Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Syria, Round II

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air strikes, America First, chemical weapons, globalism, jihadism, John R. Bolton, Middle East, oil, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Syria, terrorism, Trump

About a year ago, when President Trump first ordered airstrikes to punish Syria for using chemical weapons in its civil war, I made the case for not jumping to the conclusion that the chief executive had betrayed his promises to carry out an America First-style foreign policy. This weekend of course came a second set of Syria strikes, with the same declared objective, and I still believe that they don’t herald a new burst of (futile, if not counterproductive) interventionism in the Middle East. My main reason: Mr. Trump’s own words in announcing the attacks.

At the same time, don’t think that I’m incredibly confident that I’m right.  

First, the reasons for some confidence about where Syria policy is headed. According to the President, he’s under no illusion that either limited American uses of military force or more comprehensive policies will cure what ails Syria or the completely dysfunctional and failed Middle Eastern neighborhood in which it lives. In his words, not only is he opposed to “an indefinite presence in Syria.” He declared more broadly:

“Looking around our very troubled world, Americans have no illusions. We cannot purge the world of evil or act everywhere there is tyranny.

“No amount of American blood or treasure can produce lasting peace and security in the Middle East. It’s a troubled place. We will try to make it better, but it is a troubled place.”

In other words, Mr Trump is rejecting the globalist premises of his post-World War II predecessors. Reflecting the ostensible (and, it seems, eternal) lessons of appeasing fascist dictators during the 1930s, they have held that aggression or turmoil or instability or (fill in the upsetting development of your choice) anywhere are all too likely to escalate into crises that will eventually threaten the United States.

As a result, American forces repeatedly have been ordered into backwater conflicts with no intrinsic potential to affect U.S. security, prosperity, or freedom in any tangible way. But given the consequent globalist resolve both to nip these problems in the bud, as well as to address their underlying causes, they have demonstrated plenty of potential to mire the country into a series of costly quagmires.

Therefore, even though Mr. Trump – like former President Barack Obama before him – has described the airstrikes as essential for upholding a global norm (decades-long international bans on the “ghastly,” “barbaric,” and “brutal” use of chemical weapons), he seems to believe that this military practice can be isolated not only from whatever deep-rooted economic, social, and cultural failures have produced the strife that has occasioned their use, but from that consequent conflict itself.

But I’m worried about three big caveats. First, as long as the Syria civil war lasts, the more apparent it will become that limited actions like airstrikes won’t prevent atrocities like chemical weapons use, and the greater the temptation for more ambitious measures judged likelier to achieve their aims – but also capable of triggering a conflict with Russia, which like the United States has officials and military personnel in Syria.

Second, although the President has portrayed Syria as a conflict from which the United States can soon walk away, this analysis depends on claims that deserve major skepticism, to say the least – like the final defeat of ISIS (and, by extension, all jihadist terrorism?), and the possible emergence of a regional coalition of Sunni Arab states that “can ensure that Iran does not profit from the eradication of ISIS” and spread its influence across the Middle East.

After decades in which the American people have been told (rightly) that the region can endanger their security (via that terrorism) and their prosperity (via its gargantuan oil supplies), these positions will invariably look like naive hopes if the President’s rosy scenario doesn’t pan out. In fact, they could well spur calls for deeper and more dangerous U.S. involvement – even from an understandably skeptical public.

What’s of course supremely ironic about that dilemma is that important elements of the Trump domestic programs look like much more promising ways to shield the nation from Middle East threats than the globalist strategy he’s partly embraced of “fighting ’em there so we don’t face ’em here,” and promoting prosperity by trying to control a dizzying array of events abroad.

As I’ve written repeatedly, it makes much more sense to deal with terrorism by “keeping them out of here” through the kinds of serious border security programs the President endorses, and to continue breaking the region’s strong choke hold on global energy supplies by supporting the production revolution that American energy companies have engineered at home.

The third reason for concerns about a more interventionist Trump foreign policy has to do with his appointment of John R. Bolton as his national security adviser. Bolton, a former (interim) U.S. UN ambassador during George W. Bush’s presidency, is a strong, lifelong supporter of using the American military to solve all manner of national security challenges abroad.

It’s true that, unlike most globalists, Bolton seems to believe that these challenges will stay solved without any kind of nation-building- or democracy promotion-type follow-on. Hence his unrepentant support for the Bush administration overthrow of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein  – without a serious plan for the war’s aftermath. In all, it’s worrisome for believers in an America First approach to foreign policy that Bolton’s often trigger-happy voice could often be the last one Mr. Trump hears before making a momentous strategic decision.

Bottom-line: The slope leading from America’s current approach to Syria and the Middle East’s turmoil in general to another major war isn’t completely slippery. But it’s hard to be confident that President Trump’s footing is completely secure, either.

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Following Up: More on the Trump Tariffs

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aluminum, Australia, Canada, David J. Lynch, Defense Department, defense manufacturing base, downstream industries, European Union, Following Up, George W. Bush, Gordon Hanson, James Mattis, Kentucky, manufacturing, Mitch McConnell, multiplier, Paul Krugman, Paul Ryan, steel, steel-consuming industries, tariffs, terrorism, The New York Times, Trade, Trump, U.S. Business and Industry Council, United Kingdom, Washington Post, Wisconsin

I could spend all day today rebutting ignorant, biased, and simply inane commentary on President Trump’s Thursday announcement that stiff tariffs will be imposed on U.S. imports of steel and aluminum (along with watching the plethora of college hoops on TV today!). Instead, I’ll offer some follow-on thoughts to the tariff talking points I posted yesterday.

>The European Union in particular seems outraged by the Trump decision, and has threatened to retaliate with tariffs on its own on a wide range of products, including some from Wisconsin and Kentucky. These of course happen to be the home states of House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. It’s an understandable, and certainly clever, impulse, and in 2003, something like it succeeded in convincing former President George W. Bush to lift steel tariffs he had imposed 18 months earlier.

Of course, Bush 43 was no Trump. He was a committed free trader and globalist, and/or agent of of America’s powerful corporate offshoring lobby. But here’s something that needs to be considered by Messrs Ryan, McConnell, and other lawmakers at whom the Europeans or other powers may take aim: What if, shortly after September 11, Osama Bin Laden had threatened to destroy major targets in their home states or districts unless the United States withdrew militarily from Afghanistan and left him alone. Would the affected legislators have run to the White House to plead for an abandonment in the war on terror? Not likely.

I know that war and economics are different (although given the importance of economic strength as a source of military strength and overall national success, the similarities and overlap are widely overlooked). But don’t doubt for a minute that American politicians’ reactions to these European threats will be watched closely in all the world’s capitals, and that signs of weakness will be factored into foreign decisions to abide by or violate current trade agreements at the U.S.’ expense, or take other measures to gain advantage in their own, American, or third-country markets that clash with free market and free trade norms.

So here’s hoping that American Members of Congress and Senators will show some backbone, and make clear to the nation’s trade partners that they won’t permit themselves and the country at large to be hanged separately.

>Speaking of hanging separately, quite naturally, U.S. steel- and aluminum-consuming industries are concerned that their global competitiveness will be harmed if they’re forced to use more domestic metal in their products. They need to keep two considerations in mind. First, if foreign governments are permitted by Washington’s inaction to dump major American industries like aluminum and steel out of existence, consuming sectors would be next in line. 

Second, there is indeed no inherent reason to make the consuming industries pay any penalty at all. When I was at the U.S. Business and Industry Council, which represented many steel-consuming companies and industry groups, we persuaded them that the best solution would be tariff protection for them as well. The tariff complaints coming from such sectors today reveals that the Trump administration hasn’t put this possibility on the table. That’s a major missed opportunity, and the President should realize that such offers not only can build support for the steel and aluminum tariffs. They can also expand the constituency for broader America First trade policies. (New Trump statements on possible auto tariffs make clear exactly the types of steps needed, although as is usually the case, they work best when applied across-the-board.)   

>Speaking of missed opportunities, here’s another (big) one – the handling of some allied countries’ indignation about being treated as threats to America’s national security because of their steel and/or aluminum shipments. In several major cases, these complaints could have been prevented had the administration recognized that Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom are defined by American law as part of the nation’s defense “technology and industrial base.”

I’m not necessarily a supporter of this policy, but since it exists, these countries have an entirely legitimate point regarding their possible inclusion in the metals’ tariff regime. And the Trump administration should have explained to them that they were of course being exempted. Moreover, the Defense Department should have told the rest of the administration about the legal and legislative situation. Yet Pentagon chief James Mattis’ memo to his administration colleagues outlining his department’s position on the tariffs never mentioned it.

Not that these allied countries are entirely blameless for the row. They could have raised the issue when the prospect of sweeping U.S. tariffs was first raised. But all indications are that they preferred to grandstand.

>As should now be expected, the media coverage of the tariff controversy has often veered off into economics and policy La-La Land. Two of the funniest examples I’ve seen so far (and they’re nearly identical): criticizing the announced tariffs because they only boast the potential of bringing back high-value manufacturing to the United States instead of lots of industrial jobs.

Think I’m kidding? Here’s Washington Post correspondent David J. Lynch: “If tariffs prompt companies to move production back to the United States, they would likely opt for highly automated plants that require fewer workers. Trump’s tariffs ‘would bring back 21st-century factories where we lost 20th-century factories,” [economist Gordon] Hanson said this week at the National Association for Business Economics conference in Washington.”

Here’s no less than Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul M. Krugman: “[T]he tariffs now being proposed would boost capital-intensive industries that employ relatively few workers per dollar of sales; these tariffs would, if anything, further tilt the distribution of income against labor.”

What both authors are somehow missing is how manufacturing is valuable for much more than high wage employment. It’s long been the nation’s leader in productivity growth. It generates nearly 69 percent of private sector American spending on research and development. And don’t forget its high employment and output multipliers – which mean that each dollar of manufacturing output punches far above its weight in generation production and jobs elsewhere in the economy.

That last point is particularly relevant to Krugman’s claim about labor’s low share of national incomes. The manufacturing employment multiplier tells us that adding to industry in America – including capital-intensive industry – will promote employment in related sectors like logistics, plus revitalize the retail and other service sectors of the towns and cities and counties where the new factories are built. Those jobs may not pay as well as the manufacturing jobs lost. But they’re sure better than the economic death that often results when communities lose their factories.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Real Message Sent by the Trump Security Strategy Blueprint

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alliances, allies, America First, Asia-Pacific, borders, burden sharing, China, Cold War, deterrence, Eastern Europe, Europe, free-riding, Germany, globalism, international institutions, internationalism, Japan, Middle East, nation-building, National Security Strategy, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, South Korea, sovereignty, Soviet Union, terrorism

The Blob – a wonderful nickname for the Washington, D.C.-centered complex of establishmentarian foreign policy bureaucrats, former officials, think tanks, lobbyists, and journalists – has actually come up with a useful insight in noting some important contradictions between the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) document, and the president’s speech announcing the document’s release.

It’s hardly new to observe that big differences on crucial issues seem to divide President Trump from his top advisers, though it’s always valuable to note, since this gap can’t possibly make American diplomacy more effective, and could cause real problems. My chief NSS-related concern, however, could be even more important: Mr. Trump’s speech once again demonstrates that he himself remains pretty confused about his foreign policy priorities – and not entirely convinced that priority-setting is particularly important at all.

Not that presidents are often perfectly consistent about America’s approach to international challenges and opportunities. And given the diversity of these challenges and opportunities, consistency itself can be a vastly overrated virtue – at best. But these days, much more clarity is urgently needed – especially since President Trump has touted himself as such a disrupter; especially since the America First-style disruption he touts is badly needed on many fronts, in my opinion; and especially since disruption is badly needed because some genuinely dangerous situations are nearing crisis territory, and some existing crises keep worsening.

With that backdrop in my mind, two of these clashing ideas – maybe described more accurately as sets of impulses? – stand out. The first has to do with America’s major security alliances. Mr. Trump has consistently, and in my view, understandably, complained about defense free-riding by countries in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region in particular that for decades have enjoyed protection by U.S. conventional and nuclear forces. And his December 18 NSS speech continued in this vein, scolding his White House predecessors for failing “to insist that our often very wealthy allies pay their fair share for defense, putting a massive and unfair burden on the U.S. taxpayer and our great U.S. military.”

He’s absolutely right that major economies like like Germany, Japan, and South Korea should pay far more, and not only because they can afford to do so – and free up American resources for major domestic needs in the process. They need to pay more because they face far greater threats from potential aggressors like Russia and China and North Korea than does the United States.

If President Trump would start highlighting the discrepancy – firmly based in geography – between the security challenges faced by the United States and those faced by its allies, he might actually achieve greater defense burden-sharing. But he makes a fatal mistake when boasts that his administration’s “new” strategy “emphasizes strengthening alliances to cope with these threats.  It recognizes that our strength is magnified by allies who share principles — and our principles — and shoulder their fair share of responsibility for our common security.”

For whenever the allies have heard phrases like “common security,” they have concluded that the United States can’t afford to put any meaningful pressure on them to boost defense budgets – because its own vital interests will always persuade it to fill any gaps. History could not teach more clearly the lesson that America’s failure to stress that its alliances are helpful assets, not vital necessities, and that its support for these arrangements is not unconditional, has been the kiss of death for any efforts to eliminate or reduce free-riding. And the Trump administration’s burden-sharing campaign will surely founder on exactly these shoals.

If we were living in another (past) decade, this shortcoming might be No Big Deal. After all, as I’ve previously written, America’s major alliance commitments, including their nuclear dimension, involved either pledges to protect arguably vital or potentially vital regions, or to deter adversaries, like North Korea, that couldn’t retaliate in kind against the American homeland. So it’s anything but entirely surprising that, for decades during the Cold War and after, these alliances achieved their overseas goals and kept the United States itself safe.

But the likeliest alliance-related potential flashpoints nowadays are totally different. Russia, which still has plenty of nuclear weapons, is seriously threatening only Baltic and other East European countries that were recklessly invited to join the North Atlantic Treat Organization (NATO) even though their fates have never been considered vital interests by American leaders. Even during the Cold War, America’s European allies were never entirely convinced that Washington would risk DC, or New York, to save Paris or London. It’s that much less credible to suppose that U.S. leader would risk a major American city to save Riga.

Frighteningly, however, that’s precisely a catastrophe that the United States today could suffer because it remains American strategy to deny a president any real choice but to act. And the means to this perilous end? A growing U.S. military presence in Eastern Europe not remotely strong enough to repel a Russian attack, but large enough to put irresistible political pressure on Washington to go nuclear to save it from annihilation, or to retaliate for its loss.

Such American tripwire forces remain on the Korean peninsula, too, and their tripwire mission also remains exactly the same – even though North Korea can now, or will shortly be able to, respond to American nuclear weapons use by destroying U.S. cities.

In other words, greater alliance burden-sharing – and probably much greater changes – now need to be squarely on President Trump’s table not simply to achieve greater economic equity and to finance domestic policies more responsibly. They’re needed to reduce as dramatically as possible the chances that nuclear weapons will land on American soil. But as Mr. Trump’s speech indicates, there’s no reason to suppose that he’s even considering this type of disruption.

The second set of clashing ideas or impulses has to do with the overall purpose of American foreign policy. I’ve been writing for decades that the main flaw in the internationalist approach dominating the country’s diplomacy for decades has been its insistence that the United States can be no more secure, prosperous, or free than the world at large. Therefore, internationalism (which Mr. Trump and many of his supporters tend to call “globalism”), whether in its conservative or liberal forms, has pursued a worldwide reformist and policing agenda even in areas where the United States had no tangible stakes whatever, or where the benefits never remotely approached the costs and risks.

In his NSS speech, Trump (again) rightly lambasted the archetypical post-Cold War version of this internationalism: “nation-building.” He emphasized that “We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone” and repeated an important (potentially and constructively) disruptive in marker laid down in previous addresses:

“We will pursue the vision we have carried around the world over this past year — a vision of strong, sovereign, and independent nations that respect their citizens and respect their neighbors; nations that thrive in commerce and cooperation, rooted in their histories and branching out toward their destinies.”

The point about a world of “strong, sovereign, and independent nations” represents long overdue pushback against the globalist objective of a world increasingly governed by ever more powerful international rules and institutions that can only undermine national self-rule – and are likeliest to focus on restraining U.S. freedom of action.

But the business about respecting citizens and neighbors (along with his concern about “vigorous military, economic, and political contests…now playing out all around the world”), and thriving in commerce and cooperation, too strongly resembles the standard internationalist boilerplate that has launched the nation on so many, often disastrously, misguided Americanizing missions.

And although an explicit Trump-ian return to nation-building etc seems wildly improbable, first consider the president’s description of his anti-terrorism goals in the Middle East, and then try to figure out how they can be reached without transforming this dysfunctional region into something light years from where it is now, and that it has never been: “confronting, discrediting, and defeating radical Islamic terrorism and ideology” and preventing “terrorists such as ISIS to gain control of vast parts of territory all across the Middle East.”

Far better for him to focus like the proverbial laser beam on “not letting them into the United States” – a goal that, however difficult, is far more practicable than curing what ails a remote, often hostile part of the world with which the United States has almost nothing in common.

The conventional wisdom about documents like the National Security Strategy is that they’re overwhelmingly for show, have virtually nothing to do with an administration’s day in and day out decisions, and lack any meaningful predictive power. Ditto for sweeping presidential speeches on grandiose subjects. And again, the conventional wisdom isn’t entirely wrong.

But as even cynics tend to concede, just as NSS-like reports result from the work of numerous government agencies and therefore hundreds of junior and senior officials (including political appointees), prepared presidential remarks (even in this administration) usually represent the combined efforts of many White House officials and also incorporate input from a wide range of government agencies. As a result, it’s far-fetched to suppose that they’re completely devoid of meaning. For me, they can reveal two important insights about a chief executive’s foreign policy outlook and potential.

First, as suggested above, they can yoke presidents to ill-considered and even dangerous commitments. Consequently, they can create equally ill-considered and even dangerous public expectations, too. Of course, circumstances force politicians to execute U-turns all the time, but the more obvious they are (because they reverse positions prominently staked out), the more (needlessly) damaging they can be.

Second, and more important, they speak can volumes about how well presidents can handle the challenge of making hard foreign policy choices, their related willingness to acknowledge in the first place that not all good things are possible simultaneously, or even close, and their consequent ability to establish sustainable priorities. In these respects, the president’s remarks about his administration’s first NSS display too many of the shortcomings that produced globalism’s major failures.

Im-Politic: More Fake News on Trump and Muslims

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Barack Obama, CAIR, Council on American-Islamic Relations, George W. Bush, Hamas, Holy Land Foundation, Im-Politic, Immigration, Mainstream Media, Muslims, Politico, Sally H. Jacobs, terrorism, travel ban, Trump

American’s mistrust of the Mainstream Media is so great that even the Mainstream Media is getting worried. If these reporters and editors keep turning out slanted stories like Politico‘s article yesterday reporting a growing national shortage of Muslim clerics, their trust deficit can only deepen.

The main message that author Sally H. Jacobs and the Politico staff wanted to send is stated clearly in the headline and subhead: “America is Running Out of Muslim Clerics. That’s Dangerous: How Trump’s travel ban worsened a shortage of qualified preachers – and why that’s dangerous.”

And the piece does contain several anecdotes about imams from Muslim countries invited to serve mosques in the United States being turned away during the last year by U.S. immigration authorities. Moreover, it leads off with a story about one of those congregations being unable to generate enough volunteer imams from its own ranks, ostensibly because of studies showing that violence against American Muslims has been rising since the 2016 election that put Mr. Trump in the White House.

But there are two enormous, related problems with these points – one which Jacobs and her editors don’t appear to be aware of but should have investigated further, and one they clearly are aware of (which of course is a clear indication of bias).

The problem that’s known to the Politico team is that the only big decrease in the numbers of imams permitted to enter the United States that emerges from the best data available took place under former President Obama. How do I know that this is known to Jacobs and the Politico staff? Because it’s mentioned in the article:

“In an effort to stem fraudulent applications for such visas, the number of R1s [a U.S. visa issued for temporary religious workers] issued during the Obama era declined significantly from 10,061 in 2008 to 2,771 in 2009. In the following years, though, the number rose steadily and in 2016 the government issued a total of 4,764 R1s.

“It is unclear whether or by how much those numbers have dropped during the Trump administration, as statistics for fiscal year 2017 will not be available until next year, says a U.S. State Department spokesman.”

And something else crucial should be apparent from these sentences: The reason that the Obama administration cracked down – even as the Muslim population of the United States kept rising, thereby boosting the demand for clerics – is because it perceived a phony imam problem that needed to be nipped in the bud. This problem, moreover, surely grew under the presidency of George W. Bush – who so many Never Trump-ers across the political spectrum are now portraying as a paragon of tolerance.

If only these vital points hadn’t been buried in Jacobs’ piece!

The problem that Jacobs and the Politico staff may not be aware of (but arguably should have been) is that the main hate crimes figures cited in the piece come from a source that, to put it mildly, has reputational and objectivity problems: The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Just one such problem: In 2009, a federal judge ruled that the U.S. government (under George W. Bush) “has produced ample evidence” to establish CAIR’s association with groups like the Holy Land Foundation (an Muslim charity convicted in the United States of funding Islamic militants) and Hamas (listed by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization since 1997).

There’s no denying that an actual or impending shortage of American Muslim clerics is an important and interesting development in its own right. And it raises the at least as important and interesting question of why Jacobs and Politico were so determined to turn a real news story into a fake news attack on President Trump?

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Case for a “Made in America” Approach

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Africa, AIDS, border security, climate change, corruption, diseases, foreign policy, foreign policy establishment, globalism, HIV, human rights, internationalism, Iran, Iran deal, Islamic terrorism, Israel, Jeffrey Goldberg, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Middle East, missile defense, nuclear proliferation, oil, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, population control, Project-Syndicate.org, shale, terrorism, The New York Times, Thomas Friedman

I’m picking on New York Times uber-pundit Thomas Friedman again today – not because of any personal animus, but because, as noted yesterday, he’s such an effective, influential creator of and propagandist for the conventional wisdom on so many public policy fronts. And just to underscore that it’s nothing personal, I’ll also put in my cross-hairs another, though lower profile, thought leader: Harvard political scientist Joseph S. Nye, Jr. The reason? Both recently have provided us with quintessential illustrations of how lazy – and indeed juvenile – the justifications for American international activism served up by the bipartisan foreign policy establishment have grown.

The analyses I’m talking about aren’t quite as childishly simplistic as the establishment theme I wrote about last month – the assumption that American involvement in alliances and international organizations and regimes is automatically good, and that withdrawal or avoidance is automatically bad. But because it’s a little more sophisticated, it can be even more harmful. It’s the insistence that whenever the United States faces a problem with an international dimension, the remedy is some form of international engagement.

A recent Friedman column revealed one big weakness with this assumption: It often logically leads to the conclusion that a problem is utterly hopeless, at least for the foreseeable future. Just think about the only sensible implications of this October 31 article, which insists that the apparently metastasizing threat of Islamic terrorism in Africa can’t be adequately dealt with through the military tools on which the Trump administration is relying.

Why not? “Because what is destabilizing all of these countries in the Sahel region of Africa and spawning terrorist groups is a cocktail of climate change, desertification — as the Sahara steadily creeps south — population explosions and misgovernance.

“Desertification is the trigger, and climate change and population explosions are the amplifiers. The result is a widening collapse of small-scale farming, the foundation of societies all over Africa.”

I have no doubt that Friedman is right here. And as a result, he has a point to slam the Trump administration “for sending soldiers to fight a problem that is clearly being exacerbated by climate and population trends….” (That’s of course a prime form of American international activism.)

But he veers wildly off course in suggesting that other forms of such activism – “global contraception programs,” “U.S. government climate research” and the like are going to do much good, especially in the foreseeable future. Unless he supposes that, even if American policies turned on a dime five or even ten years ago, Africa would be much less of a mess? The only adult conclusion possible is that nothing any government can do is going to turn the continent into something other than a major spawning ground for extremism and refugees.

And this conclusion looks especially convincing considering the African problem to which Friedman – and so many other supporters of such approaches – gives short shrift: dreadfully corrupt governments. For this is a problem that has afflicted Africa since the countries south of the Sahara began gaining their independence from European colonialists in the late-1950s. (And the colonialists themselves weren’t paragons of good government, either.)

So I’m happy to agree that we shouldn’t pretend that sending American special forces running around Africa helping local dictators will actually keep the terrorists under control (although as I’ve argued in the case of the Middle East, such deployments could helpfully keep them off balance). But let’s not pretend that anything Friedman supports will help, either – at least in the lifetime of anyone reading this.

Nye has held senior government foreign policy posts in Democratic administrations and, in the interests of full disclosure, we have crossed swords in print – mainly about the proper definition of internationalism and about a review of an anthology he edited that he didn’t like (which doesn’t seem to be on-line). But I hope you agree that there’s still a big problem with his November 1 essay for Project-Syndicate.org about the implications of America’s domestic energy production revolution for the nation’s approach to the Middle East.

In Nye’s words: “Skeptics have argued that lower dependence on energy imports will cause the US to disengage from the Middle East. But this misreads the economics of energy. A major disruption such as a war or terrorist attack that stopped the flow of oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz would drive prices to very high levels in America and among our allies in Europe and Japan. Besides, the US has many interests other than oil in the region, including nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, protection of Israel, human rights, and counterterrorism.”

Two related aspects of this list of reasons for continued American engagement in the region stand out. First, it’s completely indiscriminate. And second, for this reason, it completely overlooks how some of these unmistakably crucial U.S. interests can be much more effectively promoted or defended not through yet more American intervention in this increasingly dysfunctional region, but through changes in American domestic policies.

For instance, we’re (rightly) worried about nuclear proliferation, especially in Iran? How can today’s engagement policy help? Even if the the current Iran nuclear deal works exactly as intended, what happens when it runs out? Should we simply assume that Tehran will be happy to keep its nuclear genie in a bottle for another fifteen years? Will Iran be persuaded to give up the nuclear option permanently if Washington cultivates even closer ties with its age-old Sunni Muslim enemies, like Saudi Arabia?

Although I’m a missile defense skeptic – especially when it comes to the near-term threat from North Korea – isn’t figuring out a more effective way to repel an Iranian strike more likely to protect the American homeland? It’s certainly a response over which the United States will have much more control – and indeed, any control. In addition, if the United States withdraws militarily from the Persian Gulf region, Iran’s reason for launching such an attack in the first place fades away and, as I’ve argued in the case of North Korea, America’s own vastly superior nuclear forces become a supremely credible deterrent for any other contingencies.

Of course the United States faces a big Middle East-related terrorism problem. But as I’ve argued previously, the keys to America’s defense are serious border security measures. They, too, pass the “control test” with flying colors, and consequently seem much more promising than the status quo approach of trying to shape the region’s future in more constructive ways. But as I’ve also written, it would also make sense to keep in the Middle East small-scale American forces whose mission is continually harassing ISIS and Al Qaeda and whatever other groups of vicious nutballs are certain to appear going forward.

Nye’s point about the integration of global energy markets is a valid one. But in the same article, he acknowledges how the U.S. domestic energy revolution’s “combination of entrepreneurship, property rights, and capital markets” has changed the game for America. Why does he suppose that its effects won’t spread significantly beyond our borders?

As for Nye’s other two reasons for continued U.S. Middle East engagement, the notion that Washington can do anything meaningful to promote the cause of human rights simply isn’t serious, and Israel has amply demonstrated that, with enough American military aid, it can take care of itself.

Moreover, as you may recognize, the arguments for mainly focusing on border security to handle the Middle East terrorist threat applies to the African menace that’s preoccupying Friedman.

The main takeaway here isn’t that U.S. international engagement will never be needed to protect national security, safeguard the nation’s independence, or enhance its prosperity. It’s that Made in America approaches will turn out to be vastly superior in many cases – and certainly in many more cases than the bipartisan globalist foreign policy establishment recognizes. How long will it take for President Trump to get fully on board?

By the way, I first began exploring the idea of Made in America solutions to foreign policy problems and international threats when I read this article by current Atlantic Monthly Editor Jeffrey Goldberg. He argued in 1999 that the nation was making a big mistake ignoring Africa in its diplomacy because the continent was likely to become a source of deadly diseases sure to cross oceans and eventually afflict Americans and others; that “H.I.V., of course, is a particularly vicious warning shot”; and that it was high time for Washington to deal with “poverty, poor sanitation and political instability” as well as put “a global system of public health and disease surveillance in place.”

Not that Goldberg presented a stark either-or choice, but my reaction was “If we do need to figure out whether to place more AIDS-fighting emphasis on promoting African economic development, or on finding a cure through medical research, isn’t the latter much likelier to deliver major results much sooner?”

As is clear from the Friedman article, Africa’s array of problems continues unabated. And according to no less than the (devoutly globalist) Obama administration, as of last year, the United States was “on the right track to reach most of its “National HIV/AIDS Strategy” goals for 2020 – which seek an America that’s “a place where new HIV infections are rare” and where “high quality, life-extending care” is available.

Im-Politic: Fake Hate Group Facts from the Washington Post

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Abha Bhattarai, ACT for America, Center for Immigration Studies, CIS, hate groups, Im-Politic, Islamic terrorism, Mainstream Media, Mark Krikorian, Muslims, Southern Poverty Law Center, SPLC, terrorism, The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post

What on earth gives with journalists at the Washington Post? Both editors and reporters alike? I ask this because of the outrageous headline in today’s edition, accompanying an equally outrageous article, sliming an organization that’s concerned about the spread of Muslim extremism and terrorism into the United States as a “hate group.”

Not that there’s anything new about mainstream news media and their staffs being dismissive about these dangers. And not that there’s anything new about these newspapers, magazines, broadcast networks, and websites using as their guide to hate groups the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) – even though this organization’s definition of an anti-Muslim extremist can be wildly offbase.

What’s new, and upsetting, about this incident is that the Post itself recently published an article – by the head of the restrictivist immigration organization, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) – that its appearance alone (let alone the evidence it marshaled) revealed that the paper itself took most seriously the case that SPLC hate group ratings are simply biased garbage.

As noted by its Executive Director Mark Krikorian in a Post article just last March, SPLC has labeled CIS a hate group since February.  But as Krikorian also pointed out:

“CIS has testified before Congress more than 100 times over the past 20 years. We’ve also testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and our work has been cited by the Supreme Court and the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General. We’ve done contract work for the Census Bureau and the Justice Department. Our director of research was selected by the National Academies of Sciences as an outside reviewer for last year’s magisterial study of the fiscal and economic impacts of immigration. Our authors include scholars at Harvard,Cornell University, Colorado State University, the University of Maryland and elsewhere. We are one of the most frequently cited sources on immigration in the media (including in The Post).”

And he sensibly concluded:

“Equating a group that has such a track record of engagement in the public policy debate with, for instance, the Holy Nation of Odin has nothing to do with warning the public of ‘hate.’ The SPLC’s true purpose can only be to deprive the American people of points of view they need to hear to make informed and intelligent collective decisions.”

Yet this morning, just six months later, a Post headline declared that “Marriott says it will not cancel conference hosted by anti-Muslim hate group.” In other words, this development was portrayed as a fact. But in the third paragraph, reporter Abha Bhattarai (and clearly her editors) show that the paramount basis for this description was that same Southern Policy Law Center.

Now the group so labeled – ACT for America – is completely separate from Krikorian’s CIS. Here’s how it describes it purpose:

“ACT for America educates citizens and elected officials to impact public policy and protect America from terrorism. As a result, ACT’s grassroots network has driven the education process toward the successful passage of 84 bills in 32 states. ACT for America is continuing to expand its nationwide volunteer network that trains citizens to recognize and help prevent criminal activity and terrorism in the United States while preserving civil liberties protected by the United States Constitution.”

Bhattarai attempted to buttress the SPLC’s finding by reporting that ACT was

“behind anti-Muslim demonstrations across the country this summer that attracted white supremacist groups.

“‘I don’t believe in having Muslims in the United States,’ Francisco Rivera, of the white supremacist group Vanguard America, said at one of the demonstrations.

“‘Their culture is incompatible with ours.’”

Sounds like guilt by association to me. Moreover, there are reasons to view Bhattarai’s verbal brush as excessively broad in a more fundamental sense. Here’s how another big national news organization, The Los Angeles Times, depicted these activities. ACT, it stated, “has supported President Trump’s restrictions on refugees and travel from Muslim-majority countries. It organized protests throughout the country this summer against sharia law, which the group says is incompatible with Western culture.”

That appears to be much more precise — and less damning — phrasing. And I’m inclined to trust in it because the Times handled the headline for its version of this story properly, too:

“Marriott won’t cancel convention of what critics call anti-Muslim hate group.”

So the Times, unlike the Post, seems to understand the difference between a fact and an opinion. But the Post‘s failure in this regard is even less excusable because it had recently run material casting major doubt on the SPLC’s bona fides. In other words, it seems that its own reporters and editors don’t read a lot of what the Post produces. Maybe the rest of us should take this as a hint?

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Afghanistan Opportunity Trump Has Missed

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Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Barry Posen, border security, George W. Bush, Iran, Iraq, ISIS, Middle East, nation-building, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, refugees, Russia, September 11, Syria, Taliban, terrorism, The Atlantic, travel ban, Trump

Although I usually oppose U.S. overseas military interventions, I can understand President Trump’s decision this week to keep significant numbers of American troops in Afghanistan and even expand the presence (to some unannounced extent). What I do find disappointing is Mr. Trump’s apparent neglect of more promising alternatives that couldn’t possibly be called “defeat” or “retreat,” and his failure to describe realistically what may be the biggest fundamental choice the nation still faces in Afghanistan.

I shouldn’t have to remind anyone that Afghanistan under Taliban rule provided the base for the Al Qaeda terrorists responsible for the September 11 attack and so many other atrocities (on top of those that they have inspired by supportive groups and individuals). So clearly conditions inside that country (a problematic term, to be sure, as will be explained below) matter for U.S. national security. And it’s hard to imagine that even most Americans who are terribly – and understandably – frustrated with the sixteen-year U.S.-dominated military operation that has followed would disagree. The main question has always been how best to defend American interests.

After the Taliban were overthrown by a (highly successful) U.S.-led military campaign in the fall of 2001, Presidents Bush and Obama tragically opted for a standard American counter-insurgency effort to keep the Taliban out of power that combined continued military pressure on their remaining forces and strongholds with programs to promote Afghan economic, social, and political reform.

As critics (including me) predicted, this strategy of “nation-building” failed mainly because Afghanistan lacked the crucial prerequisites for nation-hood to begin with. So several years ago, as the Taliban began mounting a comeback largely as a result, I began supporting a fundamentally different approach: abandoning reform efforts and focusing on securing the United States’ essential aim in Afghanistan – preventing the Taliban or similar groups from consolidating control in enough territory to reestablish a safe haven capable of generating more terrorism.

This strategy would still involve U.S. military forces. But their top priority by far would not be supporting whatever Afghan government military exists, or training such forces (unless some especially promising units can be identified). Instead, the main American mission would be harassing the Taliban and its allies sufficiently to prevent that territorial consolidation, and the main instruments would be special forces and air strikes. And I argued that such operations could prevent ISIS in Iraq and Syria from posing a similar threat. Finally, I recommended that this approach be supplemented – and eventually superseded – by strengthening the security of America’s borders, to reduce greatly the likelihood that terrorists that still might originate from Afghanistan or anywhere else could actually reach the U.S. homeland.

The main advantages of this approach were, initially, concentrating American efforts on overseas goals that seemed both vital and attainable, as opposed to desirable for non-essential; and recognizing that the U.S. government ultimately is much likelier to succeed in controlling access to the United States than in comprehensively manipulating events in far-off lands.

In his speech this week, President Trump did a good job in describing the urgency of continuing to deny terrorists a safe haven in Afghanistan. But although he (once again) disparaged nation-building, he also paid it enough lip service to make clear that the basic goal remains in place. For example, he argued that “Military power alone will not bring peace to Afghanistan or stop the terrorist threat arising in that country” and asked India (and possibly America’s European allies) to “help us more with Afghanistan, especially in the area of economic assistance and development.” Surprisingly, moreover, he never connected his Afghanistan strategy with his so-far successful efforts to control American borders more effectively. Indeed, Mr. Trump didn’t even mention his proposed suspension of travel from terrorist-wracked countries (a list that, oddly, never included Afghanistan itself).

And the picture drawn by the President of his ultimate objective(s) was confusing, at best. Notably, on the one hand, he insisted that “From now on, victory will have a clear definition:  attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing al Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan, and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge.” On the other, he stated that the “strategically applied force” his administration will apply in Afghanistan “aims to create the conditions for a political process to achieve a lasting peace.” Still more puzzlingly, he allowed that a political settlement could include “elements of the Taliban.” To be sure, in a technical sense, these objectives aren’t mutually exclusive. But they sure don’t coexist easily, at least not at this point.

One especially worrisome consequence of this Presidential rhetoric is its suggestion, however cautious, that there’s an ultimate, satisfactory solution in Afghanistan that results from continuing U.S. involvement, at least in the foreseeable future. Much skepticism is warranted, mainly because the chances of Afghanistan becoming something politically cohesive enough to “take ownership of their future, to govern their society,” in Mr. Trump’s words, flies in the face of so much of this area’s history.

But that doesn’t mean that the United States should simply pull up stakes, either now, or somewhere down the road – because of that safe haven threat. My own preferred strategy would have resulted in America’s leaders acknowledging that Afghanistan is not a problem to be solved but, as if often true in world affairs, a condition that requires continual management – and then explaining that some forms of management are vastly more realistic, and cheaper, than others.

Nonetheless, an even more appealing alternative has emerged over the last week. In an August 18 article in The Atlantic, MIT political scientist Barry Posen made the case for a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan based on the intriguing observation that the countries neighbors, Russia and Iran, both have compelling interests in ensuring that the Taliban and similar groups don’t return to power. In the words of the piece’s title, the aim would be “to make Afghanistan someone else’s problem.”

Of course, I couldn’t help but notice that this proposal strongly resembles my recommendation for handling the challenge of increasingly powerful North Korean nuclear weapons. I’m also impressed, though, by Posen’s observation that both Russia (which is vulnerable to Islamic extremism infecting its own sizable Muslim population) and Iran (a Shia Muslim-dominated country theologically opposed to Sunni groups like the Taliban and Al Qaeda) have compelling reasons to frustrate America’s enemies in Afghanistan.

Posen also intriguingly responds to fears that a combined Russian-Iranian success would strengthen those anti-American countries’ efforts to dominate the entire Middle East. As he points out, Pakistan and China both would find this prospect alarming, too, and would seek to check Russian and Iranian influence.

Is Posen’s scheme fool-proof? Of course not. But it looks at least as promising as Mr. Trump’s plan, and it’s discouraging that this supremely, if Machiavellian, America-First strategy apparently wasn’t even considered by the Trump administration in its efforts to fix a badly broken U.S. Afghanistan policy.

Following Up: Britain’s May is Moving – Though Too Slowly – to Define the Real Terrorism Problem

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Barack Obama, Following Up, Islam, Islamism, London Bridge attacks, Manchester bombing, multiculturalism, Muslims, Susan Rice, terrorism, terrorists, Theresa May, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, travel ban, Trump, United Kingdom

British Prime Minister Theresa May’s remarks following Saturday night’s London Bridge attacks include one of the most forthright, perceptive, and necessary statements from an international leader (excepting President Trump) about the difficulties free societies face in combating terrorist acts committed by Muslims.

Specifically, these comments appear to recognize that these abominations are not simply the product of individuals having nothing whatever to do with their co-religionists, or with the supposedly peaceful, law-abiding, thoroughly assimilated – in other words, utterly unexceptional – communities they comprise. That is, May has closely approached stating that something is decidedly, and often dangerously, abnormal in too many of the Islamic neighborhoods and congregations found in the non-Islamic world, and particularly in the United Kingdom and in the rest of Europe.

As the Prime Minister declared, “While we have made significant progress in recent years, there is – to be frank – far too much tolerance of [Islamist extremism] in our country. So we need to become far more robust in identifying it and stamping it out – across the public sector and across society. That will require some difficult and often embarrassing conversations, but the whole of our country needs to come together to take on this extremism – and we need to live our lives not in a series of separated, segregated communities but as one truly United Kingdom.”

That last clause is extraordinarily important. As I wrote in the wake of last month’s suicide bombing in Manchester, the United Kingdom has officially glorified multiculturalism to such a degree that it has encouraged in many ways the emergence of Muslim population clusters with considerable degrees of autonomy from even the legal system – let alone the values – that holds in the rest of the country.  

May unmistakably has now attacked those policies, and by extension the assumption behind them:  that many of the core teachings of Islam are no better and no worse than those developed in the British Isles throughout their long history. They are simply different. As a result, if certain Muslims living in Britain wish, say, to govern family life with the precepts of their faith rather than British law, they should enjoy ample freedom to do so. Indeed, denying them these rights in the absence of clear and present dangers to – to what, it’s not entirely clear; certainly not the freedoms enjoyed in Britain by other individuals, like women – would be the antithesis of liberty and tolerance.

Yesterday, May strongly suggested that in practice, this segregation has created major dangers at least to national security and public order. And she deserves immense credit for recognizing that, however “difficult and embarrassing” pluralistic democracies like her country may find creating a more united United Kingdom, a concerted effort must not only be made – it must succeed.

Nevertheless, I worry that May herself is still a bit too embarrassed to identify the main problem. For along with describing the enemy belief system as “Islamist,” she also insisted that “It is an ideology that is a perversion of Islam.” Which, if you view as legitimate her alarm at segregated Muslim communities, is a little too neat.

After all, if extremist Islamism indeed “perverts” Islam, presumably this offense would be readily apparent to the vast majority of Muslims themselves. And not only would these segregated communities refuse to tolerate it, and be joining with the national authorities in “identifying it and stamping it out” (May’s own words, as per above). An outraged Muslim majority would be taking the lead in these matters.

But nothing could be more obvious than the general failure of Muslims anywhere to fit this description. Instead, as the Prime Minister herself complains, there has been “too much tolerance,” and the most dangerous manifestations are in those communities whose segregated nature produces Islam in a form relatively un-polluted by British and other non-Islamic values (whatever you suppose them to be).

So May has a ways to go before the clarification of thought that necessarily precedes any course of action with a reasonable hope for success. But she’s clearly much further along than much of the American leadership class. Take Susan E. Rice, national security adviser to former President Obama. On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, she was asked about President Trump’s proposal to suspend travel to the United States from a handful of majority Muslim countries that the Obama administration itself viewed as either overrun with terrorists or ruled by terrorist-sponsoring regimes. She explained her continued opposition (which is also shared by her former boss) in part this way:

“[I] think there’s a very real risk that by stigmatizing and isolating Muslims from particular countries and Muslims in general that we alienate the very communities here in the United States whose cooperation we most need to detect and prevent these homegrown extremists from being able to carry out the attacks.”

Leave aside your views on the travel ban proposal for or against. First of all, I’ve never been comfortable with the suggestion just made above (and by so many others) that there’s something fundamentally acceptable about residents of the United States (and especially citizens) conditioning their cooperation with law enforcement authorities that are combating violence on whether or not they feel stigmatized in some way by Washington, or any level of government. Are you? And remember – nearly all Muslims resident in the United States live here legally, so it’s not as if they need fear deportation like so many illegal Hispanic residents, or Hispanics here legally here with illegal friends or relatives.

But more important is Rice’s obliviousness to a glaringly obvious implication of her statement: Why, in the first place, are Muslim communities “the very communities here in the United States whose cooperation we most need to detect and prevent…homegrown extremists from being able to carry out the attacks”? It’s because so many of the actual attackers and attacker wanna-bes are coming from those communities. Obviously something about them has gone seriously wrong.

I’m not saying I know exactly what needs to be done domestically on top of existing efforts, and how new programs can be squared with essential Constitutional protections. It’s also clear that the United States doesn’t have the kind of related assimilation-segregated communities problems plaguing the United Kingdom and so much of Europe. But I do know that the more solidly the more extreme versions of multiculturalism take root in America, the larger these problems will grow. And the sooner the British more explicitly acknowledge major problems among their compatriots who practice mainstream Islam, the faster they’ll restore acceptable levels of safety to their concert halls, historic bridges, and the rest of their country.

Im-Politic: Manchester and the Wages of Multiculturalism

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assimilation, Christopher Hitchens, Democratic Party, homegrown terrorists, Im-Politic, immigrants, Islam, London, Londonistan, Manchester bombing, multiculturalism, Muslims, New Labour, Saudi Arabia, Sharia, terrorism, Tony Blair, United Kingdom

The aftermath of the horrific Manchester bombing is seeing the reappearance of a familiar pattern that keeps dangerously muddling major issues. I’m talking about the tendency to emphasize that the suspect was a “homegrown” terrorist, not an immigrant or a refugee from a majority Muslim country. Therefore, this reasoning goes, responses that emphasize restricting immigration from such countries are at best misguided and at worst bigoted. The latter charge has even become a mainstay of the U.S. judicial system.

The dangers and fallacies of this analysis become clear upon reviewing the emergence of the United Kingdom as a major target of terrorist attacks from Muslim extremists and a major source of foreign fighters and other operatives in the Middle East and worldwide for Al Qaeda and ISIS. If these terrorists aren’t newcomers to the UK, you can be sure they were overwhelmingly homegrown in the country’s Muslim immigrant communities. And their numbers and destructiveness point to shocking British failures both to control the country’s borders adequately and to assimilate Muslims safely. More specifically, they reveal the perils of the British government’s determination starting in the 1980s, and especially in the 1990s, to make the establishment of an identity politics focused on Muslims a top national priority.

Spearheaded by former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his New Labour party, London dealt with the country’s Muslims as a group with official standing, represented in government councils by a national organization created to “represent mainstream Muslim opinion.” It provided safe haven for prominent jihadists wanted for terrorism by countries like Jordan and France. It permitted a network of Islamic religious law (sharia) courts to spread across the country and formally recognized some rulings involving divorce and other domestic issues. Perhaps most damaging in the long term, it offered “state funding for Muslim schools on the same basis as Christian and Jewish schools” and paid no attention to their curricula – many of which were developed by arch-fundamentalists from Saudi Arabia.

Among the results? As the British government reported after 2001 riots involving white and South Asian gangs in several northern industrial towns, these localities contained

“‘separate educational arrangements, community and voluntary bodies, employment, places of worship, language, social and cultural networks,’ producing living arrangements that ‘do not seem to touch at any point.’ As one Pakistani Briton told the report’s authors, ‘When I leave this meeting with you, I will go home and not see another white face until I come back here next week.’ Last year, Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, warned that much of Britain was ‘sleepwalking its way toward segregation.’ And this segregation is especially entrenched among Muslims.”

In addition, “A non-Muslim child who lives in a Muslim-majority area may now find herself attending a school that requires headscarves. The idea of separate schools for separate faiths—the idea that worked so beautifully in Northern Ireland—has meant that children are encouraged to think of themselves as belonging to a distinct religious ‘community’ rather than a nation.”

In fact, by July, 2005 – in the wake of an Islamist bombing of London’s Tube that claimed 52 innocent lives – even Blair had had enough. In major speech, he warned that anyone who did not “share and support the values that sustain the British way of life,” or who incite hatred against Britain and its people, “have no place here.” But the Manchester attack, and numerous smaller predecessors over the previous twelve years, indicate that his turnabout – which by all accounts had been ambivalently implemented – came too late to slow the destructive dynamics he set in motion.

Skeptics will rightly note that the British experience is a far cry from America’s, with the U.S. Muslim community – whether immigrant or homegrown – showing many fewer signs of dangerous radicalization. At the same time, identity politics has now become such a hallmark of one of the country’s two major political parties that even many of its leaders are warning about the consequences (though mainly at the ballot box). And the late British writer Christopher Hitchens wrote of what had by that time come ruefully to be called “Londonistan” by the time of the 2005 bombing, “It‘s impossible to exaggerate how far and how fast this situation has deteriorated.”

Im-Politic: When Media Bias Turns Downright Incompetent

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Al Qaeda, Alexi McCammond, Axios.com, Barack Obama, Im-Politic, Islam, King Abdullah, King Salman, Michelle Obama, protocol, Queen Elizabeth II, Saudi Arabia, terrorism, Trump

It’s only the middle of a Saturday afternoon and I’ve already changed my mind twice about what to write about. So it goes in the blog business. I confess it’s not the most important subject on the merits that I’ve read about in the last 24 hours. But it is arguably one of the most emblematic of the era of instinctively anti-Trump media coverage (I refuse to dignify it with the word “journalism”) in which we’re living.

As I’m sure you know by now, President Trump left Washington, D.C. yesterday for his first foreign trip, and the first stop has been Saudi Arabia. And almost on cue, the new-ish media site Axios.com posted an article with the sensational headline “Conservatives ignore Trump’s bow to Saudi leader.” And if you know anything about recent U.S.-Saudi diplomacy and protocol, this does indeed seem like an inexcusable example of American right-wing hypocrisy.

After all, conservatives did blast former President Obama in 2009 for bowing to the Saudi king at a meeting in London. And in my view, they were right to do so. Monarchs insist on such gestures as acknowledgments of their supremacy over all supposedly lesser mortals. Why on earth should any U.S. leader – or any American – feed this deeply un-democratic and profoundly un-American conceit? And by the way, I’d apply the same standard to the Queen of England – who, unlike any kings of Saudi Arabia (in all likelihood a major funder of Al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups), seems like a perfectly nice and in many respects admirable individual.

So indeed – what the heck was Mr. Trump doing emulating his predecessor? And why aren’t conservatives up in arms? Here’s why. As is clear from the two photos in question, Mr. Trump was just bowing slightly to enable King Salman – who is shorter – to give him a medal. Then King Abdullah was also shorter than Mr. Obama. But no act like a medal award was involved that required a lowering of the Obama noggin or a bend at the waist.

Moreover, Axios reporter Alexi McCammond overlooked a genuine opportunity to point out a Trumpian hypocrisy on this score. The president’s wife and daughter, who accompanied him on the trip, and wore no headscarves – something that’s ordinarily a major no-no in Saudi Arabia’s arch-conservative Islamic theocracy. Lately, the Saudis have been making exceptions for visiting foreign dignitaries – hence the bareheaded Trump women. But private citizen Trump didn’t seem to know this in 2015, when he slammed then First Lady Michelle Obama for going headscarf-less on a visit to the Kingdom.

So not only are we living through an era of almost pervasively biased and double standard-ridden “journalism” and social media commentary (coming from all sides, as shown by the Trump comment above). Even by their own debased norms, we’re living through an era of thoroughly incompetent “journalism”:and social media commentary.