, these complaints make sense.

Funny, they hadn't made that much sense to her in June 2016, on the allies paying freight:

For the Record: Tough on China

 

Illustration by Javier Zarracina/Vox.

Rafael trying to come out plus trompiste que le Trompe:

All things he fought against

Whereas with the one thing he campaigned on https://t.co/dtYcVQLqiZ

— It's Just Soup For My Family (@Yastreblyansky) September 6, 2020

Seriously...

Voters, David Brooks doesn't like the way you smell

David F. Brooks in the presence of someone who's not conversant with the liberal international order. Via Medium.

Shorter David Brooks, "Voters, Your Foreign Policy Views Stink!", The New York Times, 13 June 2019:

The problem with foreign policy in America nowadays is the voters, who have never heard of the phrase "maintaining the liberal international order" and are therefore hostile to it, or at any rate hostile to the thing that they actually have heard of that is more or less the same thing, or else it's because they have for some reason that escapes me lost faith in human nature and human possibility and become, especially among the young, distrustful, alienated, and unwilling to get involved in the strange, hostile, outside world.  Therefore we need a leader who can grapple with failures like Iraq, build a younger leadership class, and embody optimism. Probably he should also be a member of a minority, a senator from a state like Illinois, and a talented writer, with experience living in a foreign country not in Europe.

Just making up that last sentence, of course: the Obama nostalgia is completely subliminal here, and real Brooks would be startled to hear himself accused of it. He's never been able to grasp that Obama has any actual original foreign policy views, if only because he can't imagine the possibility that anybody could come up with original foreign policy views after Wolfowitz or maybe Clausewitz or thereabouts or let's say after he got his Chicago BA. But he seems to have a dim awareness that once there was a moment when somebody grappled with the failure of Iraq for a while, and there were a bunch of foreign policy experts under 50, and something more than lip service was given to optimism, while the Republicans grimly kept their eyes averted from the unpleasant spectacle.

The remarkably childish headline is for real. What he's depressed about today is a new survey study:

Copernicus—Think of that!

Something very funky about that Krasinski Square setting, chosen, some thought, because it's a lot smaller than the Zamkowy Square where Obama addressed enraptured crowds in 2014, and easier to fill up with President Duda's bussed-in supporters. But looks a lot like a postmodern staging of a Wagner opera. Reuters photo via New York Daily News.

The Emperor discusses his plans for North Korea in response to its test of what seems to have been an ICBM that could carry a nuclear weapon to Alaska or Hawaii if they could make one small enough to fit it, which they apparently will one of these days if things go on the way they do:

“I have some pretty severe things we’re thinking about," Trump said at a news conference in Warsaw. "Doesn’t mean we’re going to do them. I don’t draw red lines."

"It’s a shame they’re behaving this way and they’re behaving in a very dangerous manner, and something will have to be done about it," Trump said.

He has no idea what he's doing because Mattis hasn't told him yet; perhaps the Secretary thought it would be more prudent to wait until after the Putin meeting, since, as we know, Trump can't be trusted to keep information to himself.

Also he thinks he doesn't draw red lines but he drew one just last week, the very same as the old Obama red line that he has mocked so much:

Semantics, how does it work?

Update: I'm as annoyed with NPR as ever on this, but the US position looks a lot better to me in the light of some neglected Yemen news.

The port of Aden, 1876, via Qatar National Library.

Bizarre exchange on NPR Thursday morning in reference to the Navy attack on missile installations held by "rebels" in Yemen that (very ineptly) attacked a US ship:

TOM BOWMAN: Well, there's a civil war going on in Yemen right now. The Houthi rebels are aligned with the former president of the country, fighting the current president. And the U.S. is providing support to Saudi Arabia, who's fighting to keep the current president in power. The U.S. is providing air refueling capability, intelligence capability as well. And they've refueled as many as 5,000 bombing flights over Yemen.

And a concern here, Renee, is that there have been a lot of civilians killed here in this effort to support the Saudis, as many as 4,000 civilians killed. And there was one incident last week where 140 civilians were killed at a funeral. So this is the first time the U.S. has actually been involved militarily here.

RENEE MONTAGNE: Right. I mean, that's a key here, that the U.S. is actively supporting these Saudi airstrikes. It's not a passive sort of support. And this funeral has really kicked up a big controversy there, a lot of resistance. What is that doing to - what kind of problem is that for the U.S.?

Where Bowman says the US has never previously been militarily involved, and Montagne agrees that, yes, we have been very seriously involved. And then Bowman comes back to say that in fact with this strike we are also not involved, disagreeing not so much with Montagne as, weirdly, with himself:

Whose side are you off?

Leaf from a Manichean book, 8th-9th c., from the ruins of Karakhoja in the Taklamakan, Xinjiang, Museum für Indische Kunst, Berlin, via Silk Road Seattle.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, tackles the tergiversations ("Our Russia Problem") on Russia policy of Republican presidential candidates over the past 16 years, from George W. Bush gazing enthusiastically into President Putin's soul through Willard Mitt Romney fighting the Soviet threat 30 years after its death to Donald Trump getting seduced by Putin's honeyed tongue. It just goes to show—what?—how incoherent the Democrats are:

Over the same period, Democrats have gone from mocking George W. Bush’s naïveté about Putin … to mocking Mitt Romney for describing Russia as America’s main geopolitical foe … to spinning theories about Trump being an agent of Russian influence that seem ripped from a right-wing periodical circa 1955.

Sorry, but Bush was ridiculously naïf at that point, though his administration eventually reached a more cautious approach.

Romney, too, was eminently mockable for calling Russia "the main geopolitical foe". It wasn't quite as bad as the way Douthat puts it, as if Romney was ignoring China or "radical Islamic terrorism" (say the magic words, Ross)—Romney was talking about Russian conduct in the UN Security Council, not geopolitics in general. But he was totally wrong about that: Russia was doing many things the US didn't like much, but the traditional Russian obstruction in the Security Council hardly existed any more, at all; in fact Russia was especially cooperative on the issues the US cared most about, Iran and North Korea. Obama's debate wisecrack was clearly justified:

Post Hawk Ergo Propter Hoc

I'm guessing this (from the January 2013 Senate Benghazi hearings, photo by Alex Wong/Getty North America) is more "In the second place..." than "Peace out!" but it does show her fingers know how to go there.

If you saw that cross-head in Mark Landler's book-promo excerpt (for Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle over American Power, being released from Penguin Random House today) in the Times Magazine—

—you might have started feeling a little panicky, and you wouldn't have been alone.

Though you also might want to just take a deep breath and ask yourself what it means, if Carpet-Bomber Cruz, who was still in the race last I heard, doesn't qualify as a hawk. Or John Kasich, who's called for a major US ground force in Syria. Or Donald J. Trump, who may claim (although he's demonstrably lying) to have opposed the war in Iraq back in 2002 but is eager to "bomb the shit" out of it now, and kill all the families of the ISIS fighters as well and send Exxon in to do the nation-building, and thinks Japan and South Korea and Saudi Arabia should have nuclear arsenals. True that Trump doesn't have a lot of respect for NATO, though neither did Donald Rumsfeld. But what's a "true" hawk?

Or you might want to look at the fine print—the part of the article known in the trade as "the article"—and see what that has to say about, for instance, her stance as opposed to that of President Obama:

Is Francis Berning?

Jeffrey Sachs in Toya, Mali, with school official Mahamadou Alamin. Photo by Sebastien Cailleux/Condé Nast, 2009.

Dr. Google and I stumbled into a couple of odd things while we were trying to figure out the Bernie-Bergoglio kerfuffle that seem, to me, to have some clarifying value, taken together.

1. Just a year ago, in April 2015, the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences held a Plenary Meeting on Human Trafficking: Issues beyond Criminalization, to which the development economist Jeffrey Sachs was invited, and later in the month a panel discussion on sustainable development with the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, as a result of which the chancellor of the Academy, Mgr. Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, took a certain amount of heat from conservative Catholics, on the grounds that both Dr. Sachs and Secretary General Ban are known supporters of abortion rights.

Including some heat at the conservative Catholic website First Things from Stefano Gennarini, Director of the Center for Legal Studies at the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam) in New York and Washington:

Turnaround

Image via Thai Food and Travel.

That's pretty startling:

Less than 24 hours after Senate Democrats blocked President Obama’s free trade push, leaders in both parties agreed Wednesday on a path toward granting the president accelerated authority to complete a major accord ringing the Pacific Ocean.

Brokered by Wyden and Schumer (I just got a letter from the BoldProgressives asking me to thank Schumer for his BoldProgressiveness in voting against the fast-track legislation, and he's already turning around to work for it), the deal is to allow a separate Senate vote on a bill to require the TPP to include provisions against currency manipulation (some economists I greatly respect say the lack of such provisions is the treaty's biggest flaw), allowing the anti-treaty Democrats and presumably Ron Paul to say they've done their best to stop it, so that the majority can then vote it in and the whole machine begin to roll. I think. Like a green mango, the news is not yet ripe enough to release its full perfume.

While later in the afternoon the House

Hard out there for a hegemon

Vladimir Lukich Borovikovsky, potrait of Anna and Varvara Gagarin, 1802.

Shorter Ross Douthat, "The Method to Obama's Middle East Mess", March 29 2015:

Guess what, Bush was wrong. Cheney was right. If you keep trying to stop killing people, somebody could get hurt. The only way to ensure world peace is perpetual war.

The Bush would be the George W. Bush of ca. 2006, who suddenly realized that allowing Cheney and Rumsfeld to run the government was making him unpopular and staged a bit of a palace coup, with the help of George H.W. Bush's CIA director Robert Gates and, no doubt, other veterans of the brief reign of George I, and the Monsignor is stepping out to take a position against the coup and for the not-so-ancien régime.

No, he doesn't say that. Indeed, he doesn't mention Bush or Cheney at all. But after a good deal of work, much too tedious to report, trying to figure out what he is talking about in this piece, I've decided that's all he can mean, with a column devoted to attacking the concept of "offshore balancing", something that has only been mentioned, as far as I can determine, three times in the history of the New York Times (each time by Ross Douthat, starting last July), as if it were at the center of an ongoing controversy.

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.

ISIS: Take a deep breath

House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the world's first university, founded by Caliph Harun al-Rashid toward the end of the 8th century. Can't find a credit or even a date (13th century?) for this beautiful piece.

What I think were the most important ISIS stories of the past week were not the terrifying or exciting ones, and they have not been getting the press attention they deserve. Both were at Juan Cole's place, and both examined points of view with which we are not so familiar in America, from the higher realms of the Iranian political establishment, and from the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

The first, on Friday, was Professor Cole's piecing together of evidence that Iran and the US are now allies in the battle against the self-described Caliphate—I mean, not just having a common enemy but actively working together; the US providing "extremely close" air support to the Iran-backed Shi'ite militias in Amerli, the US and Iranian air forces apparently informing each other of their strike plans so they don't accidentally bomb each other, and Ayatollah Khamenei having officially put his imprimatur on US-Iran military cooperation (Slate has picked up on this too), among other things.

Wut we need *moar* stupid?

A mysterious result of Googling "neoliberal kittens". From Radioactive Mongoose.

Teaser from Peter Beinart's new foreign policy piece in the Atlantic:

A new critique of the president's "don't do stupid shit" doctrine is emerging—and it's coming from within his own party.

Honest. Like that cowardly Obama, refusing to deploy the stupid-shit weapon, which has served us so well in the past.

Beinart sets up a left-right-'n'-center trichotomy of Obama criticism with a right represented by Senator McCain demanding that the administration do more bombing, and a left represented by Prosecutor Greenwald denouncing the Obama administration as a prolongation of the war-mad dictatorial Bush administration, just with different faces, with which thoughtful citizens can't negotiate at all, only groan "O tempora! O mores!" and go their weary ways. The center, in this picture, is what you might call the hipster faction, as in "you probably haven't heard of them yet":

Any fish bite if you got debate

Drones

Bob Schieffer actually did, contrary to all expectation, ask a drone question, but he asked Romney instead of Obama. Romney, sticking with his basic strategy for the evening, quickly agreed that Obama was right about whatever it was Romney didn't want to talk about and started talking about something else, how Iran is "four years closer to a nuclear weapon" etc. Obama was glad to pick up that baton and start running with it further away than ever. Oh well.

I don't understand why Obama doesn't mention that Iran is not "four years closer" to building a nuclear weapon—since they have converted a large proportion of their 20% enriched uranium to solid form, for use in the medical reactor, they are strictly speaking a good deal further away.

Kandahar airfield. Photo by GlobalPost vis PBS.

Geeky linguistic sidelight:

@mattyglesias had an issue during the debate that wasn't really about foreign policy:

Inconsistency between Obama's pronunciation of "Pakistan" and "Afghanistan" always drives me nuts.
— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 23, 2012

That used to bother me too, the way he says the heavy vowels in "Pakistan" the way they say can't in the UK and in "Afghanistan" the way we say can't in the US—until I heard myself doing pretty much the same thing.

Now I think I know what it's about. "Pakistan" is a relatively new word, coming into general use only after the country itself came into existence in 1947; "Afghanistan" is an older one, known to English speakers since maybe the mid-18th century (first official UK use was 1801). So it's had time to evolve a universal English pronunciation whereas "Pakistan" has not. I imagine younger people like Matty (that's what his Twitter address always makes me think of, "Matty Glesias") are more likely to pronounce the two the same way. Just as my grandmother used to pronounce "endive" in French—it was still an exotic vegetable to her, but to me it sounded hysterically bourgeois.

The afghan Emir Sher Ali Khan with his "friends" Russia and Great Britain. Punch, November 30, 1878

Route to the sea

Romney earned a lot of laughs with his strange concept of Middle East geography:

Syria is Iran's only ally in the Arab world. It's their route to the sea. It's the route for them to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon, which threatens, of course, our ally Israel. And so seeing Syria remove Assad is a very high priority for us. Number two, seeing a — a replacement government being responsible people is critical for us. And finally, we don't want to have military involvement there. We don't want to get drawn into a military conflict. (Transcript from NPR)

First, of course, Iran doesn't need a route to the sea, since it has plenty of coastline of its own; and secondly Syria is not its route to anywhere, on account of the countries between the two, Iraq and Turkey.

However, in Romney's defense, he's not the only one: a lot of highly respectable people believe this without being aware that they believe it: those who discuss how Iran supplies the Hezbollah militia with arms. I used to wonder a lot about this, during the Iraq war, every time I'd see a story about it: how did they get the stuff across Iraq, when Iraq was occupied by US troops?

Duh. That's the answer. Iraqis allow them to, and the US can't do anything about it (the administration has been entreating Maliki to close the air corridor, without success). It is because of the Iraq war that Iran is able to send arms to Syria and Lebanon. Iran did not have a route to the Mediterranean, but George W. Bush gave them one. One of his many little gifts.

The Mechanics of Destruction cartoon series, by Vincent Kelly (I'm pretty sure Gideon is UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, but it was mainly the headline and the woman I liked)