Im-Politic: Your Guide to the Inauguration Weekend Numbers Game

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2016 election, Electoral College, Im-Politic, inauguration, popular vote, Richard Nixon, Trump, Vietnam War moratorium, Women's March

With today’s national and global Women’s Marches, the numbers game has just intensified greatly. Don’t kid yourself. Despite organizers’ claims that they’re not anti-Trump events, they’re all about discrediting Donald Trump’s presidency even as it’s just beginning – a continuation of the campaign that began right after the insurgent Republicans’ victory with (accurate) observations that he seemed to have lost the popular vote.

If you have any doubts, you need to get on Twitter. There, President Trump’s opponents, including in the supposedly impartial mainstream media, have spent the last 24 hours gleefully and ceaselessly reporting that the crowds that gathered for yesterday’s inaugural events were considerably smaller than those for previous such presidential occasions. And the boasting has continued today, with (also accurate) observations that the women’s marchers – including in Washington, D.C. – are also more numerous than the inaugural gatherings.

Don’t get me wrong. In a democracy, playing the numbers game is really important, legitimate, and actually necessary. In fact, these newest claims bring back memories of my own participation in the second Vietnam War “moratorium” demonstration in the nation’s capital in November, 1969. Interestingly, as the roughly 500,000 protesters filled the Mall, many of us wondered if our presence would make any difference to then President Nixon, who seemed more than able and willing to ignore us. It turns out he was paying plenty of attention.

I strongly suspect that President Trump has been paying attention, too. He certainly should. There’s clearly a lot of manufactured hysteria at work in these marches (which, as is typical with such efforts, tend to attract mongers of many imagined grievances), along with superficial virtue-signaling.  But it’s also clear that many participants are genuinely troubled, scared, outraged, or some combination of these emotions. That’s their right, and Mr. Trump unfortunately bears the blame for at least some.

Nevertheless, numbers exist in a context, and here’s some to consider before concluding that any of these developments mean that Mr. Trump is anything less than a legitimate president, or that he’s even losing the battle for public opinion.

First, the numbers game that counts most is the election. And under the U.S. Constitution, the election numbers that count decisively are those of the Electoral College. That’s the contest President Trump won, and it’s the contest around on which all the candidates for the White House based their strategies. Had the popular vote been the determinant, all these campaigns would naturally have evolved much differently – with possibly big implications for the popular vote.

Second, there may be much less to the turnout numbers of the last 24 hours as well. After all, without doubting the strength of anti-Trump feelings, the president’s opponents can draw on the impressive institutional strengths that have been built up over decades by major interlocking progressive and identity organizations – including labor unions. They’ve had more than two months to organize these marches and protests not only at the national but at the state and local levels as well.

So it’s not at all surprising that they were able to mobilize – and transport – large numbers of participants. What’s much more surprising is how poorly they performed when they had a chance to prevent Trump from reaching the White House in the first place. And don’t forget – their presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, was thought to have a major edge with the population groups that supposedly represented America’s demographic future.

As Mr. Trump repeatedly states, he’s heading a movement, too. But it should be obvious that this movement is embryonic, and that its organizational reach is limited at best. Think of how few truly Trump-ian candidates ran in House and Senate races. Think of how poorly they were funded. In fact, a major test of the staying power of Trump-ism will be its ability to recruit, train, and finance quality office-seekers throughout the country.

It’s also important to remember that relatively few Trump voters have long histories, or any history, of political activism. As indicated above, they’ve had few if any organizations to join, and their very support for such an unconventional candidate with such a strong anti-establishment message surely makes clear their deep disdain for the nation’s public life.

Of course, they turned out for Trump campaign rallies and other events in numbers that were stunning largely because of the campaign’s lack of organization and infrastructure. But now that their champion is in power, nothing would be more logical than for them to return to their lives and jobs in the simple expectation that it’s now up to Mr. Trump to deliver. As a result, for so many to have journeyed to Washington, D.C. – which, chances are, involved taking more than a short, Amtrak northeast corridor train ride – augurs well for the new president.

The only reasonable conclusion? Donald Trump continues to generate strong feelings among backers and opponents alike, and since both groups number in the tens of millions, he’s now – as widely noted – the leader of a deeply divided country. Can he bridge this divide substantially? Significantly? At all? And can he expand his base to include whatever fence-sitters are left? The answers will go far toward determining his administration’s success.

As for his opponents, the big question they face is one similar to one posed endlessly to the Trump campaign: Your backers will attend rallies. But will they vote?

Im-Politic: Why Trump-ism Could Have Staying Power

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2016 election, America First, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, foreign policy, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, internationalism, Jimmy Carter, John Kerry, national interests, national security, Obama, Peggy Noonan, Richard Nixon, rule of law, The Wall Street Journal, Trade

Welcome to the Age of Trump!

Since ages these days come and go a lot faster than previously in history, this one could well end in November, if he loses the presidency. Who, though, can doubt that, until then, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee will dominate the news cycle with his outsiders’ instincts and his matchless flair for publicity, and keep his presumptive rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton, the quintessential insider, continually on the defensive?

At the same time, the reasons for supposing that what might be called “Trump-ism” in American policy (and yes, I’m aware of all the contradictory views he still needs to resolve) is no flash in the pan are much stronger than widely realized.

Even given the implacable hostility he’s generated throughout the Mainstream Media, because of all the of digital ink spilled already on Trump’s remarkable rise, it’s hard to imagine anyone recently coming up with something fundamentally new – including me. But the Wall Street Journal‘s Peggy Noonan (who gained fame as a star speechwriter for Ronald Reagan) achieved just that objective in her April 28 column, when she wrote that the key to Trump’s appeal has been his supporters’ conviction that “he is on America’s side.”

Moreover, before you say, “Duh,” Noonan’s basic analysis ultimately also explains why Trump is so detested by the nation’s policy establishment across the political spectrum, along with the establishment journalists that flack for them – and why his approach to America’s challenges and opportunities holds much more promise than the reigning framework, especially in world affairs.

As you’ll see if you read the article, Noonan’s definition of “pro-American” entails much more than an avowed determination to defend and advance the nation’s interests. Of course, all public officials will call that their goal, and nearly all will sincerely mean it. What Noonan emphasizes, however, is the tendency of mainstream liberal, conservative, and centrist politicians alike to dilute that goal with numerous other considerations. These often are compatible with what’s best for America, or could be. But they’re not necessarily or intrinsically “pro-American” and can easily – and often have – compromised U.S. security or prosperity.

Noonan’s writes that Trump’s literal America First outlook “comes as a great relief to [his backers] because they believe that for 16 years Presidents Bush and Obama were largely about ideologies. They seemed not so much on America’s side as on the side of abstract notions about justice and the needs of the world. Mr. Obama’s ideological notions are leftist, and indeed he is a hero of the international left. He is about international climate-change agreements, and leftist views of gender, race and income equality. Mr. Bush’s White House was driven by a different ideology—neoconservatism, democratizing, nation building, defeating evil in the world, privatizing Social Security.

“But it was all ideology.

“Then Mr. Trump comes and in his statements radiate the idea that he’s not at all interested in ideology, only in making America great again—through border security and tough trade policy, etc. He’s saying he’s on America’s side, period.

I’d elaborate with two points. First, there’s a fundamental, bipartisan worldview and approach to world affairs underlying all these disparate positions. As I’ve explained, it’s called internationalism, and its bedrock tenet holds that America’s best bet for security and prosperity is pursuing what political scientists call milieu goals – literally trying to shape the world to make it safe for America.

As a result, especially since Pearl Harbor, this strategy has led the nation’s leaders on what I’ve called (especially in writing about national security and international economic policy) a search for abstract (a word Noonan uses in passing) standards to guide policy rather than simply asking what makes America and its people safer or wealthier. In fairness to the policy gurus and their acolytes, they insist that they’re simply taking a broader, more complex (sophisticated, etc.) and indeed more realistic view of U.S. interests. In particular, they claim to understand that the long run is more important than instant gratification.

That’s why even long before President Obama entered the White House, American leaders have been talking about strengthening peaceful global norms of behavior and the international institutions that should be administering them; about preserving relationships; about submitting to a “global test” before going to war (Secretary of State John Kerry’s words as the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate); about creating New World Orders and balances of power and “global structures of peace” (a Richard Nixon favorite); about freeing global trade and commerce to the greatest possible extent; about winning foreign “hearts and minds” (a Vietnam War campaign); about figuring out who’s on the “right side of history” (a big bone of contention during Jimmy Carter’s presidency); about eradicating global poverty; about controlling arms; about demonstrating credibility; about exercising or maintaining “global leadership.”

Of course, America and the world as a whole would indeed likely be much better off if much of this substantive progress (i.e., disarmament, trade liberalization) came to pass. But the main question facing policy-makers is rarely, “What would be advantageous” but “What is achievable at acceptable cost and risk?” Just as important is the question, “Compared to what?” For countries without alternatives, questing for a more congenial world environment is arguably the policy to follow – even though, paradoxically, however, their very lack of alternatives logically reflects a weakness that places this goal far out of reach.

As I’ve argued, however, the United States is in a different, and much more favorable, situation entirely, thanks to its geographically isolated location, its still dynamic social system, its sheer size, and its consequent economic power and potential for self-sufficiency. And logically, a policy of relying on variables that are relatively easy to control (i.e., a country’s own capabilities and actions) makes much more sense than a policy relying on variables that are relatively difficult to control (i.e., the capabilities and actions of others).

The arguments for pursuing the procedural aims of internationalism (those institutional goals) are even weaker for the United States. Given its military and economic superpower status and potential, yoking America to internationally agreed on standards of behavior seems likeliest to crimp valuable freedom of action, and hand influence over America’s fate over to powers that are either indifferent or hostile, without contributing on net to national security or well-being.

Also worth fretting about are time-frames (which are closely related to cost and risk issues). Let’s assume that even all of the above goals would benefit America sufficiently to warrant their pursuit. That still leaves the matter of how long the nation is supposed to wait for the benefits to start flowing. And nowhere is this question more important than in the international trade field, where Americans have repeatedly been told either (a) that their jobs and incomes should be sacrificed for the greater good by decisions to win and keep allies by handing them chunks of U.S. markets; and (b) that whatever economic pain liberalized trade is inflicting will eventually be more than offset by greater efficiencies or wider consumer choices or even more employment opportunities and higher wages (when foreign countries finally decide to open their markets).

It’s important to note that a “Trump-ian” crockery-breaking pursuit of greater and quicker policy benefits has no place in domestic politics. At home, Americans have developed a strong consensus on acceptable standards of behavior that justifies the supremacy of rule of law and its consequent proceduralism.  Nothing close to such a consensus is visible internationally.

But here’s something that’s at least as important to note: Even though it’s by no means certain that internationalism’s assumptions have been discredited, or that its promises have been broken, what is certain from the success this year of Trump as well as Democrat Bernie Sanders – another staunch critic of U.S. trade policy – is that Americans increasingly are out of patience. They’re demanding policies that safeguard their livelihoods and raise their wages now. And they’re in no mood to be told that such measures might violate World Trade Organization rules or antagonize allies whose own free trade bona fides are dubious at best – or offend populations in a dysfunctional Middle East that hasn’t exactly been showering Americans with affection lately.

Finally, the politics of the divide between Trump supporters and policy elites has been positively inflamed by the latter’s ability to avoid most of the costs and risks of glittering, quasi-utopian visions still all too far from panning out. Precisely because these electoral considerations dovetail so neatly with a policy shift strongly grounded in geopolitical and economic realities, unless U.S. security and international economic policies start delivering concretely for many more Americans very soon, the Age of Trump could have real legs.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Times’ History of Free Trade is Bunk

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Adam Smith, Binyamin Appelbaum, Donald Trump, Douglas A. Irwin, economics, economists, free trade, I.M. Destler, Jagdish Bhagwati, John Maynard Keynes, John Stuart Mill, mercantilism, protectionism, Republicans, Richard Nixon, Robert Torrens, Ronald Reagan, Smoot-Hawley Tariff, strategic trade theory, tariffs, The New York Times, Trade, {What's Left of) Our Economy

It’s easy to imagine the thought processes responsible for The New York Times running last week’s article describing Donald Trump’s views on trade policy as “Breaking with 200 Years of Economic Orthodoxy”:

“We are the newspaper of record.”

“The public needs vital context to make intelligent decisions.”

“We can flaunt our matchless knowledge of history.”

What a shame, then, that economic correspondent Binyamin Appelbaum’s piece failed so badly on so many counts.

Let’s be charitable and start off by accentuating the positive. Appelbaum deserves credit for characterizing trade concerns as “among his oldest and steadiest public positions.” That’s a healthy corrective to media-wide reporting portraying the Republican presidential front-runner as motivated solely or mainly by – nativist and even racist – hostility to immigration.

It was also encouraging that Appelbaum acknowledged (though in an excessively narrow way, as will be demonstrated below) that “economists have oversold their case.” And he helpfully quoting a leading voice in the profession as noting not only that foreign protectionist practices are all too common, but that “It might be that the threat of tariffs or other trade sanctions could cause American trading partners to open up their markets or drop their barriers to trade.”

Unfortunately, nothing else Appelbaum wrote met standards of current or historic accuracy. First, although he correctly described mercantilism’s focus on amassing trade surpluses, he never pointed to a Trump statement endorsing such a goal. Conversely, the author errs when he contends that the orthodoxy calls for maximizing international trade flows. Instead, it calls for permitting global trade to reflect patterns of comparative advantage to the greatest extent possible.

As for Appelbaum’s brief history of American trade politics, it omits crucial facts. Specifically, he quotes as gospel the view of the University of Maryland’s I.M. Destler that “For most of the last century…skepticism about trade had been relegated to the fringes of the Republican Party.” But no significant Republican shift toward trade liberalization took place until after World War II. Indeed, legislators Reed Smoot and Willis Hawley, sponsors of the 1930 tariff, were both Republicans.

And even after most of the party warmed toward freer trade positions, major tariffs were imposed in 1971 by President Richard M. Nixon and throughout the 1980s by President Ronald Reagan – hardly fringe figures.

Finally, Appelbaum also seriously distorts the economics profession’s position on trade liberalization. Why, for example, didn’t he point out that, like one of the contemporary he cited, Adam Smith himself endorsed the threat and use of tariffs to open foreign markets. He also left out all the major loopholes in standard free trade theory pointed out by some of the biggest names in economic history. This history of the idea of free trade by Dartmouth’s Douglas A. Irwin makes clear how significant they have been. Here’s a summary drawn from my (New York Times) review of Irwin’s 1996 study – which unfortunately has not been digitized:

“Robert Torrens and John Stuart Mill explained how countries could use tariffs to enhance national wealth by stimulating the production of more profitable exports. Mill showed that tariffs protecting ‘infant’ industries could help them survive competition with more established rivals and eventually become self-supporting — without exacting larger costs from that country’s consumers or other economic sectors.

“During the 1920’s, Frank Graham of Princeton theorized that tariffs could provide permanent help for national economies by encouraging a shift from agriculture into manufacturing, thereby increasing a country’s total wealth. In the wake of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes insisted that free trade policies could impoverish individual countries during periods of already high unemployment, deflation and fixed exchange rates, particularly when the deflation was caused by a central bank’s determination to keep interest rates up. And in the 1980’s, a school of ”strategic trade” theorists contended that the special characteristics of certain industries (particularly those dominated by a few producers) could allow governments in some instances to use export subsidies to create national advantage.”

Irwin was correct in noting that “these arguments simply represent exceptions to a still-enthroned free trade rule — not new rules themselves (my paraphrase).” But it’s also true that these exceptions are so substantial that they call the theory’s validity into question.

In fact, Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati, a leading free trade champion for decades, put it best when he observed, ”One cannot assert that free trade is ‘the policy that economic theory tells us is always right’ . . . certain developments make the case for free trade more robust whereas others make it less so . . . the latter are subject to many difficulties as one passes from the classroom to the corridors of policy making.”

I suppose that Appelbaum and The Times should be praised to trying to convey the idea that a high profile current campaign issue has deep roots in the past. But is it so unreasonable to hope that they could do the story anything close to justice?

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Desperately Seeking Real Retrenchment

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Afghanistan, American exceptionalism, Asia-Pacific, Baltic states, Bashir Al-Assad, boots on the ground, Charles Lanes, chemical weapons, defense budget, defense spending, Earl Ravenal, George W. Bush, international law, Iraq, ISIS, isolationism, Middle East, multilateralism, national interests, NATO, Nixon Doctrine, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pivot, Poland, Richard Nixon, Russia, sequestration, Soviet Union, Stephen Sestanovich, Syria, Ukraine, Vietnam War, vital interests, Vladimir Putin, Washington Post

Washington Post columnist Charles Lane has just done an excellent job of demonstrating how powerfully universalist America’s bipartisan foreign policy establishment remains – even as powerful reasons keep multiplying for climbing down from this wildly ambitious approach.

According to Lane, a new book by former American diplomat and Columbia University political scientist Stephen Sestanovich bears out President Obama’s claim to be a kindred spirit with Richard M. Nixon as a “retrenchment” president – one of the chief executives who has sought to “correct the perceived overreaching of their predecessors and free up U.S. resources for domestic concerns.” In fact, says Lane, Sestanovich has written that post-World War II U.S. foreign policy has been marked by a “constant pendulum-swing between administrations that aggressively pursued U.S. goals abroad” (who the author calls “maximalists”) and those Nixon- and Obama-style retrenchers.

I hate to comment on books I haven’t yet read. But Lane’s description of Mr. Nixon and Mr. Obama both qualify as retrenchers reveals a mindset so enthusiastic about massive and potentially open-ended U.S. involvement in literally every corner of the world if necessary that it sees even talk about a more discriminating approach as a major departure.

Judging by the record, it hasn’t been. In fact, both the Nixon talk and the Obama talk about retrenchment have been overwhelmingly that – talk. Just as important, and closely related, what have arguably looked at least superficially like exercises in retrenchment have in fact been exercises in wishful thinking. Both presidents have actually agreed that the security, stability, and even prosperity of the entire world are U.S. vital interests. They’ve simply differed with the maximalists in insisting that these interests can be defended through means that are less dangerous and violent, and more globally popular, than the unilateral U.S. use of military force.

To cite the leading historical example, the ballyhooed Nixon Doctrine of 1970 was never a decision to cross Vietnam or any part of Asia off the list of vital U.S. interests – those whose defense was thought essential for maintaining America’s own security and prosperity. As explained initially by Earl C. Ravenal shortly after the Doctrine’s declaration, Mr. Nixon had decided, in the absence of any evidence, that this vital set of objectives could be defended without an early resort to U.S. military involvement – chiefly, by the militaries of America’s regional allies.

Therefore, Ravenal wrote:

“the Administration’s new policies and decision processes do not bring about the proposed balance [between the country’s foreign policy ends and the means to be used to attain them]; in fact, they create a more serious imbalance. Essentially we are to support the same level of potential involvement with smaller conventional forces. The specter of intervention will remain, but the risk of defeat or stalemate will be greater; or the nuclear threshold will be lower.”

President Obama has given us a different version of such dangerous wishful thinking. More accurately, he’s given us several different versions. His original 2008 candidacy for the White House was largely motivated by a conviction that the overly unilateralist and militaristic tendencies of George W. Bush had produced disaster in Iraq, and were actually undermining U.S. security by damaging America’s international image.

That’s why Mr. Obama focused so much attention on repairing that image. He never indicated that he would scale back that list of U.S. vital interests. He simply suggested that they could be better defended if need be by acting multilaterally, with international approval, rather than by going it alone. And he conveyed the clear impression that challenges could be prevented in the first place if only America became more popular in regions like the Middle East.

Once in office, Mr. Obama did try to establish a hierarchy of U.S. worldwide interests that would have operational impact. He decided that the nation had been so preoccupied with Middle East wars that it had been neglected the Asia-Pacific region, which he considered at least as important. So he launched a “pivot” that would transfer some American forces from the former to the latter.

But the president never apparently judged the Middle East to be less important to America’s fate. He simply concluded that, with the Afghanistan and Iraq wars supposedly winding down, it had become less dangerous. Having been proven wrong by the rise of ISIS. in Afghanistan, he’s (gradually) boosting the American military presence in region again. The president is claiming, moreover – based on as little evidence as Mr. Nixon required – that any remaining capabilities gap can be filled by the armed forces of regional countries. Worse, many of his Republican critics, who are just as reluctant to deploy many more U.S. “boots on the ground,” agree with Mr. Obama’s fundamental assessment.

Further, the president has actually expanded the list of circumstances in the Middle East (and presumably elsewhere) that should justify American military responses – the kinds of chemical weapons attacks launched by Bashir Al-Assad against Syrians revolting against his dictatorship, along with similar major violations of international law.  (This effort, so far, has not yet won over the public.)

Nor does that exhaust Mr. Obama’s efforts to lengthen the list of U.S. vital interests. He has understandably responded to Russia’s recent provocations against allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) by strengthening U.S. forces and deploying them more conspicuously in new NATO members like Poland and the Baltic states, former Soviet satellites clearly in Moscow’s line of fire. Less understandable have been the Obama administration’s numerous suggestions that the security of Ukraine, too, is a matter of urgent American concern – even though this country was actually part of the old Soviet Union for decades with no apparent effects on U.S. safety or well-being.

Yet like the debate over countering ISIS, that over dealing with Vladimir Putin spotlights one major difference between President Obama and his (mainly) Republican foreign policy critics: Many of them have strongly backed big boosts in the U.S. military budget (if not always using these forces), including aggressive moves to circumvent spending caps established by the sequestration process. Mr. Obama has not sought comparable increases.

The president unquestionably has often spoken in terms that seem to support a smaller U.S. role in the world – e.g., his remarks suggesting that America’s exceptionalism isn’t all that exceptional, and reminding that much of the world has legitimate historical grievances against the West, and in some cases against the United States specifically. But his strategic walk has never matched this talk, and the continuing flood of contentions to the contrary in the punditocracy and even academe (if Lane’s Post column is accurate) plainly are serving their (partly) intended purpose of preventing searching debate on foreign policy fundamentals.

Given the nation’s resulting over-extension militarily, therefore, when the chattering class powers-that-be start labeling presidents or most other politicians as retrenchers or minimalists (an improvement to be sure over the hackneyed charge of “isolatonism”), the only legitimate reaction is a thoroughly exasperated, “If only.”

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Worrisome Obama Interview on Iran

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allies, arms control, China, Cold War, INF treaty, inspections, Iran, Iran deal, New York Times, nuclear proliferation, nuclear weapons, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Richard Nixon, Robert Gates, Ronald Reagan, sanctions, Soviet Union, Thomas Friedman, verification

On Day Two of what we might call the Iran Nuclear Deal Era, I find myself wondering whether the more President Obama speaks out on the agreement, the weaker public support will get. Based on his new interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, this at least certainly should be the case.

To be clear, I continue to believe there could be a respectable case for Congress approving the agreement. It depends largely on technical questions about whether the monitoring and verification provisions really are crafted well enough to at least postpone Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon. I have strong doubts for political reasons, as I’ve explained, but hesitate at this point to decide definitively. These are matters that should be illuminated by serious evaluation process by lawmakers. Yet the Friedman interview casts further doubt on Mr. Obama’s strategic and political judgment, which House and Senate members need to consider as well.

Arguably the loopiest claim Mr. Obama made in the interview came in response to Friedman’s question, “Why should the Iranians be afraid” of “serious U.S. military retaliation if [they cheat]?” In fact, the question itself was kind of loopy, since the most immediate question raised by the prospect of Iranian violations is whether sanctions really are certain to be “snapped back” on. Even so, I was startled to read Mr. Obama answer, “Because we could knock out their military in speed and dispatch if we chose to, and I think they have seen my willingness to take military action where I thought it was important for U.S. interests.”

Leave aside any doubts over the president’s trigger finger. Does he really believe that the United States, either alone or even together with allies, could reduce Iran to a military pygmy? If so, then why doesn’t he have similar confidence about destroying Iran’s nuclear complex? What’s known of it is located in many fewer locations than Tehran’s military deployments, and without any meaningful Iranian defenses, America would face a much easier challenge monitoring and, if need be, acting against any other facilities. Moreover, these undeclared sites would pose much less of a proliferation danger in the absence of the declared sites.

Just as important: Could this possibly be the Plan B I called for yesterday? At least for now, I sure hope not, especially given warnings against this course of action from a wide range of military experts in the United States, Israel, and abroad, including Mr. Obama’s own former Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Mr. Obama’s discussion of sanctions, moreover, seems to bear out my concerns that international support for keeping Iran non-nuclear has always been paper-thin, and that as a result, talk of automatic or even highly likely snap back is nonsense. On the one hand, the president told Friedman that the current sanctions have “crippled the Iranian economy and ultimately brought them to the table.” He attributed their effectiveness to widespread global agreement that “it would be a great danger to the region, to our allies, to the world, if Iran possessed a nuclear weapon.”

On the other hand, however, Mr. Obama emphatically insisted that “in the absence of a deal, our ability to sustain these sanctions was not in the cards,” mainly because so many other countries had paid so much greater an economic price that America. He continued:

“if they saw us walking away from what technical experts believe is a legitimate mechanism to ensure that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon — if they saw that our diplomatic efforts were not sincere, or were trying to encompass not just the nuclear program, but every policy disagreement that we might have with Iran, then frankly, those sanctions would start falling apart very rapidly.”

But as I emphasized yesterday, countries that evidently have made their economic pain so clear to Mr. Obama can’t possibly view a nuclear weapons-free Iran as their top priority, and can’t be relied on to implement threats of snap back – unless an Iranian violation is genuinely obvious and egregious. In fact, the further into the deal’s time frame we proceed, the less reliable the allies will become – since they’ll have ever more Iran-related business to lose.

Finally, for now, it’s disturbing to see Mr. Obama compare his Iran breakthrough with (using Friedman’s words) “the same strategic logic that Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan used to approach the Soviet Union and China.” But as I noted yesterday, America’s China policy looks ever more like an historic failure. Beijing has become increasingly powerful and belligerent, and the leadership’s hold on power has remained strong because the trade profits and technology it’s secured (largely) from the United States have enabled it to foster prosperity as well as build up its military.

If anything, the Reagan-Soviet analogy is further off base. The former president signed a treaty on intermediate range nuclear weapons (INF) with Mikhail Gorbachev, and agreed to resume talks with Moscow on longer range, strategic arms. But before the INF deal was signed, he deployed American missiles in Europe to offset previous Soviet installations, and more broadly launched a huge military (including nuclear) buildup that played a big role in persuading Soviet leaders that the vastly superior U.S. economy could race theirs into the ground. The president also worked overtime to keep curbs on western dealings with the Soviet economy – often over heated allied objections. And in an interesting coda, the Obama administration recently has accused Russia of violating the INF accord.

It’s still of course possible that Mr. Obama has produced an Iran deal that protects American national security better than any realistic alternative. But if he has, the Friedman interview strongly suggests that the adage “Nonsense in, nonsense out” (to put it politely) will never be the same.

Following Up: More Reasons for Iran Deal Concerns

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allies, Arabs, China, Congress, Democrats, energy boom, Following Up, Germany, Iran, Iran deal, Israel, Middle East, missile defense, Obama, Persian Gulf, Peter Beinart, Republicans, Richard Nixon, sanctions, Sunnis, The Atlantic, United Kingdom

One of my favorite political anecdotes concerns an exchange that looks like it resulted from a misunderstanding. Like many such stories, though, it’s so revealing that it’s worth recounting. And it’s incredibly timely in this immediate aftermath of the Iran nuclear deal announcement.

According to initial reports, during his first, historic visit to what we used to (and still should) call “Communist China,” former President Richard Nixon was talking history with Chinese Premier Zhou En-Lai – reputedly a world-class intellectual that the chronically insecure American leader surely wanted to impress. What, Mr. Nixon supposedly asked Zhou, was the impact of the French Revolution? Replied the Paris-educated Zhou, “Too early to say.”

Eyewitnesses say that Zhou mistakenly thought Mr. Nixon was referring to the student riots that had recently rocked France, but the impression reinforced in its retelling – of Chinese farsightedness and America’s persistent short-termism – remained vivid.

President Obama and his defenders have touted the new Iran deal and the president’s overall Iran approach as embodying just the kind of strategic patience America chronically needs. I wish I could be so confident. As I’ve written previously, Mr. Obama’s optimism that Iran’s broad foreign policy will moderate as it becomes reintegrated into the world economy strongly resembles badly mistaken and longstanding expectations that a China that traded more extensively would be a much safer China. While China remained much weaker than the United States, these predictions were arguably understandable. But the reintegration process was handled so recklessly, and so much wealth and defense-related technology have been showered on China, that its belligerence has been returning as the power gap has – largely as a result – narrowed.

Iran lacks China’s global potential. But the resumption of quasi-normal trade and investment with the west in particular, coupled with the return of major oil revenues, means at the very least that its leaders will feel much less of a “guns versus butter” resource squeeze than at present. Therefore, Tehran will become better able to have its cake and eat it, too – simultaneously capable of increasing living standards at home and boosting its influence across the Middle East.  So both the regime’s grip on power and its ability to continue threatening U.S. interests are likely to grow stronger, not weaker. As a result, just as with China’s leaders, the mullahs will feel that much less pressure to mend their ways.

There’s another problem with Obama’s concept of the long game. One of the hallmarks of foreign policy realism is recognizing that lasting solutions to even the most serious challenges are rarely possible short of war or some comparable event. And even the so-called military last resort is no long-term guarantee, either. Hence muddling through is often the best option diplomats face. But truly strategic muddling through doesn’t simply entail improvising from crisis to crisis and hoping for the best. It also involves actively trying to hedge – and especially to reduce risks and vulnerabilities

In other words, the same pragmatism that has convinced Mr. Obama that unattainable perfection is the enemy of this good deal should have also convinced him to come up with a Plan B. But there’s no evidence of one worthy of the name, other than vague references to using military strikes against Iran’s nuclear complex that even his senior advisers have warned him against. I’m not advocating such attacks. But how nice it would be to hear something from Mr. Obama about bolstering American missile defenses – assuming that a nuclear-armed Iran will eventually acquire intercontinental delivery vehicles.

Stronger efforts to offer such shields to allies would be welcome, too. The major role played by the United States – including under the current administration – in developing and funding Israeli missile defenses should not be overlooked, although few Israelis seem to consider even the most advanced systems deployed an adequate substitute for genuinely de-nuclearizing Iran. The president also held a greatly hyped summit with Persian Gulf leaders in May, but contrary to hopes harbored by these countries, no significantly greater defense assistance was on the administration’s agenda.

At the same time, leaving the special issue of Israel aside, the intrinsic domestic weaknesses of these Sunni Arab countries underscores Mr. Obama’s continuing failure to explore actively another promising major strategic option for America: capitalizing on the nation’s new potential, largely thanks to the domestic energy revolution, of marginalizing the entire Middle East in its security calculations. As a result of this presidential blind spot, the United States still finds its fate closely linked to a group of regional states that lack the internal cohesion to be reliable allies over any serious time span.

Meanwhile, another less explicit Obama assumption is also looking eminently challenge-able – that the United States and its western allies will hang closely enough together to put meaningful teeth in the deal’s monitoring and inspection provisions. Ironically, some alarming new evidence comes from Atlantic contributor Peter Beinart, who supports the Iran agreement.

As Beinart sees it, one main reason for accepting a flawed deal along its present lines is that the allies were unlikely to have continued supporting current sanctions if Washington held out for stronger terms.  For it was precisely the hope of negotiating an Iran solution sooner rather than later that persuaded them to incur the economic losses generated by sanctions to begin with.  Moreover, he quotes top British and German diplomats to this effect.

Yet if the Europeans are this money hungry, are they really likely to respond to anything but the most flagrant Iranian misbehavior by shutting the new trade off? I’m glad I don’t have to make that argument.

I’m still not willing to write off the Iran deal completely – as I believe many of Mr. Obama’s staunch conservative and Republican opponents are doing reflexively and prematurely. But if it turns out to be a bad one, I’m fully prepared to “walk away.” Here’s hoping Congress is, too – especially Democrats who will surely be tempted to back the president for their own purely partisan reasons.