When will the show be cancelled?

 Even relatively apolitical Americans, I think, inevitably think of the president of the United States as a father.  In a sense this is true: any president has enormous responsibility for our well-being.  It can therefore be quite traumatic to see a profane, irresponsible, erratic man in the White House--someone who proudly announces from time to time that he can do anything and get away with it.  This last weekend was particularly difficult in this respect, but suddenly the crisis is over, and the denouement will, I suspect, help me cope a little more easily with the next two and half years of our national life.

Donald Trump actually told us all we need to know about his approach to foreign policy during his first term, in the crisis over North Korea's nuclear weapons program.  After some North Korean tests of missiles and potentially intercontinental ballistic missiles, he announced, "North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before."  Then, after an unprecedented summit with Kim Jong-Un produced a meaningless commitment, he declared the crisis over.  Eventually he added that the two leaders had fallen in love.  The playbook, as my wife has put it, came straight from a reality show script:  identify a problem, issue a horrifying threat, and then announce, without evidence, that the adversary had given in.  Over the last week we have seen a new episode of this long-running show.

Lost in the drama of threatened escalation and sudden cease fire yesterday was a very important New York Times story on the origins of the attack on Iran. On February 11, it turns out, Benjamin Netanyahu gave a long presentation arguing for war on Iran in the Situation Room of the White House, backed via zoom by a team of Israeli officials. His audience included President Trump, the White House Chief of Staff, the Secretaries of State and Defense,  the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the CIA Director, and the president's personal envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.  It did not include the Vice President or the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who were skeptical about such  a war. None of the American officials present were pushing for war with Iran at that moment.  Netanyahu argued that war could bring down the Islamic regime, and even showed pictures of possible opposition successors, including Reza Pahlavi, the would-be successor to is father the Shah.  In subsequent discussions, no senior American official backed that prediction, but none of them actually opposed the war either.  It seems to be a fixed rule of the Trump Administration that no one but the president can actually suggest what should be done in a given situation, perhaps to protect them from coming out on the wrong side, or to protect the president from ignoring good advice.  Trump began the war apparently hoping for regime change, but immediately began muddying the waters by declaring that the conflict was over without any sign of it, or that the Israeli assassination of various Iranian leaders had already changed the regime.

The enemy, however, turned out to have a say in the matter.  Just a few hits on ships in the Persian Gulf by missiles or drones shut down most of the traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.  I was reminded of a student of mine at the Naval War College, perhaps fifteen years ago, who had served on ships in that region. "They can close the strait any time," he said, "and there's nothing we can do about it."  I don't know if this is exactly what he had anticipated, but it turned out that the Iranians didn't have to put warships or even mines into the strait to shut down traffic.  This almost instantly created an economic crisis in some far-off lands, such as the Philippines, drove gas prices in the US to nearly $4 a gallon, and threatened a world-wide recession.  Iranian attacks on energy production across the Gulf made the situation even worse.  And it does seem that Iranian missile attacks on Israel and elsewhere were getting more effective, not less, and that allied stocks of anti-missile missiles were getting dangerously low.  The US meanwhile sent more ground troops to the region, threatening to seize Karg Island in the strait, the source of Iran's own oil exports--an extremely risky operation that would leave US forces in reach of Iranian firepower.

On Saturday, April 4, the president made the first of three historic posts:

"Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out - 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD! President DONALD J. TRUMP"

"A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!"

The next day he followed up with this:

"Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP"

And then, yesterday morning (Tuesday), came this:

"A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!"

The world held its breath for about twelve hours, when we learned that the government of Pakistan had brokered a deal for a two-week cease-fire involving Iran, Israel, and the US.  This morning our president struck a different note:

"Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE! The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all Military objectives, and are very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East. We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate. Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran, but a two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and consummated. On behalf of the United States of America, as President, and also representing the Countries of the Middle East, it is an Honor to have this Longterm problem close to resolution. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP"

I probably won't know for sure for some time, but I find it very difficult to believe that that agreement was actually negotiated during the day on Tuesday.  We know that Witkoff and Kushner had been negotiating for some time, and I strongly suspect that the outlines of the deal had been agreed to late last week before the flood of tweets began.  The downing of two American planes over Iran and the successful rescue mission may have delayed things as well.  Meanwhile, the three above tweets established a new narrative--that Trump's promise of drastic action had forced the Iranians to make peace.  We shall be hearing a lot more about that in weeks to come.

Turning to the reality of the situation, both sides apparently have submitted maximum peace programs, with the US demanding that Iran totally give up its nuclear program and its enriched uranium while Iran demands reparations for war damage and an end to sanctions.  Meanwhile, they do not even agree on what the truce means, with Iran arguing that it applies to Israeli action in Lebanon as well, while the Israeli government denies this. I suspect that the cease-fire will be extended indefinitely while both sides claim victory.  Vice President Vance, a leading administration skeptic about the war, now has to try to negotiate a real peace.  Certainly Iran, I think, has strengthened its international position by demonstrating how seriously it can harm the whole world economy.  I don't think that President Trump has raised his standing among the rest of the leaders of the world, and polls indicate that he has not impressed the American people, either.  I think he will be quick to threaten to resume the war, but very reluctant actually to do so.  It isn't easy to get a real sense of where the world and our place in it is going, because the president does such a remarkable job of keeping attention focused upon himself.  At that he has no peer.

I suggest that we all prepare for more episodes of the long-running drama, Donald Trump, Master of the Universe, Maker of all Peace.  Meanwhile I will close on a different note.  Joseph Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned in protest of the war, writing, "I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby."  For that he has been attacked for promoting an old "anti-Semitic trope" that Jews control the world.  It isn't clear that AIPAC and other pro-Israeli government American Jews directly pressured Trump to start this war during February, but the New York Times story absolutely confirms that Prime Minister Netanyahu did more than anyone else to talk Trump into undertaking it.  Truth, in my judgment, should be a legitimate defense against accusations of spreading anti-Semitic tropes.  Regarding Israel, Kent knew what he was talking about.

A Guest contribution

 I hesitate to write about the ongoing war.  It is very easy to speculate about how it will end in disaster, and very hard to know at this point how it will actually turn out.  I have begun an unrelated post, but meanwhile, here is an excellent article by Anatole Lieven of the Quincy Project on what this war is doing to the standing of the United States in the world.  It builds on what I said the week the war broek out.

My uncle, the prophet

 My uncle Henry Kaiser was born in 1911 and died in the late 1980s after a long career as a labor attorney.  He was the third of his 9 siblings to be born in the United States, not Ukraine, and the second, I believe, to attend college.  After graduating from Brooklyn College he attended the University of Wisconsin Law School--joining my father in Madison during his undergraduate degrees--even though their family, by that time, had fallen on hard economic times. He began his legal career before the war, working as a counsel for the American Federation of Labor, and was eventually drafted, becoming a civil affairs officer in France after D-Day.  In 1946 he argued the biggest case of his career before the Supreme Court: the contempt case against John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers, who had refused to return to work during a strike after a court issued an injunction that it had no legal right to issue.  During my college years I spent parts of two summers living in his house in Chevy Chase along with his wife and my two cousins.  We had a wonderful relationship and got to know each other very well.  He was, like me, something of a contrarian who reached his own opinions about everything.  Some of them differed significantly from the standard New Deal/Great Society views of my father and most of the people in his orbit.  I frequently argued with him, but I learned a lot.

To put it bluntly, Uncle Henry was never convinced that the vast expansion of the federal government's power over the economy had done more good than harm.  He was a brilliant negotiator and felt that the unions he represented, including the musicians and bakers' unions, could perfectly well work out their problems with management on their own.  He once volunteered that he did not think that the labor movement in the long run had benefited from the 1935 Wagner Act, which established a legal right to organize and set up the NLRB and the whole mechanism for securing government-recognized union recognition.  That was partly, he later elaborated, because in 1946 the Wagner Act had been amended in a very anti-union manner by the Taft Hartley Law, but also because he did not trust government interference.  He had seen the development of the whole network of Washington law firms and lobbyists who made so much money out of trying to bend government regulation to the interests of their clients.  And in the last decades of his life he became very concerned with changes in the legal profession more broadly, and by the growing tendency of institutions, including the government, to sue one another over almost everything.  The increasing corruption of administrative processes, he once said, might eventually tempt the American people to turn to a strongman.

I still do not think that my uncle was entirely right, because I think the New Deal did lasting good for the American people, and because I see no alternative to substantial bureaucratic authority in modern society.  Now however that most of the New Deal legacy is utterly dead--including its attempts to secure the rights of labor--I often find myself thinking that he had a point.  Such a moment occurred this morning when I opened this Wall Street Journal article about the fate of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice.  It revolves around 48-year old Mike Davis, a lawyer from Iowa with huge corporate clients who has the ear of the White House and some of the leading figures in the Justice Department.   Like Pete Hegseth, Davis apparently won Trump's heart by repeatedly defending him on cable news shows, in Davis's case after Trump was indicted for refusing to return classified documents he had taken to Mara Lago after 2021.He has been threatening the leaders of the Antitrust Division with ruin if they do not approve certain antitrust settlements, and has evidently driven the head of the division, Gail Slater, and two of her deputies, out of their jobs.  Davis denies this, but one of the deputies has sworn to it under oath. Davis has now filed suit to get that deputy, one Roger Alford, disbarred.  He has also used contacts with Trump and Attorney General Bondi to get a settlement for Live Nation, one of the nation's leading ticket brokers, that is much more favorable to them than what the antitrust division had proposed.

To put it another way, while the antitrust division was originally designed to stop monopolistic practices that cost consumers money and strangle competition, now its existence allows lawyers like Davis to make millions of dollars by using political influence to get its decisions overturned to favor their clients.  They couldn't have earned that money if we had no antitrust laws or antitrust enforcement.  That was exactly the kind of development that drove my uncle crazy.  Now, more than 35 years after his death, we see how much worse it could get.

I still find the impulse to create impartial bureaucracies to secure more economic justice for our citizens was a noble one, but Uncle Henry rightly recognized how easily it could be corrupted and turned into a new income stream for lawyers.  Like nearly everything else that President Trump is doing, this isn't an entirely new development by any means, but he and his team have pushed it to an entirely new level. There is no vaccine for this disease and there never will be, and the cure takes generations to find.  In the long run now law or constitution is stronger than human nature, and history remains a struggle between different parts of our brains.   

Farewell to another era

 In January 1917, two months after his re-election and three months before the United States entered the First World War, Woodrow Wilson gave a remarkable speech calling for peace.  Addressing the European powers, he warned prophetically that an imposed peace "forced upon the loser" would rest "as only upon quicksand."  The world needed "not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace." The United States, he said optimistically, would gladly take part in a new international organization designed to create a peaceful world.  These, he said, were the principles and policies "of every modern nation, of every enlightened community.  They are the principles of mankind and must prevail." The victorious powers did create a League of Nations at Versailles, but the United States Senate refused to ratify it after an ill Wilson refused to question any of its conditions.

Twenty years later, in October 1937, Franklin Roosevelt spoke in Chicago about the frightening world situation, including the Spanish civil war, in which Hitler and Mussolini were assisting General Franco, and the brutal Sino-Japanese war, which had just broken out. "The present reign of terror and lawlessness," he said, seriously threatened "the vey foundations of civilization. . . .Let no one imagine that America will escape.  There can be no stability or peace either within nations or between nations except under laws and moral standards adhered to by all.  International anarchy destroys every foundation for peace."  After the European war broke out in September 1939 he secured authorization to sell arms to France and Britain for similar reasons, and after France fell he asked for unlimited aid to Britain under the Lend-Lease Act.  And in August 1941 he met with Winston Churchill and issued the Atlantic Charter, which included two critical provisions:

"Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned;

"Third, 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."

Four months later, those principles, and a new commitment to form and join an international organization, became the US war aims in the Second  World War.

According to a quote which I have not been able to confirm, FDR--a man of extraordinary historical perspective--remarked late in the Second World War to Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, a staunch ally, that the new world they were helping to build would last for as long as anyone who had already been born was still alive.  That prediction has now come true, and the United States has taken the lead in the repudiation of the world that Wilson and FDR called for.  

Donald Trump and his administration are completing that destructive work, but it did not begin with them.  We took one big step in that direction, as it turned out, during the Vietnam War.  Having spent an entire decade writing a book on the origins of that war, I believe that our government undertook it in a sincere attempt to apply Wilson and FDR's principles as they had come to understand them, but the war itself rapidly appeared as a betrayal of those principles.  That in turn persuaded many members of two younger generations--who for generational reasons didn't need much persuading--that those principles had never been anything but a sham designed to conceal the real history of the United States, a history of genocide, slavery, and imperialism.  I was forcibly reminded of this yesterday listening to Glenn Loury's podcast, on which a Millennial historian, Daniel Bessner, echoed those views verbatim.  Equally importantly, under the George W. Bush administration, Boomer bureaucrats and politicians defined and implemented a new national security strategy based almost entirely on force, claiming the right forcibly to remove any hostile foreign government that sought to develop dangerous weapons or that oppressed its peoples.  That view was also very bluntly stated on the very same podcast by Larry Kotlikoff, an economist.  Only Andrew Day, a conservative Republican, argued that a lawless world would not be a safer one for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren.

The critics of a vision of a world ruled by impartial legal principles--like the many critics of the United States Constitution, about whom I will have more to say in a later post--have failed to understand human nature, and the role that ideals can play in the world.  The ideals both of the United Nations and the US Constitution are too just for real human beings consistently to live up to them, and cynics will always easily find debating points with which to discredit them. Similar feelings led Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, to decide by 1938 that British democracy was a sham and that a war between Britain and Germany would not be worth fighting.  But when that war broke out Orwell had a change of heart, which led him in 1941 to recast the whole question of ideals versus reality in his pamphlet, "The Lion and the Unicorn," in a passage referring to a key aspect of English political life.

"Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in ‘the law’ as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.

"It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. , . . Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.

"An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them. . . .The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape."

The whole enterprise of civilization, as Sigmund Freud realized, is a continuing struggle between different parts of the human brain, one of which can understand and seek to apply impartial principles to a nation or a world, and another simply dominated by primal emotions.  That it can never be entirely successful does not mean that we should give it up.  

The United States is now joining Russia as a danger to world civilization because our head of government has no respect for law and believes only in power.  He told the New York Times a few weeks ago that he is restrained only by "my own morality, my own mind," and they give him an unlimited right to reward friends and punish enemies, both at home and abroad. He appears to view the US military as his own personal force, which he can turn on any person whom he deems punishable with death.  He bragged about killing an Iranian general in his first term, and he is bragging about killing now. " We have unparalleled firepower, unlimited ammunition, and plenty of time," he posted yesterday.  "Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today. They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!"  No American president has ever used remotely comparable language in any previous war.

How has this happened?  Perhaps FDR's purported remark to Mackenzie King--which I still would like to confirm--tells us.  The two world wars persuaded the world of the need for international organizations to enforce international law, and for rules limiting war to self-defense.  The strategy and architecture of the Cold War as waged by the US was based upon defense, not offense, and the government cited deterrence, not destruction for its own sake, as the rationale for nuclear weapons.  Those generations of leaders had seen the consequences of full-scale international lawlessness.  The generations that have grown up since 1945 have not.  In in the United States, first under George W. Bush and now under Trump, and in Russia under Putin, they have arrogated to themselves the right to begin wars at their pleasure, counting on the superior militaries they built up during the Cold War to prevail.  China may do the same at any moment around Taiwan.  This is a terrible setback for civilization, but which seems to be part of the inevitable rhythm of history.

 

A journalistic breakthrough

 This story from 60 Minutes found its way onto my youtube feed this morning  It may be the most important story they have ever done.  It is about Havana Syndrome, the mysterious neurological ailment that has struck a number of Americans working for the government both overseas and at home.  Don't miss it.