Alexis, I appreciate your thoughtful and candid response to my comment. However, from my seat on the sidelines, and opinions gathered from reading and discussing, rather than embedded in the diplomatic field of action, I still find it very hard to accept the defense of US foreign policy actions on a great many fronts. I have to believe that in this dialectic we would ultimately reach consensus, as admittedly, below I am cherry-picking particularly egregious examples of errant U.S. foreign policy from my small purview, and perhaps I err in assuming (heavy on the "ass" part) that these examples prove the rule; whereas you can draw from a hundred examples of U.S. policy makers doing yeoman's work in providing meaningful foreign aid to a host of nations, and specific groups of people within them. Be that as it may, when you mention being engaged in Nicaraguan politics during the Sandinista movement, can't we agree on that being a clear example of the U.S. promoting all of the wrong motives, and actors in the Somoza regime? The nefarious methods used, and our goals just cannot be justified as "complicated politics," not the bloody Contras, and the attempt to return power to the dictatorial Somozas! And what about our holding the people of Guatemala down for long decades, the motive being cheap bananas?! As another example of US foreign policy run amok, can we justify the toppling of Mosaddegh in Iran? And for what, to allow the Brits, and us (?) to continue extracting the natural petroleum resource wealth of that nation, while paying them a criminally small pittance?! That example seems every bit as much of a bald-faced, even openly admitted, piece of evil work as anything trump has yet perpetrated abroad. I am inspired by another of your reader's comments (Ira Genium) to state that the path to trump was a green brick road constructed by a host of former bad policy makers down through the ages.
Above are three examples, admittedly from the past, but how could we justify our actions in propping up Israel at the expense of the Palestinians--right through to very modern times? I believe our foreign, and increasingly our domestic policies, are hamstrung by power hunger, and the ethos of the profit margin, driving corporate interests. I'm sorry to speak in such vague generalities, and since politics is not my field of expertise, I may rue the night I decided to write this comment. (What's that apt Abe Lincoln quote?: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.") Leaving my brain out of it, I will maintain that in my gut (the cleaner upper part), I feel that the U.S. has too often had its foreign and domestic policies corrupted by private interests at the expense of higher values. I believe it was Noam Chomsky who said that rather than a real Democracy, our political system could be termed a "Corporatocracy." Okay Alec, one too many late night brandies, and this is what you get. Cheers, Ian.
Great stuff. Our progress depends on civilized disagreement. Beyond that, it would be foolish for me to go back through our history and defend every mistake we ever made, take all the evidence of our previous folly, and claim it was something else. Only to say that, as they said in Bolivia, "otra cosa es con guitarra". Or as one Assistant Secretary of State told an audience publicly after listening to a tangled jumble of tirades about everything the United States was doing wrong (I won't say where because it doesn't matter): "So let me see if I understand correctly, you would like for the United States to do a lot more and a lot less at the same time? Do I have that right?"
Quick note on Nicaragua. I'm less certain than I was before about this matter. Two quick anecdotes (or facts). First, look at what's happening there now. The other, earlier in my career I ran into a Latin American guy (won't say which country) who was exactly my age and who turned out to have worked in Nicaragua at that very time. Like me, he had been sympathetic with Sandinistas, until he saw them in action up close. The Nicaraguan people came to hate them up in the same way they hated Somoza for a whole host of reasons, he said. And he understood why; he came to feel the same way. Another colleague of mine had worked in the country around that time, and said Sandinista leaders essentially began doing exactly what the Somozistas had done, even taking up residence in the houses they had left behind and, in some cases, having affairs with the same mistresses (that's him talking, not me).
Turns out many things seem clearer from afar than they do from up close. What are you supposed to do? Not sure. But those of us who are outside the "arena" (as TR called it) have the luxury of having nothing at all riding on our views. So we will never be blamed for fucking up, whatever we do or don't do. PS - Do believe American democracy needs to rediscover a way to represent the actual people, because the pursuit of narrow corporate interests have clearly brought us Trump and the possible final destruction of that hope. Agree he is a symptom, but also a cause and catalyst of everything that's wrong with our country. Will venture no public opinion on Israel-Palestine. I have no direct experience, only know that domestic politics have played a huge role, even more than they always do in any issue.
G.K. Chesterton has one of my favorite quotes on this topic: “‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.'” Patriotism is not blind loyalty, it means to me loving your country in spite of the flaws as you work toward a more perfect union. It is hard to see however that the U.S. Government is anything but a malign force in the world right now. I remember going places with my German grandmother when I was a little boy in the 1970s. At the time I didn’t understand what the occasional hostile stares were for when she spoke. Now I realize it was her accented English with the connotations of Nazism, even though she was actually a Holocaust survivor. I wonder if an American accent is going to be viewed in the same light as that of a German speaker after WWII when this dark period of our history ends.
Yes, I began an earlier version of this post by referring to a comment I had made about the so-called "democratic dilemma" in a past post. Can one support democracy by opposing an antidemocratic government, even if that government was democratically elected? It's a question many of us have heard counterparts overseas ask themselves in the context of fragile democracies, but which most of us (I include myself in this majority) never thought we would find ourselves facing at home. Here, I am thinking mainly about our colleagues still in the system and trying to do their best, by their country, the American people, and the US constitution. My own view is that the deep state plays several valuable roles. One is institutional memory. Another is giving sound apolitical advice for political appointee leaders to take or leave as they wish. Yet another is to serve as a brake on the unconstitutional action of a renegade administration that runs afoul of the constitution in pursuit of aims other than the national interest. (Who decides what that is?) Unless, that is, being democratically elected confers absolute power for a regime to act, without checks, undemocratically and unconstitutionally. I don't think so, and sure hope not.
I agree 100% with your take on the baffling chaos coming out of the Trump admin but I have to say that we part company somewhat in terms of ranking it. Comparing two months of stunningly bad Trump governance with the disastrous policies, decisions and actions of multiple previous administrations connected to the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, not to mention the other one-sided carnage during the years-long War(s) on Terror -- which resulted in an awful and equally one-sided toll of deaths and destruction -- seems premature, if not outright hyperbolic. He may get there and more, however, to be fair. That's my fear.
Yes, profoundly disturbing that our foreign friends mostly despise us under Trump but having been equally shocked back at the time, not only had our reputation been destroyed well before Trump came onto the scene but I can't help but wonder whether we would even have ended up with someone like Trump if those prior disastrous policies, decisions and actions hadn't occurred.
At times it all feels like some sort of grim penance rolling out from some giant karmic wheel. From which ideological well shall this new source of rejuvenating goodness be drawn? Not from this craven, grasping "deal-maker" or his insipid movement, that's for sure.
Yes, tough call. I may have the benefit now of no longer being "required" by virtue of my profession to defend my government's position. That may be part of it. And yes, most of us career professionals (I don't believe I'm misrepresenting the facts) vehemently opposed the Iraq invasion. A mistake from dicey beginning to dreadful end. I still remember being angry reading the essay by Newt Gingrich in Foreign Policy accusing career foreign service folk of insubordination (if not treason) for failing to support the Bush plan, mainly because we were faithfully reporting what our local contacts were telling us. "Don't do it!" (I wrote about this in an earlier post). I sometimes thought that our foreign friends and allies, especially France (you remember the "freedom fries" nonsense), were doing their best to serve as a final check on our power, given that our checks at home (congress, the media, the American people etc.) had failed to block a bad idea from blossoming. And it went on, unimpeded. So yes, the mess we are in now--with a criminal president who couldn't care less about anyone or anything but himself--has a precedent, an explanation, a path by which he came. He didn't come out of nowhere. The collapse of trust in government has a long history. Still, this feels different. Some would say we've torn off the mask and stopped even trying to pretend. I disagree. Many countries saw us as a pain in the ass, but understood other options were worse (and they knew they themselves were no better). Relations between countries are not totally unlike those between people. Friends can do stupid shit, for good or bad reasons. But if you burn trust, nobody will trust you. Whatever our mistakes (we are not the only country that makes them, even if ours tend to have larger and more visible consequences given our superpower status), many of our counterparts understood the pressure we were under and understood how and why we might make them. Now, not so much. It feels gratuitous, unnecessary, in your face. A big giant "fuck you!" But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's just more of the same.
America has for long been a source of inspiration. Its current state of affairs saddens me. While I am surprised that the general public seems to be taking it on a stride, I hope that they will stand up and stop this increasing monstrosity.
Indeed. It feels like a nightmare of collective insanity, with the general public in a state of induced delusion. I had thought we would awaken before this, with the coup de gras coming on January 6, but no. Instead, the toxic president has returned with literal vengeance like a powerful form of resistant bacteria. Not sure what it will take to stop him. Perhaps some massive (and costly) overstep will boomerang back against him. But maybe not even that.
Hey Ian, thanks as always for writing, and for disagreeing. Civilized disagreement is where it's at. You're not alone, and I totally understand the point of view. Since retiring from the Foreign Service, I am no longer bound to try to explain, or contextualize, US foreign policy. That might be part of it. And one of my superpowers as a diplomat (if I might say so myself) was my deep sympathies with anti-Americanism, which hardened into dogma during my days as an undergrad in that hotbed of radicalism, UCSC, during the Central American wars, particularly Nicaragua. I got where critics of the United States were coming from, most of the time. Indeed, I had had similar views of the matter myself at one time.
But once I got a closer look at issues working as a diplomat, from the perspective of a practitioner rather than an analyst, things got more complicated. Again, it might be a matter of one standing where one sits, and I don't mean to sound pretentious by making the distinction. Henry Kissinger explains it beautifully on pp. 27-28 of the introductory chapter of his tour de force book Diplomacy. A brief clip: "...The analyst runs no risk. If his conclusions prove wrong, he can write another treatise. The statesman is permitted only one guess; his mistakes are irretrievable..." I know you'll love this given Kissinger's characterization by critics as Darth Vader. President Obama made much the same point when he argued that politics were a game of probabilities rather than certainties, and sometimes the probabilities were not that much better than 50-50. The point is that any approach to any complicated foreign policy issue will be problematic, will entail costs and risks. Sometimes these costs will be greater than the initial problem appeared to be, which is one reason I always believed there should be a Hippocratic oath for all professions, including politicians, policy-makers, and diplomats.
Also, other countries are agents of their own fates, and impelled by interests of their own. Sometimes these come into conflict with ours. Other times, the governments of other countries are corrupt, and the interests they pursue are narrow rather than national. This can complicate diplomacy at times, as it will begin to complicate ours to a greater degree as the corruption of the current administration deepens and expands. How do you deal diplomatically with a government you know to be corrupt? By refusing to? By seeking to overthrow it?
But on some level the policy has to be defensible. It has to make sense in the framework of some calculation of national interests in relation to the interests of other nations. I think that was the point I was trying to make. In my experience, whatever the flaws in our approach, I didn't see that the other side offered a better option. I felt we were (mostly) trying to do our best in a complicated world. Even in advance of the invasion of Iraq. I do believe there were deeply cynical political actors who took advantage of the pervasive climate of fear following 9/11, but (as I tried to argue) it was not completely nonsensical on its face. I say that as someone who disagreed with the invasion of Iraq deeply at the time (I remember writing the draft of a rebuttal to Newt Gingrich's article in Foreign Policy magazine accusing the state department of treachery and insubordination to the President's foreign policy; he wrote that because American diplomats were reporting from the field that most of the world thought it was a stupid idea).
To me the problem with the current regime runs so deep I almost don't know how to describe it. One way (among others) is of profound and comprehensive strategic incoherence. They've defined the wrong problem, have a delusional political aim, chosen completely wacky ways and means to achieve the aim, and taken zero account of the costs and risks associated with the approach. You simply get any more incoherent than that. Of course, there are other ways to view it. For example, the president is trying in every way possible to accumulate power in his own person and to destroy any institutional limit on it, with complete indifference to the consequences to national interests. That and the Manchurian candidate hypothesis, which seems to make at least as much sense as anything else does. I swing between these alternatives, but might be totally wrong. He may be making American great again.
I don't know Alexis--while I agree that Trump's diplomatic errors are egregious, and of a style we've not experienced before, uness perhaps "McCarthyism" was parallel to it? However, your seeming defense of US foreign policy down through the ages rings false to me in too many places.
I know that you know better than I the grim details of our history in Guatemala, Argentina, Nicaragua, ...Indonesia, Vietnam, ... with Mosaddegh in Iran, and on and on. My less studied opinion is that the US government, and the Corporations it panders to, are arguably the greatest source of evil the modern world has ever seen!
Of course there have been periodic moments of greater evil-- the genocides from Hitler's Germany, to Pol Pot's Cambodia, Stalin's purges.... Conversely, we have truly shined at times, for instance in our Marshall Plan for post World War Europe, and, and? ...surely somewhere else too.
I hope you are right Alexis, and that I am wrong. That the US is no worse than myriad other nations, only in terms of scale. It may be that I have been poisoned by my recent second reading of Schlesinger's Bitter Fruit. Moreover, I admit that my bleeding-heart ecologist's perspective on the absolute devastation of the planet by humans, has made me a great misanthrope in general.
I think we can agree that right now, we are entering deep shit.
Due process in America has always struck me as an irony, at once foundational and fragile, the former suggestive of solidity, of permanence, the latter suggestive of delicacy, of impermanence. We hold it up as a paradigm of justice. And yet we abandon it with remarkable ease when it suits us to do so, as the antecedents of our doing so, noted in your post and in some of the responses, indicate, antecedents expressed by all sides of our society throughout our history. Indeed, a case could be made we're living in moment when the prevailing and contrasting viewpoints defining our national narrative all have done away with due process as a premise of those viewpoints. I wonder how a concept can be essential yet dispensable, as if living by it is merely a matter of convenience rather than principle, a virtue when needed, an externality when not.
By the way, on another matter, thanks for the recommendation of Conspicuous Cognition.
Indeed, due process if foundational and fragile, as you say. It feels like it’s fraying big time today. (Hooded ICE police snapping foreign students off the streets, really?) Will it snap altogether? In the current case, it’s complicated by the fact that Venezuelan gang members are difficult to defend politically. I sure don’t. Even though it has created unintended problems of it’s own, I’ve always agreed with the law (dating back to Clinton) that any immigrant (including green card holder) who commits a felony-level crime is automatically deported after serving prison time in the states. Even if you accept the idea that the deportees were all gang members (many reports dispute this, suggesting some people were picked up merely for having tattoos), the argument that they were here on a government mission as part of an undeclared war is patently absurd. It’s hard to know where to begin. Venezuela, for example, is a terrible story of its own.
As for Conspicuous Cognition, Dan Williams is a real rising star. He writes clearly and accessibly about a complicated and painfully relevant issue today: why do we believe what we do? It’s good to see important young academic thinkers like him and Don Moynihan (who writes with real knowledge of public policy and federal employment issues and is the single best analyst of the DOGE madness that I have read) have gained traction on Substack.
The "due process" issue is huge. Once they have established that there is no need to respect due process, the game is over and everyone is at risk, for no good reason or no reason at all. Everyone supports prosecuting violent criminals. If these are people who have broken the law, throw the book at them and prosecute them according to the law.
Absolutely. If the process is legally sound, send them far and away. Living in the US is a privilege. If it's not, then it's a slippery slope. Where will it end?
Alexis, I appreciate your thoughtful and candid response to my comment. However, from my seat on the sidelines, and opinions gathered from reading and discussing, rather than embedded in the diplomatic field of action, I still find it very hard to accept the defense of US foreign policy actions on a great many fronts. I have to believe that in this dialectic we would ultimately reach consensus, as admittedly, below I am cherry-picking particularly egregious examples of errant U.S. foreign policy from my small purview, and perhaps I err in assuming (heavy on the "ass" part) that these examples prove the rule; whereas you can draw from a hundred examples of U.S. policy makers doing yeoman's work in providing meaningful foreign aid to a host of nations, and specific groups of people within them. Be that as it may, when you mention being engaged in Nicaraguan politics during the Sandinista movement, can't we agree on that being a clear example of the U.S. promoting all of the wrong motives, and actors in the Somoza regime? The nefarious methods used, and our goals just cannot be justified as "complicated politics," not the bloody Contras, and the attempt to return power to the dictatorial Somozas! And what about our holding the people of Guatemala down for long decades, the motive being cheap bananas?! As another example of US foreign policy run amok, can we justify the toppling of Mosaddegh in Iran? And for what, to allow the Brits, and us (?) to continue extracting the natural petroleum resource wealth of that nation, while paying them a criminally small pittance?! That example seems every bit as much of a bald-faced, even openly admitted, piece of evil work as anything trump has yet perpetrated abroad. I am inspired by another of your reader's comments (Ira Genium) to state that the path to trump was a green brick road constructed by a host of former bad policy makers down through the ages.
Above are three examples, admittedly from the past, but how could we justify our actions in propping up Israel at the expense of the Palestinians--right through to very modern times? I believe our foreign, and increasingly our domestic policies, are hamstrung by power hunger, and the ethos of the profit margin, driving corporate interests. I'm sorry to speak in such vague generalities, and since politics is not my field of expertise, I may rue the night I decided to write this comment. (What's that apt Abe Lincoln quote?: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.") Leaving my brain out of it, I will maintain that in my gut (the cleaner upper part), I feel that the U.S. has too often had its foreign and domestic policies corrupted by private interests at the expense of higher values. I believe it was Noam Chomsky who said that rather than a real Democracy, our political system could be termed a "Corporatocracy." Okay Alec, one too many late night brandies, and this is what you get. Cheers, Ian.
Great stuff. Our progress depends on civilized disagreement. Beyond that, it would be foolish for me to go back through our history and defend every mistake we ever made, take all the evidence of our previous folly, and claim it was something else. Only to say that, as they said in Bolivia, "otra cosa es con guitarra". Or as one Assistant Secretary of State told an audience publicly after listening to a tangled jumble of tirades about everything the United States was doing wrong (I won't say where because it doesn't matter): "So let me see if I understand correctly, you would like for the United States to do a lot more and a lot less at the same time? Do I have that right?"
Quick note on Nicaragua. I'm less certain than I was before about this matter. Two quick anecdotes (or facts). First, look at what's happening there now. The other, earlier in my career I ran into a Latin American guy (won't say which country) who was exactly my age and who turned out to have worked in Nicaragua at that very time. Like me, he had been sympathetic with Sandinistas, until he saw them in action up close. The Nicaraguan people came to hate them up in the same way they hated Somoza for a whole host of reasons, he said. And he understood why; he came to feel the same way. Another colleague of mine had worked in the country around that time, and said Sandinista leaders essentially began doing exactly what the Somozistas had done, even taking up residence in the houses they had left behind and, in some cases, having affairs with the same mistresses (that's him talking, not me).
Turns out many things seem clearer from afar than they do from up close. What are you supposed to do? Not sure. But those of us who are outside the "arena" (as TR called it) have the luxury of having nothing at all riding on our views. So we will never be blamed for fucking up, whatever we do or don't do. PS - Do believe American democracy needs to rediscover a way to represent the actual people, because the pursuit of narrow corporate interests have clearly brought us Trump and the possible final destruction of that hope. Agree he is a symptom, but also a cause and catalyst of everything that's wrong with our country. Will venture no public opinion on Israel-Palestine. I have no direct experience, only know that domestic politics have played a huge role, even more than they always do in any issue.
G.K. Chesterton has one of my favorite quotes on this topic: “‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.'” Patriotism is not blind loyalty, it means to me loving your country in spite of the flaws as you work toward a more perfect union. It is hard to see however that the U.S. Government is anything but a malign force in the world right now. I remember going places with my German grandmother when I was a little boy in the 1970s. At the time I didn’t understand what the occasional hostile stares were for when she spoke. Now I realize it was her accented English with the connotations of Nazism, even though she was actually a Holocaust survivor. I wonder if an American accent is going to be viewed in the same light as that of a German speaker after WWII when this dark period of our history ends.
Yes, I began an earlier version of this post by referring to a comment I had made about the so-called "democratic dilemma" in a past post. Can one support democracy by opposing an antidemocratic government, even if that government was democratically elected? It's a question many of us have heard counterparts overseas ask themselves in the context of fragile democracies, but which most of us (I include myself in this majority) never thought we would find ourselves facing at home. Here, I am thinking mainly about our colleagues still in the system and trying to do their best, by their country, the American people, and the US constitution. My own view is that the deep state plays several valuable roles. One is institutional memory. Another is giving sound apolitical advice for political appointee leaders to take or leave as they wish. Yet another is to serve as a brake on the unconstitutional action of a renegade administration that runs afoul of the constitution in pursuit of aims other than the national interest. (Who decides what that is?) Unless, that is, being democratically elected confers absolute power for a regime to act, without checks, undemocratically and unconstitutionally. I don't think so, and sure hope not.
I agree 100% with your take on the baffling chaos coming out of the Trump admin but I have to say that we part company somewhat in terms of ranking it. Comparing two months of stunningly bad Trump governance with the disastrous policies, decisions and actions of multiple previous administrations connected to the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions, not to mention the other one-sided carnage during the years-long War(s) on Terror -- which resulted in an awful and equally one-sided toll of deaths and destruction -- seems premature, if not outright hyperbolic. He may get there and more, however, to be fair. That's my fear.
Yes, profoundly disturbing that our foreign friends mostly despise us under Trump but having been equally shocked back at the time, not only had our reputation been destroyed well before Trump came onto the scene but I can't help but wonder whether we would even have ended up with someone like Trump if those prior disastrous policies, decisions and actions hadn't occurred.
At times it all feels like some sort of grim penance rolling out from some giant karmic wheel. From which ideological well shall this new source of rejuvenating goodness be drawn? Not from this craven, grasping "deal-maker" or his insipid movement, that's for sure.
Altruism itself seems to be dead.
Yes, tough call. I may have the benefit now of no longer being "required" by virtue of my profession to defend my government's position. That may be part of it. And yes, most of us career professionals (I don't believe I'm misrepresenting the facts) vehemently opposed the Iraq invasion. A mistake from dicey beginning to dreadful end. I still remember being angry reading the essay by Newt Gingrich in Foreign Policy accusing career foreign service folk of insubordination (if not treason) for failing to support the Bush plan, mainly because we were faithfully reporting what our local contacts were telling us. "Don't do it!" (I wrote about this in an earlier post). I sometimes thought that our foreign friends and allies, especially France (you remember the "freedom fries" nonsense), were doing their best to serve as a final check on our power, given that our checks at home (congress, the media, the American people etc.) had failed to block a bad idea from blossoming. And it went on, unimpeded. So yes, the mess we are in now--with a criminal president who couldn't care less about anyone or anything but himself--has a precedent, an explanation, a path by which he came. He didn't come out of nowhere. The collapse of trust in government has a long history. Still, this feels different. Some would say we've torn off the mask and stopped even trying to pretend. I disagree. Many countries saw us as a pain in the ass, but understood other options were worse (and they knew they themselves were no better). Relations between countries are not totally unlike those between people. Friends can do stupid shit, for good or bad reasons. But if you burn trust, nobody will trust you. Whatever our mistakes (we are not the only country that makes them, even if ours tend to have larger and more visible consequences given our superpower status), many of our counterparts understood the pressure we were under and understood how and why we might make them. Now, not so much. It feels gratuitous, unnecessary, in your face. A big giant "fuck you!" But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's just more of the same.
America has for long been a source of inspiration. Its current state of affairs saddens me. While I am surprised that the general public seems to be taking it on a stride, I hope that they will stand up and stop this increasing monstrosity.
Indeed. It feels like a nightmare of collective insanity, with the general public in a state of induced delusion. I had thought we would awaken before this, with the coup de gras coming on January 6, but no. Instead, the toxic president has returned with literal vengeance like a powerful form of resistant bacteria. Not sure what it will take to stop him. Perhaps some massive (and costly) overstep will boomerang back against him. But maybe not even that.
Hey Ian, thanks as always for writing, and for disagreeing. Civilized disagreement is where it's at. You're not alone, and I totally understand the point of view. Since retiring from the Foreign Service, I am no longer bound to try to explain, or contextualize, US foreign policy. That might be part of it. And one of my superpowers as a diplomat (if I might say so myself) was my deep sympathies with anti-Americanism, which hardened into dogma during my days as an undergrad in that hotbed of radicalism, UCSC, during the Central American wars, particularly Nicaragua. I got where critics of the United States were coming from, most of the time. Indeed, I had had similar views of the matter myself at one time.
But once I got a closer look at issues working as a diplomat, from the perspective of a practitioner rather than an analyst, things got more complicated. Again, it might be a matter of one standing where one sits, and I don't mean to sound pretentious by making the distinction. Henry Kissinger explains it beautifully on pp. 27-28 of the introductory chapter of his tour de force book Diplomacy. A brief clip: "...The analyst runs no risk. If his conclusions prove wrong, he can write another treatise. The statesman is permitted only one guess; his mistakes are irretrievable..." I know you'll love this given Kissinger's characterization by critics as Darth Vader. President Obama made much the same point when he argued that politics were a game of probabilities rather than certainties, and sometimes the probabilities were not that much better than 50-50. The point is that any approach to any complicated foreign policy issue will be problematic, will entail costs and risks. Sometimes these costs will be greater than the initial problem appeared to be, which is one reason I always believed there should be a Hippocratic oath for all professions, including politicians, policy-makers, and diplomats.
Also, other countries are agents of their own fates, and impelled by interests of their own. Sometimes these come into conflict with ours. Other times, the governments of other countries are corrupt, and the interests they pursue are narrow rather than national. This can complicate diplomacy at times, as it will begin to complicate ours to a greater degree as the corruption of the current administration deepens and expands. How do you deal diplomatically with a government you know to be corrupt? By refusing to? By seeking to overthrow it?
But on some level the policy has to be defensible. It has to make sense in the framework of some calculation of national interests in relation to the interests of other nations. I think that was the point I was trying to make. In my experience, whatever the flaws in our approach, I didn't see that the other side offered a better option. I felt we were (mostly) trying to do our best in a complicated world. Even in advance of the invasion of Iraq. I do believe there were deeply cynical political actors who took advantage of the pervasive climate of fear following 9/11, but (as I tried to argue) it was not completely nonsensical on its face. I say that as someone who disagreed with the invasion of Iraq deeply at the time (I remember writing the draft of a rebuttal to Newt Gingrich's article in Foreign Policy magazine accusing the state department of treachery and insubordination to the President's foreign policy; he wrote that because American diplomats were reporting from the field that most of the world thought it was a stupid idea).
To me the problem with the current regime runs so deep I almost don't know how to describe it. One way (among others) is of profound and comprehensive strategic incoherence. They've defined the wrong problem, have a delusional political aim, chosen completely wacky ways and means to achieve the aim, and taken zero account of the costs and risks associated with the approach. You simply get any more incoherent than that. Of course, there are other ways to view it. For example, the president is trying in every way possible to accumulate power in his own person and to destroy any institutional limit on it, with complete indifference to the consequences to national interests. That and the Manchurian candidate hypothesis, which seems to make at least as much sense as anything else does. I swing between these alternatives, but might be totally wrong. He may be making American great again.
I don't know Alexis--while I agree that Trump's diplomatic errors are egregious, and of a style we've not experienced before, uness perhaps "McCarthyism" was parallel to it? However, your seeming defense of US foreign policy down through the ages rings false to me in too many places.
I know that you know better than I the grim details of our history in Guatemala, Argentina, Nicaragua, ...Indonesia, Vietnam, ... with Mosaddegh in Iran, and on and on. My less studied opinion is that the US government, and the Corporations it panders to, are arguably the greatest source of evil the modern world has ever seen!
Of course there have been periodic moments of greater evil-- the genocides from Hitler's Germany, to Pol Pot's Cambodia, Stalin's purges.... Conversely, we have truly shined at times, for instance in our Marshall Plan for post World War Europe, and, and? ...surely somewhere else too.
I hope you are right Alexis, and that I am wrong. That the US is no worse than myriad other nations, only in terms of scale. It may be that I have been poisoned by my recent second reading of Schlesinger's Bitter Fruit. Moreover, I admit that my bleeding-heart ecologist's perspective on the absolute devastation of the planet by humans, has made me a great misanthrope in general.
I think we can agree that right now, we are entering deep shit.
Alexis,
Due process in America has always struck me as an irony, at once foundational and fragile, the former suggestive of solidity, of permanence, the latter suggestive of delicacy, of impermanence. We hold it up as a paradigm of justice. And yet we abandon it with remarkable ease when it suits us to do so, as the antecedents of our doing so, noted in your post and in some of the responses, indicate, antecedents expressed by all sides of our society throughout our history. Indeed, a case could be made we're living in moment when the prevailing and contrasting viewpoints defining our national narrative all have done away with due process as a premise of those viewpoints. I wonder how a concept can be essential yet dispensable, as if living by it is merely a matter of convenience rather than principle, a virtue when needed, an externality when not.
By the way, on another matter, thanks for the recommendation of Conspicuous Cognition.
--Bob
Indeed, due process if foundational and fragile, as you say. It feels like it’s fraying big time today. (Hooded ICE police snapping foreign students off the streets, really?) Will it snap altogether? In the current case, it’s complicated by the fact that Venezuelan gang members are difficult to defend politically. I sure don’t. Even though it has created unintended problems of it’s own, I’ve always agreed with the law (dating back to Clinton) that any immigrant (including green card holder) who commits a felony-level crime is automatically deported after serving prison time in the states. Even if you accept the idea that the deportees were all gang members (many reports dispute this, suggesting some people were picked up merely for having tattoos), the argument that they were here on a government mission as part of an undeclared war is patently absurd. It’s hard to know where to begin. Venezuela, for example, is a terrible story of its own.
As for Conspicuous Cognition, Dan Williams is a real rising star. He writes clearly and accessibly about a complicated and painfully relevant issue today: why do we believe what we do? It’s good to see important young academic thinkers like him and Don Moynihan (who writes with real knowledge of public policy and federal employment issues and is the single best analyst of the DOGE madness that I have read) have gained traction on Substack.
The "due process" issue is huge. Once they have established that there is no need to respect due process, the game is over and everyone is at risk, for no good reason or no reason at all. Everyone supports prosecuting violent criminals. If these are people who have broken the law, throw the book at them and prosecute them according to the law.
Absolutely. If the process is legally sound, send them far and away. Living in the US is a privilege. If it's not, then it's a slippery slope. Where will it end?