The Neocon President and the New World

 We awakened this morning to find that the United States has begun an unlimited war against the Iranian regime.  I use "unlimited" in the sense that I learned to use it in the Strategy and Policy Department of the Naval War College:  a war, in Clausewitz's words, "to overthrow the enemy--to render him politically helpless or militarily impotent, thus forcing him to accept any peace we please."  Woodenly reading his speech while wearing a baseball cap and forsaking a tie, the president promised death to any member of the Iranian security forces that resists the United States.  American forces reportedly already attempted to kill the regime's leaders.  This operation obviously will redefine the Trump presidency and may easily reshape the whole world, but like so much of what has happened under Trump, it has deep generational roots.   It vindicates his exact contemporary George W. Bush, resuming the policy and strategy which Bush announced and implemented in 2002-3, and which his successors never actually redefined or abandoned.

The Bush Administration featured neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, and Dick Cheney, who had drawn particular conclusions from the fall of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Nothing, Wolfowitz had argued in an infamous memo during the first administration, should now stand in the way of the worldwide hegemony of the United States.  The USSR's fall had left hostile states like Iraq and North Korea without a patron, and the United States must now take the opportunity to remove their governments by force before a new peer competitor emerged to support them.  Wolfowitz's view never prevailed under Bush I, which wisely ended the first Gulf War without going to Baghdad, but the Bush II administration immediately embodied it in their National Security Strategy.  That document reserved a US right to overthrow any hostile regime that in our view threatened to acquire nuclear weapons.  The administration immediately implemented it when it went to war with Iraq, and a friend of mine once heard Bolton declare that it would deal similarly with Iran and North Korea when the Iraq war was over.  When that war turned out to be a fiasco, such plans went onto the back burner.  They have now been revived.  If my contemporary and friend Bill Strauss had lived to see this, I am sure that he would have said that this was where our  Boom generation had always been heading.

The Obama Administration never really decided whether it was adopting a different national security strategy or not.  It did temporarily end our involvement in Iraq, although it intervened there once again when ISIS took control of much of the country. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton adopted the neocon playbook when a Libyan revolt threatened Muhammar Qadaffi, using military force to remove him as well, and plunging yet another Middle Eastern nation into chaos.  Her successor John Kerry, however--like me, the son of a professional diplomat--took a different path on Iran, reaching an agreement that would keep its nuclear program within peaceful bounds.  Kerry and Obama did not however try to re-establish formal diplomatic relations with Iran or really sell the American people on a new policy. Prodded by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the entire Republican Party lined up against the agreement, and Donald Trump denounced it during his first term.

Trump has now concluded an informal offensive and defensive alliance with the Israeli government and is waging joint war on Iran a second time, this time with the explicit goal of bringing down the government, just as the Bush II administration had hoped to do.  Trump's foreign policy consists of  using every economic, political and military asset at his disposal either to destroy regimes he deems hostile or make them submit to his will.  In Venezuela he believes that he has successfully intimidated a new political leader by kidnapping the old one and bringing him to the United States.  In Iran--a nation of 93 million people--he believes that a combination of bombs and an Iranian revolt can topple a well-organized totalitarian regime.  I don't think anyone really has any idea of what the outcome of this operation will be in Iran.  

Trump meanwhile has transformed the presidency into a foreign policy dictatorship.  He made no pretense of seeking authority for this big new war, and implicitly claimed a right to begin war against any nation that in his view threatens the United States.  Such a broad grant of authority was in fact built into the resolution the Congress passed after 9/11, that fateful day, which has never been repealed.  Trump is also indulging a fantasy that the US Air Force has been promoting for at least three decades, that targeted air strikes can bring down a whole modern regime.  He is discounting Iran's ability to retaliate against US assets in the Middle East, against our allies there, and even, possibly, within the United States itself. 

Most importantly of all, Trump is following in the footsteps of Vladimir Putin, overthrowing what is left of the twentieth century dream of a world ruled by law rather than force. In the Atlantic Charter of August 14, 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill proclaimed on behalf of their governments, " they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them."  Like some provisions of the US constitution, those noble words immediately began struggling with human ambition and greed, and the United States has honored them in both the observance and the breech many times in the last eight decades.  Now an American president claims the right to dispose of the government or sovereignty of any nation that he chooses.  And hanging over us now is the possibility of a Chinese attack on Taiwan.  According to press reports, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Caine, warned the president that a war against Iran would leave us without the resources to meet our commitments elsewhere.  Our chances of saving Taiwan have been questionable for a long time, and now a very large portion of our navy is tied up in the Middle East.  Leaving behind the post-Second World War dream of a more peaceful world--a dream also nurtured by presidents like Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush--we are now on the verge of the world Orwell described in 1984, when three authoritarian regimes, Oceana, Eurasia, and East Asia, rule their own spheres.  That, apparently, is where history has been heading since the fall of Communism in 1989.                                                                                       

Correcting Coleman Hughes

 It was about five years ago, I think, that I discovered Coleman Hughes, a very heterodox Columbia graduate who was then podcasting independently.  In 2023 I was at one point booked to appear on his show to talk about States of the Union, but he apparently decided to take a break from podcasting and that never happened.  Coleman, who I believe will turn 29 or 30 this year, isn't afraid of anyone, sees pretty clearly, and in his public persona, at least, always stays on a very even keel.  Some time ago he started podcasting regularly on The Free Press.  I initially regarded him as an anti-woke center leftist like myself.  He is no Trump administration supporter, but he has moved significantly to the right, most notably regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  

Over the weekend I heard him interview a novelist named Lionel Shriver about her new novel, which deals with the issue of immigration.  She believes that we have gone on with open borders for too long and she also believes that we should limit immigration from some parts of the world--particularly Muslim parts.  I agree about open borders but I don't think I agree about Muslims, but that is another story.   I was brought up short when they began talking about the birthright citizenship clause of the Constitution. Both of them agreed that it was put in solely because of slavery, and that it shouldn't be applicable to anyone who happens to be born here, whatever their legal status.  I was appalled to hear this, and I just went to The Free Press to try to explain why in a comment on the post. I found that the comments will be closed, so I am putting my comments here and hoping that Coleman, or a producer of his, has a google alert for his name that will bring this post to his attention.

The 14th Amendment was passed to deal with the aftermath of slavery, but it did not introduce the concept of birthright citizenship to American law.  Birthright citizenship was English common law and the American republic used it from the beginning.  To verify this--I had already looked into it--I asked one of the ultimate authorities, Google AI, "Didn't the US government recognize birthright citizenship before the 14th amendment was passed?"  Here is the answer.

Yes, birthright citizenship existed as an established legal principle in the United States well before the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. The amendment primarily codified and protected a rule that had already prevailed in American law for decades. 

Recognition Prior to the 14th Amendment

Before 1868, the U.S. government recognized birthright citizenship through several mechanisms: 

English Common Law (Jus Soli): Early U.S. law adopted the British principle of jus soli ("right of the soil"), which held that anyone born within the nation's territory and allegiance was a citizen.

Judicial Rulings: In the 1844 case Lynch v. Clarke, a New York court ruled that a child born in the U.S. to temporary alien visitors was a natural-born citizen under the common law.

Federal Assumptions: Early Supreme Court cases, such as Murray v. The Charming Betsy (1804), assumed that persons born in the U.S. were citizens.

 They might have gone further than that.  The Constitution states that any "natural born citizen" is eligible to become president of the US.  English law had clearly defined "natural born subject." The great jurist Blackstone wrote, "Natural-born subjects are such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England," as well as children of subjects born overseas.

Like Justice Scalia's Heller decision on gun control, a Supreme Court decision to redefine birthright citizenship would reverse precedents going back beyond the founding of our republic.  

The End of an Era

 My book American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War(2000) had two endings, a narrative ending and a much more reflective epilogue.  The narrative concluded with LBJ's press conference of July 28, 1965, in which he announced the beginning of increasing ground troop deployments to South Vietnam.  I then wrote these last paragraphs.

"In the same press conference, Johnson announced his choice of Abe Fortas for the Supreme Court.  Two days later, on July 30, he signed the Medicare Bill in Independence, Missouri, and presented former President Truman with Medicare Card no. 1. The Congress would soon pass the Voting Rights Act and a huge Education Bill.  Johnson had a 65 percent approval rating.  The Gemini program, the next step on the way to the moon, had just completed a spectacular mission, including a spacewalk.  The economy had been steadily expanding for four years and five months. Unemployment was 5 percent; annual inflation was less than one percent.  The deficit for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1965 was $3.8 billion (less than $20 billion even in 1997 dollars).  One dollar bought four Deutschmarks and 360 Japanese yen.  The Interstate Highway System was well on its way to completion.  The Sound of Music was the most popular movie of the year. American colleges, with the sole exception of the University of California at Berkeley, were full of well-dressed, industrious, and obedient undergraduates, and in January, in a cover story on the Palisades, California high school class of 1965, Time had announced that American youth seemed to be on the verge of a new golden age.

"No one knew that a whole era of American history was over."

The era that came to an end had combined a series of extraordinary national achievements--such as the space program and the Interstate Highway System--with a remarkable expansion of the role of the federal government (Medicare) and decisive, unprecedented progress in civil rights (the  Voting Rights Act).  It was also an era of fiscal discipline, US industrial dominance, and careful macroeconomic planning, creating perhaps the most rapid broad-based economic progress in US history.  And it was a socially conservative era in which men, women, children and  young adults all knew their roles.  Within ten years, things had turned decisively in a different direction, and they have kept going in a different direction ever since.

 Two events last week, combined with other only slightly less recent ones, leave no doubt that we have left other aspects of earlier eras completely behind.

The first such event was the end of the START  treaty, the last of a series of agreements between the US and the USSR--later replaced by Russia--to contain their nuclear arsenals within recognized limits.  The two nations had always struggled to keep that effort alive, and it suffered a major blow when the George W. Bush Administration denounced the treaty banning anti-ballistic missiles so as to pursue Star Wars.  It had allowed both the US and Russia to make huge reductions in their nuclear arsenals, but both sides have continued to upgrade some of their capabilities, and now they can do so without limit.  President Trump claims to want a new agreement including China, but such a pact surely would have been easier to bring about if Russia and the United States had stuck to the old one.  Meanwhile, Trump's obvious aversion to the NATO alliance is forcing other NATO nations to think about developing new nuclear capabilities of their own.  The generations that lived through the invention and detonation of nuclear weapons recognized an obligation to try to get that genie back into the bottle. Today's leaders, who grew up in the relatively secure world that our parents left us, do not.

The second equally striking example was the president's announcement that the EPA is withdrawing the finding that greenhouse gasses threaten public health, thus invalidating the basis on which the agency has tried to regulate the use of fossil fuels.  Even fuel economy standards for cars are going to lapse, and Trump is waging a war on alternative energy sources, which now threaten the fossil fuel industry because they have become cheaper.  That looks to me like the end of attempts to combine science and the power of the federal government to regulate the economy for the common good.  Once again, a clear-eyed look finds evidence that no administration had ever established a clear legal basis for regulating the burning of petroleum and coal.  The original Clean  Air Act did not mention them, and Congress apparently has never passed a law defining climate change as a threat.  Now it looks as if climate change is simply something that we shall have to live with, because industry has won a decisive victory over attempts to regulate it for the common good.  We have already lost the same battle with respect to the financial sector, going back to the 1980s.  

And last but not least, our political climate has changed beyond recognition.  The founders of our nation believed that only a virtuous citizenry could make a republic work.  They believed that our heads must rule our hearts--a problem movingly addressed in private by one of their most distinguished members, Thomas Jefferson, in a love letter to a married woman.  These beliefs later led Jefferson, who took office at a moment of partisan conflict every bit as intense as our own, one that had nearly brought the young republic down, to announce in his first inaugural, "We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans."  Now instead we have a president without any emotional restraint of any kind, who explicitly denies any restraints upon his own behavior, and who--along with the rest of his administration--treats the entire opposition party as treacherous, dangerous, worthless scum, whose power must be eliminated by any means necessary.  One would search the archives in vain for another cabinet member's appearance before a congressional committee that would rival Attorney General Bondi's display before the House last week.  It made a mockery of the oversight process that is one of the foundations of our government.  In the meantime, she has joyfully embraced her assigned mission of making criminal cases, however weak, against anyone who has offended her boss.  So far federal judges and a grand jury have managed to stand in the way. There will be more tests. 

And unfortunately, the same spirit of partisanship and a similar disregard for facts has infected the opposition as well as the government.  Again and again I have read that the administration's attempts to place new restrictions on voting are illegal because the Constitution gives all power over the administration of elections to the states.  That is not true.  The relevant clause of the Constitution, which everyone seems too lazy to search for on google, states, "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chasing Senators."  The ultimate authority rests with Congress. That of course, isn't enough to satisfy President Trump, who won't wait for Congress.  He has just announced that he will issue an executive order changing the rules for voting.  I also believe that the Democratic Party's knee-jerk opposition to any new voter ID laws is a mistake, both politically and on the merits.  Polls show that very large majorities of Americans support them, and there is no reason to oppose them so long as they are coupled with provisions that make the necessary IDs easy enough to get.  Indeed, it is noteworthy that despite  endless hand-wringing among Democrats about "voter suppression," I am not aware of any accusations of Republicans having actually stopped anyone from voting in the election of 2024.   The real problem is to prevent the current administration from getting control of counting the votes.  The Justice Department has seized all the 2020 ballots from Fulton County in Georgia and may use them to make a fraudulent case for voter fraud there.

Perhaps the most striking feature of our new era is the eclipse of the printed word.  The invention of radio does not seem to have hurt the printed word, perhaps because it simply read from scripts.  But the invention of television, which did provoke some alarm when it first appeared, has been a completely different matter. Images began to replace words as means of communication, and now we all have exactly the images we want to see at the touch of a fingertip.  The whole habit of reading, thinking, and concluding, which made the formation of our nation possible, has been lost among most of our citizens.  

I must again remind my valued readers of why I write these posts.  I do not do so because I think I or any of my readers can do anything to stop these trends in the world at large.  The trends are too big, and great historians, as I often say, do not argue with history.  Yet there are those among us who still enjoy using our brains to put things in context, and to use history and commentary for the purpose Dr. Johnson ascribed to literature: better to enjoy life, and better to endure it.  And to paraphrase my other mentor Orwell, the earth is still going around the sun, and neither the ideologues nor the bureaucrats will ever be able to stop it.  Their time shall pass.

A Blast from the Past

 It was nearly twenty-four years ago that I published this piece in the Boston Globe.  I think it has held up pretty well.

MIDEAST

Utterly at odds

As a new generation of leaders takes charge, the pragmatic lessons of the past are being lost, replaced by visions of a dogmatic future

By David Kaiser, 4/28/2002

From 1820 to 1860, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and other children of the early American Republic kept the slavery controversy under control and preserved the Union. Why their offspring failed to do so is not easily answered.

At 140 years' distance, neither the Southern states' determination to secede in 1860-61 nor the Northerners' decision to bring them forcibly back into the Union seems entirely logical. Newly elected President Abraham Lincoln opposed any further extension of slavery but denied any intention to disturb it where it existed. Why, therefore, should the Southern leadership have abandoned the Union? Why, on the other hand, should the North, which included only a minority of real abolitionists, have tried to preserve it?

In the same way, outsiders today assume that both Israelis and Palestinians have nothing to gain and much to lose from prolonging and deepening their armed conflict. This supposedly logical view, however, misses the point. Like the Civil War in 1861, the Israeli-Palestinian struggle does not relate to the present. IT, too, is about two parties' utterly irreconcilable ideas of the future and reflects the rise of new generations of leaders who have no commitment to or faith in the arrangements under which they have grown up. They are willing to risk their future and their children's lives to try to turn their ideas into reality.

By 1860, the white Southern leadership - composed exclusively of men far too young to have any memories of the American Revolution or the adoption of the Constitution - believed in slavery as a positive good, one that needed not only to be maintained, but extended - first into the Southwest, and later into Mexico and around the Caribbean (where it had already been abolished). (The postwar myth that states' rights, rather than slavery, caused the war grew naturally from the bad conscience of a defeated elite, but the secessionists themselves made it very clear at the same time that they fought the war for the sake of slavery.) Lincoln and the Republicans, meanwhile, argued that slavery would die out if it could be kept roughly within its original limits, as some of the Founding Fathers had hoped, but they also decided that slavery threatened the expansion and survival of free labor and free institutions.

When the South seceded, Lincoln initially defined the unrest as a test of democratic institutions, of whether a freely elected government could defeat a rebellion. After 18 months of indecisive conflict he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation and turned the war into an all-out moral crusade. No foreign intervention could have dissuaded either side from fighting the war to the finish.

The goals of the Israelis and Palestinians are equally irreconcilable. In 2000, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians now living in the West Bank and Gaza the right to manage their own affairs - hedged by a vastly restricted but continuing Israeli presence - but insisted that they accept this as the maximum that they would ever receive. Ariel Sharon, the current prime minister, who fought briefly in Israel's war of independence, might have offered them a smaller state under similar conditions.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who is old enough to remember the initial Palestinian expulsion from what is now Israel and who has spent his whole adult life dealing with its consequences, might have wanted to accept some such deal, but the increasingly influential generation of middle-aged Palestinians who have spent their whole lives under foreign rule and their adulthood under Israeli occupation will not. Whatever their ultimate goal - and for many it remains the destruction of Israel itself - they now insist upon a complete and irrevocable withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlements from the territory occupied in 1967, and the right completely to control their own state. This includes the right to readmit millions of refugees, to build their own military power, and eventually perhaps to engage Israel in a new conflict.

Three generations of Palestinians have now been born in exile, and the third generation displays nearly every day its willingness to die for its parents' ideals. The Palestinian leadership will not stop terror until it is promised a full and irrevocable Israeli withdrawal from the territories. There is not the slightest indication that any successor to Arafat would be more moderate than he.

Israelis of all political persuasions now understand these goals and are revising their own views accordingly. This is why Sharon is going to insist - as he told New York Times columnist William Safire recently - not merely on keeping some of the territory occupied in 1967, but on controlling the border between Palestine and Jordan. Sharon's most likely successor is Benjamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister who was born after the war of independence and who has shown even less interest in the rights of the Palestinians. And a majority of Israelis now regard the creation of an armed Palestinian authority as a serious mistake.

Recently the Israeli historian Benny Morris - author of ''Righteous Victims,'' an extraordinarily evenhanded treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the 20th century and previously a critic of the occupation of the West Bank - declared publicly that compromise has become impossible. Either Palestine will become an Arab state with a rapidly diminishing Jewish minority, he wrote, or Greater Israel will become a Jewish state with a very small Arab minority. A recent poll found 40 percent of Israelis surveyed favoring expulsion of the Palestinians.

Some historians are beginning to focus upon 80-year cycles in American and world history, and to understand how the outcome of one cycle - the crisis that creates a new political order - ultimately creates the basis for new conflicts that come to a head when a postwar generation has grown up. In the United States the founding of a Republic divided by the issue of slavery in 1788 eventually made the Civil War inevitable. The outcome of that war, in which the North reestablished the Union but eventually allowed the ex-Confederates to maintain white supremacy, laid the foundation for the civil rights struggles that began in the 1950s.

On another front, for the last 20 years a new generation of Republicans and corporations has been waging an increasingly strident and effective campaign against most of the achievements of Roosevelt's New Deal, including labor unions, limits on economic inequality, and even Social Security. In the same way, the struggle in the 1930s and '40s to create Israel - which succeeded partly because of the Holocaust in World War II - has created the conflict with the Palestinians.

In the last 10 years, we witnessed the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union - all creations of the First World War that had lasted 75-80 years. The next 20 years will see the disintegration - or at least the transformation - of many of the national and international beliefs and institutions that the Depression and the Second World War created in the United States, Western Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East.

The prestige the United States secured as the victor in the Second World War and the founder of the post-1945 world order will mean very little in a world in which no one any longer remembers those events. The baby boom generation - which in the late 1960s first mounted an intellectual challenge to their parents' world - will have to build a new one to put in its place, and history does not guarantee that it will be a better one.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not, alas, the last one of the post-1945 era to be resolved. Instead, it is the first great conflict of a new era that will discard many of the beliefs of the second half of the 20th century and leave behind the stable, comfortable, and equitable world that our grandparents and parents created in which middle-aged Americans have spent their entire lives.

The Next Three Years

 Senator Joseph McCarthy ( in office 1947-57) had a great deal in common with Donald Trump, but no one remotely like Trump has never served as president before.  Yes, Richard Nixon's interior world resembled Trump's quite closely, but Nixon knew that he had to be a completely different person in public in order to be elected--and when Watergate revealed important things about his interior world, he had to leave office.  That Trump was ever nominated by a major party three times, much less elected twice, illustrates the bankruptcy of our political life.  His personality includes some contradictory aspects, I think, and that has made him very hard to interpret from the beginning.  We have learned a lot over the last year--the first year of an unfettered Trump presidency--and I am going to make some very tentative observations about where we seem to be going.

Trump obviously sees the world as a hostile environment in which no one can be trusted.  He also sees himself as the smartest and most entitled person who ever lived.  He has evidently managed people all his life with what is called "intermittent reinforcement," that is, praising them one day and excoriating the next.  Just a few days ago he described the "very good call" that he had with Governor Walz of Minnesota, but this morning he declares that “'Governor' Waltz is either the most CORRUPT government official in history, or the most INCOMPETENT."  He routinely abuses members of the Democratic Party, any Republican who dares to disagree with him, and any world leader who won't do what he wants.  Having made an entire business career out of successfully redefining failure as success, he continually redefines reality on issues from inflation to the trade balance to crime.  Because he is president, no one has the courage to question all his misstatements--not, I think, because they fear retaliation, but because it's too frightening to admit how clueless he seems to be, since he still holds our fate in his hands.   Accounts of Trump's career indicate that he has always used any weapon at his disposal against anyone who stands in his way, and now those weapons include the Justice Department, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the entire US military establishment, all of which are led by men and women entirely devoted to doing his bidding.

The confusing aspect of Trump's personality is this:  when things do not go his way, he uses the strategy that Senator George Aiken of Vermont suggested for the Vietnam War: he declares victory and takes his toys home.  That is how he used to argue for his financial wizardry in the face of repeated bankruptcies, and that is how he now declares that crime has been eliminated from the city of Washington, D.C., and that manufacturing is booming again in the United States.  I recently read a Wall Street Journal article that quoted an observer characterizing him as the greatest reality tv producer of all time, and that observation had some truth, but as I survey both the foreign and domestic situations today, I see little chance that that tactic is going to alter certain key situations fundamentally.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rightly pointed out in Davos that Trump has revolutionized world politics. "Today," he says, "I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints."  He merely confirmed what Trump had said himself, that "my own morality" is the only restraint he recognizes in foreign affairs.  Secretary of State Rubio confirmed that before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when he argued that the president was free to take any military action that it deemed "in its national interest," which of course Trump will judge. Trump has just used the American military to remove a hostile head of government in Venezuela and take over that country's enormous oil reserves.  He could easily solve any real security problems involving Greenland within the NATO framework, which allowed the US to create about a dozen bases there during the Cold War, but he instead threatened to take it by force.  He has now sent an "armada" (a word which I hope will not come back to haunt him--see 1588) to Iran, apparently to force some kind of drastic change there.  He threatens and imposes tariffs even in retaliation for domestic steps that foreign governments take that he does not like.  Yes, he did retreat over Greenland, but that was obviously a tactical retreat rather than a real change in world view, as the Iranian adventure proves.  The formation of his Council of Peace, with himself as chairman, suggests that he sees himself as a one-man UN.  Two US presidents, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, played critical roles in attempting to set up  a durable world order based on international institutions enforcing, or at least promoting, impartial rules among nations.  Trump has completely repudiated their legacy.  He rejects any impartial rules and all international institutions.

We also saw Trump reverse course rhetorically regarding the anti-immigration operation in Minneapolis last week after ICE agents killed a second American citizen for no reason, but I expect this to be temporary as well.  His team, led in this case by Stephen Miller, has two goals: to remove several million illegal aliens from the country by any means necessary, and to take steps to crush the active opposition of state governments, local governments, and the hundreds of thousands of US citizens--perhaps millions--who are willing to take to the streets to stop ICE operations.  And while I know many people may not want to hear this, on this point, they are on relatively firm ground.  Our failure to pass laws to legalize the status of men and women who came here without legal permission and who have become functioning parts of their communities is another illustration of the bankruptcy of our politics, one I deeply regret.  Under current law, however, the government has the right to deport these people, and under constitutional precedents going back to 1861 and reaffirmed during the civil rights era, state and local governments have no right to oppose the federal government or pursue an opposite policy, and private citizens' right to protest does not extend to a right to obstruct.  We are headed for a reckoning between left wing Americans who believe, as my contemporaries did 60 years ago, that the rightness of their cause justifies anything, and a hostile federal government.  That reckoning can very easily involve the resort to the Insurrection Act that Trump has threatened and it could conceivably involve the suspension of habeas corpus, allowed in the Constitution in times of "invasion or rebellion," both of which Trump has declared to exist.  The Constitution does seem to reserve the right of suspension for the Congress, but Trump, like Lincoln in 1861, might certainly do it without asking.  The two shootings in Minneapolis are parallel to what happened at Kent State in May 1970, when a National Guard commander, after many hours of taunting and rock-throwing by students, opened his troops to open fire.  ICE may back down temporarily here and there as the months go by, but I will be amazed if their operations cease.

Trump's Justice Department, meanwhile, is spending enormous time and energy on his personal grievances, attempting, it seems, to prove that election fraud really did take place in Georgia (and perhaps elsewhere) in 2020.  That I think will turn out to be a political mistake.  Governor Kemp of Georgia favored Trump in 2020, but he valued his state's right to count its own votes more highly, and I don't think any Georgians appreciate being called crooks or dupes of the Democratic Party.  But Trump is dedicated to this cause, and there is evidence that the government might be preparing some kind of gigantic conspiracy case against Barack Obama, James Comey, John Brennan, and many others for trying to steal the 2016 election by falsely discrediting Trump.  The president has said repeatedly that these men belong in jail, and his Justice Department obviously regards his word as law.

In the last week we have seen some evidence that Republicans in Congress might join with Democrats to restrain the immigration crackdown, and they avoided a government shutdown by promising to consider restrictions on ICE.  That is a hopeful sign.  Meanwhile, Trump's proclamations of "the greatest economy ever" clearly are not persuading the bulk of the American people, and there is a very good chance of Democrats taking over at least the House this fall.  Trump has declared that their victory would be catastrophic and we don't know what he could or would do to try to prevent it.  If it happens, however, we will probably have more chaos--including more failed impeachments.  The other possible restraint comes, of course, from the 25th amendment, but I think things would have to get much much worse before Trump's cabinet would declare him unfit to rule.

Certain therapeutic schools use the concept of "thriving on chaos" to describe people whose early traumas lead them to seek out chaotic situations in which they have come to feel comfortable.  I did not realize until just now that the save phrase was the title of a management handbook published in 1987, more or less at the peak of Trump's real estate career.  That is one book he might have bothered to read, and it would have confirmed his worst instincts.  The president remains the father of our national family, and it is terrifying for children to know that their fate depends on a person like that.  As Carney's speech shows, the rest of the world, who can see Trump as a distance, probably has a better grasp on what the situation portends than we do.  Other great powers may decide to take advantage of the increasing chaos we face at home.  Eventually we will return to a focus on order.