Im-Politic: The Globalist Never Trump Blob Shows its True Colors

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America First, Biden, Blob, Byron York, democracy, election interference, globalism, globalists, Im-Politic, Michael McFaul, Never Trumper, Russia, Senate Intelligence Committee, social media, The American Conservative, The Atlantic, Trump, Twitter, Washington Examiner

If you believed that you’d been wronged on social media because someone had erroneously described your tweet on purpose, wouldn’t you stand by that tweet or post? Apparently not if you’re Michael McFaul. At least not for a while.

And his activity on Twitter in the last few days is worth highlighting because even though you haven’t heard of him, McFaul is a card-carrying member of the bipartisan globalist U.S. foreign policy Blob. A recent tweet of his, moreover, epitomized the views of this group of current bureaucrats, former officials, Mainstream Media journalists, and think tankers that even President Trump’s partial implementation of a fundamentally different foreign policy strategy he calls “America First” poses such a mortal danger to both national and international security that any means justify the end of defeating it.

In addition, McFaul’s reaction to criticism also adds to the thoroughly Orwellian spectacle that’s been staged this last week by these and Never Trumpers in politics in (a) charging (based entirely on anonymous sources) that Mr. Trump has privately expressed contempt for Americans servicemen and women who have risked their lives for their country; (b) claiming that this unsubstantiated report, published Thursday in The Atlantic, proves the President’s contemptible character; and (c) insisting that some or all of the Atlantic piece’s allegations have been confirmed because they’ve been repeated by other anonymous sources to other journalists. (BTW, for all anyone knows – and for all these other journalists know – the sources they’re using may be the same accusers.)

As indicated above, McFaul is not your every day, garden variety tweeter. He’s considered a leading academic authority on Russia who served in the Obama administration for five years, including two as ambassador to Moscow. He’s got nearly 517,000 followers. He also tweets a lot: 85,000 to date! (Almost as much as yours truly!) And if you spend more than thirty seconds on his feed, you’ll see that he really doesn’t like the President or his policies.

Which is his right. It’s also his right to have tweeted the day the Atlantic article came out that “Trump has lost the Intelligence Community. He has lost the State Department. He has lost the military. How can he continue to serve as our Commander in Chief?”

But Washington Examiner political correspondent Byron York was just as entitled to respond on Twitter the following morning (Friday) that “This tweet has disturbing undertones in our democratic system. Trump is commander-in-chief because he was elected president, and he will remain commander-in-chief as long as he is president, for a second term if re-elected.” 

McFaul, not surprisingly was outraged. He tweeted back to York that evening : “Byron, you know DAMN well that I was not advocating a coup! You know damn well that I support democracy 100%, at home and abroad. Of course Americans voters, including 2 million federal workers, determine who the CiC is. I tolerate such nonsense from trolls. But from you? Wow.”

But here’s an even bigger “Wow.” When you clicked on the York cite of the original tweet, Twitter told you it was no longer available. McFaul had deleted it.

The plot sickened yesterday afternoon when McFaul himself evidently recognized how feckless his actions looked. He sent out the following Tweet, which added a sentence to the original: “Trump has lost the Intelligence Community. He has lost the State Department. He has lost the military. How can he continue to serve as our Commander in Chief? Our soldiers, diplomats, and agents deserve better. We deserve better. #Vote.”

Which returns us – and him – to Legitimate Opinion-Land. But McFaul needed prompting, as several of his followers and others had previously asked him why he deleted the original if was so indignant over York’s comments. Moreover, McFaul is hardly inarticulate. Why didn’t he include this qualifier in the original?

Even stranger: In a follow up tweet, McFaul stated “I retweeted with a clarifying sentence. 50,000 + people understood exactly what I meant. But trying to be more precise to the handful who I confused or deliberately distorted my views. But I know @ByronYork personally. There’s NO WAY he could believe that I’d support a coup.” In other words, lots of furious backtracking for a confused or mendacious handful.

Or was it a handful? Shortly before that tweet, McFaul had told his followers “Im deleting this tweet below. It has been misunderstood –whether deliberately or unintentionally — too much. Here is what I meant to say: If you believe Trump has not served our country well as Commander in Chief, vote him out of the job in November. https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1302071499914842112”

At the same time, McFaul’s clear and ongoing belief in the fundamental illegitimacy of Mr. Trump’s presidency can’t legitimately be questioned. Just late last month, in an on-line op-ed , he wrote that a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report had shown that:

“Far from a hoax, as the president so often claimed, the report reveals how the Trump campaign willingly engaged with Russian operatives implementing the influence effort.”

Even worse, in his eyes,

“[S]ome of the most egregious practices from the 2016 presidential campaign documented by the Senate investigation are repeating themselves in the 2020 presidential campaign. Once again, Putin wants Trump to win and appears to be seeking to undermine the legitimacy of our election. Just like in 2016, Putin has deployed his conventional media, his social media operations and his intelligence assets to pursue these objectives.

“Most shockingly, Trump and his allies have decided to — again — play right along.”

To McFaul’s credit, he at least acknowledged that “China, Iran and Venezuela now in the disinformation game” as well. (For details on China’s massive efforts, see my recent American Conservative article.)

He added that “it will be up to American voters to decide when and how cooperation with foreign actors during a presidential election crosses the line,” but indicated that the main reason was “Because waiting for criminal investigations or more congressional hearings will be too late….”

Most ominously, McFaul continues to maintain that the President has remained loyal to Putin, not once criticizing him in public and often undermining policies from his own administration to contain and deter Putin’s belligerent behavior abroad.”

In contrast, Democratic nominee Joe Biden “has affirmed that his campaign will not use information or accept assistance provided by foreign actors….In addition, Biden has assured Americans that he would retaliate in response to any foreign interference.”

So when McFaul declares that “Trump and Biden’s contrasting positions on Russian interference in American elections are clear. Whether voters care about these differences, however, is not as obvious,” it sounds to me that if the President is reelected, the de-legitimization campaign by McFaul and the rest of the Blob will continue. You don’t have to call that a coup to recognize it’s not democratic politics-as-usual, either.

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Im-Politic: Have Americans Got Family Policy All Wrong?

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David Brooks, education, extended family, families, globalization, Im-Politic, Immigration, nuclear family, social policy, The Atlantic, women

David Brooks has scored a four-bagger with his new Atlantic article on whether the recent American focus on maintaining and fortifying the nuclear family has been such a hot idea. He’s powerfully challenged the conventional wisdom about a long-time social and cultural institution and public policy goal. He’s taught readers fascinating and important lessons about American social history. He’s spotlighted a host of recent developments and trends on this crucial front. And (I guess this is just my own personal bag) in the process, he’s reminded me of what a clueless snob I can be in jumping to conclusions.

To continue momentarily on a personal note, I was staring in disbelief as I wrote most of the above, for Brooks, a New York Times columnist, has never struck me as much more than the kind of establishment conservative who long dominated the Republican Party and the right half of the mainstream media, and who’s spent the last three years bitterly inveighing against the rise of Trump-ian populism – without offering any useful suggestions as to what might replace it.

It’s true that Brooks had also made quite a name for himself as a social and cultural commentator, but I never paid much attention to these writings. If his new Atlantic article is any indication, that was a major mistake.

I’m not entirely sure I agree with Brooks’ main policy argument – that it’s no longer possible to restore the nuclear family’s primacy in American society, because that prominence only emerged because of overall national conditions in the post-World War II United States that simply can’t be replicated. In particular, I still strongly doubt that the developments that have weakened the nuclear family were inevitable, or were all inevitable, and are therefore irreversible.

I’m thinking of indiscriminate economic globalization and Open Borders-friendly mass immigration policies that have destroyed generations of middle class jobs and the incomes and economic opportunity they create; welfare policies that surely discouraged to some degree the maintenance, especially in the African-American community, of traditional two-parent families; the ever-mounting incompetence of the nation’s public primary and secondary schools; and a values transition that (thankfully) fostered greater social and cultural freedom and diversity, but that also unmistakably encouraged individualism, pointless exhibitionism, and the insistence on instant gratification to run riot, and all but scorned the idea of commonly accepted norms, self-restraint, and short-term sacrifice for long-term gain.

In other words, maybe the dominance of the nuclear family nurtured much of the economic progress and prosperity in particular that characterized the 1950s and 1960s, rather than the other way around.

But what I’m thinking mainly about today aren’t those big policy and (inevitably politicized) questions, but about some of the forms of extended families that Brooks mentioned prominently, and that I had completely forgotten about. Not that I’m the only one. But this blind spot recently led me in particular to ridicule someone and his outlook on life (not to his face, but to friends and relatives) who deserved much better.

It came at a wedding during which at one point, the father of the groom stood up to give his toast to the happy couple, and began waxing nostalgic (as parents at these moments understandably do) about the good old days of his son’s youth. He was anything but silver-tongued, but one point he made struck me at the time as especially absurd and revealingly parochial. Back then, he pointed out, so many of the aunts and uncles and cousins lived on the same block, and we saw each other all the time. But now, most of the family has spread out as far as – and he named a town a whole two towns, and only a few miles, away.

I found this hilariously small-minded, and missed few opportunities to bring up his remarks and what the volumes they allegedly and unflatteringly spoke about this kind of crimped perspective (which also characterized many attendees at the affair).

But as Brooks’ article pointed out, these types of extended families have been the norm for much of American history, and boasted and nurtured many virtues that sadly are in short supply today – like community and mutual support and the spread of constructive social and personal norms and values.

So as I was reading his piece, I began to think that yes, there’s a big difference between being able to spontaneously run into relatives just by stepping out the front door and seeing them on the front porch across the street, or at the supermarket, and needing to take a short drive two towns over in order to visit.

And I began thinking about the history of both sides of my own childhood nuclear family. My father’s father came to America from Lithuania and was aided almost as soon as he stepped off the boat not only by various Jewish-American charities, but by relatives that preceded him and by an organization comprised of other immigrants from the same town. He remained active in their affairs for the next five or six decades.

My mother’s parents lived in a small apartment building in the south-ish Bronx that was full of related families. I spent the first nine years of my own life in a small apartment building in Flushing, Queens (New York City) that was dominated by two or three closely-related families. They not only socialized constantly; they took summer vacations with each other at the same bungalow colony a little ways upstate.

So most of my playmates were each other’s cousins. Moreover, I also went to grade school with and hung out with a bunch of Irish-American kids from across the street who were related as well. Meanwhile, when we were very young, the various mothers took their turns walking us the six blocks to and from P.S. 20. And at about the same time, when my brother was born, we moved upstairs to a larger apartment in the same building and my mother’s mother moved into our old place. I.e., instant babysitter!

These networks, by the way, didn’t vanish even in the suburban north shore of Long Island to which my family moved in the early 1960s. Even though single family houses had replaced apartment buildings, lots of our neighbors in our community were very chummy, and have remained so. Ditto for their kids. (My father was kind of standoffish for various reasons, but the sheer number of chuldren for my brother and I to play with and the advantages of car-pooling kept us at least in the outer reaches of these circles.)

Nor, apparently, was this community unique. I was very moved about a year ago to read a Facebook post from an alum of my high school (who I didn’t know but have connected with since) to another alum (who I didn’t know either and haven’t connected with) fondly remembering the days when all the families on their block held cookouts and other backyard parties together and went on outings and looked after each other’s kids.

And according to Brooks, these patterns and structures were common during the 1950s and 1960s:

“[N]uclear families in this era were much more connected to other nuclear families than they are today—constituting a “modified extended family,” as the sociologist Eugene Litwak calls it, ‘a coalition of nuclear families in a state of mutual dependence.’ Even as late as the 1950s, before television and air-conditioning had fully caught on, people continued to live on one another’s front porches and were part of one another’s lives. Friends felt free to discipline one another’s children.”

Brooks isn’t indiscriminately nostalgic for extended families, and rightly notes major drawbacks:

“[T]hey can…be exhausting and stifling. They allow little privacy; you are forced to be in daily intimate contact with people you didn’t choose. There’s more stability but less mobility. Family bonds are thicker, but individual choice is diminished. You have less space to make your own way in life.”

And no small matter: “[M]ost women were relegated to the home. Many corporations, well into the mid-20th century, barred married women from employment: Companies would hire single women, but if those women got married, they would have to quit. Demeaning and disempowering treatment of women was rampant. Women spent enormous numbers of hours trapped inside the home under the headship of their husband, raising children.”

Further, these extended families do tend to encourage parochialism that can too easily degenerate into outright ignorance of, indifference to, and even hostility toward the outside world, or certain major portions of it.

Is some kind of middle ground possible? Brooks insists that that train has left the station:

“Today, only a minority of American households are traditional two-parent nuclear families and only one-third of American individuals live in this kind of family. That 1950–65 window was not normal.”

Again, I’m skeptical about abject pessimism – just as I am about Brooks’ (cautious) optimism about the possibility of building a healthy society with many more non-nuclear families and many fewer nuclear families than even exist today. More important for now, though, is recognizing Brooks’ stunning achievement – which will force any but the completely closed-minded to start thinking.

Following Up: The New York Times’ Fake History of the U.S. is Spreading

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1619 Project, African Americans, education, Following Up, history, journalism, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, racism, Sean Wilentz, slavery, The Atlantic, The New York Times

Since Americans’ mistrust of the news media keeps getting stronger, it’s a safe bet that they’d be pretty upset to find out that one major news organization is playing a bigger and bigger role in shaping their childen’s education. And they could well become livid if they learned that this media influence in the schools is growing even as scholars in the relevant field are concluding that much of the material being propagated is bunk.

Yet that’s exactly what’s been happening with The New York Times‘ 1619 Project. As I reported in a post last year, the project, named after the year the first black African slaves were brought to North America, seeks to [its words] “reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.” The Times‘ reason for undertaking this effort? Its conclusion that “our story” as a nation hasn’t been told “truthfully.”

As I explained last year, the big problem with the 1619 Project isn’t that reconsideration of any aspect of U.S. history (or any history) should be beyond the pale, but that a news organization like The Times has no qualifications to undertake this task. Even more troubling: The Times lately has endorsed the view that it should act like a news organization with a substantive agenda, or several of them. And one of them is writing “about race and class in a deeper way than we have in years” because “America [has] become so divided by Donald Trump.”

Now confirmation has just emerged making clear that this bias has significantly infected the 1619 Project, and it comes not only from the ranks of America’s academic historians, but from historians with decidedly progressive views. Their case was summarized (at length) by Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, who concluded in a piece in The Atlantic (itself a pretty progressive publication) that although the role of slavery and racism in American history “remains too little understood by the general public,” The Times in many cases sought to fill the gap “through falsehoods, distortions, and significant omissions.”

What’s arguably worse, as Wilentz’ account makes clear, The Times not only blithely brushed off all of the historians’ critique. It doubled down on its propagandizing.

And here’s what’s clearly worse: The paper’s efforts to introduce this shoddy excuse for scholarship into school curricula have been succeeding. According to this report, 1619 Project materials are now being used or will soon in school systems in Chicago; Newark, New Jersey; Washington, D.C.; and Buffalo, New York. A New York City school is teaching with the Project as well, And The Times is working with an important ally – the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which has produced a variety of “curricular resources,” including “a reading guide for the issue, activities to engage students, and more.

It’s bad enough that American journalism keeps spewing out Fake News. It now needs to be spreading Fake History? And the nation’s schools need to be swallowing it?

Making News: National Radio China Trade Wars Interview Now On-Line…& More!

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China, Gordon G. Chang, i24News, tariffs, Thaddeus McCotter, The Atlantic, The John Batchelor Show, Trade, trade war, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I’m pleased to announce that the podcast is now on-line of my interview last night on John Batchelor’s nationally syndicated radio show providing an update on President Trump’s threatened tariff hikes and their possible impact on the U.S.-China trade conflict.  Click here for an illuminating discussion with John, me, co-host Gordon G. Chang, and former Michigan Republican Congressman Thaddeus McCotter.

Also, it was especially great to receive from i24News a link to the video of last night’s China trade interview on that Israeli television network.  Click on it, and you should be able to access the segment via the download button and then opening it up.

Finally, a useful analysis of the trade conflict appearing in an Atlantic post today featured a recent RealityChek explanation of why it’s so unlikely that the negotiators can reach a deal that serves U.S. interests.  Click here to read it.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming (and recent!) media appearances and other developments.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Atlantic’s Hatchet Job on Trump’s Trade Policy and Trade Negotiator

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Chad Bown, China, globalization, James Bacchus, Matt Peterson, Merit Janow, multinational companies, Peterson Institute for International Economics, Robert Lighthizer, The Atlantic, Trade, trade war, Trump, U.S. Trade Representative, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I wish I could say that, in the process of ringing out the old year, America is ringing out incompetent or willfully ignorant journalism about U.S. trade policy. But a looooong article just published by The Atlantic on U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer makes painfully clear that that point remains as far away as ever.

The article, by Atlantic Senior Editor Matt Peterson, would deserve quick dismissal simply due to one of its major themes: that Lighthizer, President Trump’s chief trade negotiator, takes a hard line on the issue in general, and on China in particular, because he’s long been in the pocket of the domestic steel industry as one of its principal trade lawyers.

This smear is especially rich because a trade policymaker lionized by Peterson as a strong opponent of such conflicts of interest and consequent paragon of policy virtue – another American trade lawyer named Merit Janow – followed her stint as a senior magistrate at the World Trade Organization (WTO) – by accepting a position as “a charter member of the International Advisory Council of China’s sovereign wealth fund, China Investment Corporation or CIC.” That is, she jumped onto the payroll of the Chinese government.

But more fundamentally troubling about Peterson’s piece is its – sadly, standard – description of the WTO as an institution that defends and promotes the interests of the entire American economy. How so? By creating a U.S.-style court of law that would impartially mete out commercial justice but that could be used especially effectively by American diplomats highly skilled in working with such systems. One genuine contribution made by Peterson is reporting evidence that Lighthizer himself once apparently bought into this argument.

These views, however, completely ignore two related, alternative interpretations of the WTO’s creation that at deserve consideration at least because one of them is so regularly repeated by journalists and WTO supporters. That interpretation portrays the WTO as an arrangement that aimed primarily at restraining America’s ability to combat predatory foreign trade practices by enmeshing the United States in a simple majoritarian legal system in which all countries – including the vast majority of members who relied heavily on such mercantilism for their growth.

Chad Bown of the (pro-WTO) Peterson Institute for International Economics, one of the American media’s “go to” trade policy commentators made this point abundantly clear when he told The New York Times that the main foreign impetus for establishing the WTO was a determination to find ways of resisting America’s (successful) 1980s unilateral efforts to frustrate their trade predation and pry open their markets to U.S.-made goods.

Former WTO official (and U.S. Member of Congress) James Bacchus made a similar point earlier this year when he criticized Lighthizer (and other American economic nationalists) for their belief that the United States was better off under the pre-WTO world trade system.  Why?  Because it left the (democratically elected) U.S. government “free to go on the offence aggressively in trade by taking unilateral trade actions without any international legal constraint.”

The second, related alternative interpretation of the WTO’s creation focuses on the U.S. multinational corporations that dominated U.S. trade policymaking under Mr. Trump’s immediate predecessors: They strongly favored subjecting unilateral American power in trade diplomacy because their overseas operations – especially those geared toward supplying the American market – benefited immensely, often at the expense of domestic competitors, from many of the predatory foreign practices targeted by many American leaders who don’t shill for these offshoring interests. China’s longstanding beggar-its-neighbors currency policies have been only one example.

The Atlantic is rightly proud of its long history of publishing “iconic thinkers” and “covering ideas that matter.” Many more articles like Peterson’s, and it will also be known for hatchet jobs.

Im-Politic: The Mainstream Media’s Latest Immigration Fakery

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criminal aliens, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, Mainstream Media, The Atlantic, Trump, Vietnam, Vietnam War

Just when I thought that it had become impossible for the Mainstream Media’s pro-Open Borders bias and Trump Derangement Syndrome to make me genuinely angry, along came The Atlantic‘s article yesterday on Trump administration policy toward refugees from Vietnam – including those who arrived in the Vietnam War’s tragic aftermath.

The piece – loudly advertised as an “exclusive” – clearly sought to convey the impression that the Trump administration has decided to start deporting certain groups within this population simply because it’s determined to rid America of as many foreign-born residents as possible, along with preventing the entry of as many newcomers as possible. In the case of the Vietnamese, of course, this policy would be morally outrageous both because so many refugees aided the U.S. military effort and (along with their descendants) face grim fates if they return; and because the United States inflicted so much damage on the country during its decade-plus of massive armed involvement. (I’m not trumpeting a position on the war – which I opposed – here. Just stating a fact.) When I saw the headline, I was up in arms myself.

Imagine my surprise, then, to discover (in the fourth paragraph) what’s really changing:

“The administration last year began pursuing the deportation of many long-term immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, and other countries who the administration alleges are ‘violent criminal aliens.’”

Why is that a change? Because, in the authors’ view, this decision violates

“a unique 2008 agreement  [between Washington and Hanoi] that specifically bars the deportation of Vietnamese people who arrived in the United States before July 12, 1995—the date the two former foes reestablished diplomatic relations following the Vietnam War.”

But Trump administration officials have concluded, and told The Atlantic on the record, that the agreement “does not explicitly preclude the removal of pre-1995 cases.”

Which seems eminently reasonable when the article finally makes clear that the U.S. intent now is not indiscriminately to round up Vietnamese-Americans and kick them out of the country in order to advance (circle one or both) nativist or racist goals. Instead, the intent was to treat as exempt from the 2008 deal “people convicted of crimes.”

Indeed, these folks were not only convicted of crimes. According to the Department of Homeland Security’s Katie Waldman, “these are non-citizens who during previous administrations were arrested, convicted, and ultimately ordered removed by a federal immigration judge.”

But how did the Atlantic authors describe a U.S. government effort finally to get rid of convicted criminals who clearly have been using delaying tactics to put off removal orders by the American judicial system? As

>”the latest move in the president’s long record of prioritizing harsh immigration and asylum restrictions….”

>a ”new stance [that] mirrors White House efforts to clamp down on immigration writ large, a frequent complaint of the president’s on the campaign trail and one he links to a litany of ills in the United States.”

>a “shift” that “leaves the fate of a larger number of Vietnamese immigrants in doubt.”

>a betrayal of many “refugees from the Vietnam War. Some are the children of those who once allied with American and South Vietnamese forces, an attribute that renders them undesirable to the current regime in Hanoi, which imputes anti-regime beliefs to the children of those who opposed North Vietnam.”

In fact, if anything, the new Trump policy changes a 2017 administration decision that makes no sense at all for anyone who believes that criminal aliens have no business remaining in the United States one minute longer than necessary: exempting these criminals from deportation if they arrived in the country before 1995. What on earth was that about? And why does The Atlantic, by posting this “scoop” seem to object so strongly – especially since nowhere does this piece challenge the convictions?

Im-Politic: George Bush’s Biggest Legacy

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alliances, America First, Cold War, George H.W. Bush, globalism, Im-Politic, international institutions, The Atlantic, The National Interest

OK, so that newspaper op-ed on the U.S.-China trade truce I mentioned in yesterday’s post won’t be appearing on-line till tonight. That enables me to sound off about the other big news of the past weekend: the passing of former President George H.W. Bush.

The fawning reactions by the nation’s intertwined bipartisan political establishment and Mainstream Media were off-putting in any number of ways – only beginning with the transparently crude, self-serving attempts to contrast the alleged courtly golden age of selfless, noble American politics and policy he represented (and that they allegedly champion today) with the triumph of coarseness, hyper-partisanship and grifter-ism supposedly represented by Donald Trump’s election as President.

Not that Bush wasn’t an admirable personality in many ways, including his unmistakable record as a devoted, loving husband and father, and his courageous service in World War II. And not that he didn’t display some equally admirable traits as President – including a willingness to compromise, an ability to learn and evolve, a refusal to demonize political opponents, and that famous “prudence” lampooned by Saturday Night Live’s Dana Carvey.

But Bush’s presidency was marked by way too many major blind spots and outright failures to deserve canonization, and it’s no coincidence that the most serious entailed a refusal to recognize the obsolescence and flaws of the globalist priorities and strategies to which the nation’s chattering classes still cling.

It’s possible to single out significant individual Bush blunders, like his enthusiasm for offshoring-friendly trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the global agreement that created the World Trade Organization (WTO); his indifference to predatory foreign trade and broader economic practices that were undermining American industrial competitiveness; and his belief that greater U.S. and other foreign engagement with China would produce a People’s Republic that was more democratic, capitalist, and friendly to the West.

Way more important, however, is the broader globalist outlook he almost defiantly epitomized, and which was responsible for his biggest, closely related strategic and political mistakes.

On the strategic front, Bush does deserve credit for contributing to the overwhelmingly peaceful demise of the Soviet Union and the equally smooth unification of Germany – neither of was inevitable. But he squandered a critical opportunity to begin preparing Americans for the kind of fundamental transition away from intertwined Cold War approaches to both national security and economics that would have left the nation much safer and more prosperous than today.

Bush’s fans have a point when they insist that strong support of America’s Cold War alliance system was essential to ensure that the fall of communism didn’t trigger broader and potentially dangerous worldwide instability. Too much simultaneous upheaval could well have produced worrisome consequences in Europe in particular.

Yet Bush wasn’t content to view or portray the preservation of alliances and other Cold War institutions as temporary expedients needed to ensure a successful closure to that era. He repeatedly spoke of these arrangements and their survival as ends in and of themselves that were vital to defend and advance core American interests because those interests required nothing less than a thoroughly peaceful, stable, prosperous world. And in this respect, he embodied what I have described in The National Interest as the fatal mistake of American globalism, and one that, through endeavors that sought to achieve this utopian ambition, over the longer term has kept the nation exposed to utterly unnecessary risks, strapped it with equally unnecessary economic burdens, and left it less secure and economically healthy in the long run.

In other words, Bush repeatedly championed the globalist conviction that the best guarantors of America’s security and prosperity were not America’s own power, wealth, and potential, but those very international institutions whose effectiveness he prioritized. As a result, he dismissed the idea that genuine pragmatism recognized the superiority of a fundamentally different approach – ensuring the well-being of an already substantially secure and prosperous nation regardless of international conditions. And therefore, whenever expanding or consolidating the nation’s own material capabilities, or capitalizing on its geopolitical blessings, clashed with expensive and or risky efforts to bolster the institutions and inch toward globalism’s grandiose worldwide goals, he invariably chose the latter.

The political results were devastating, and if you accept the above analysis, they rightly limited Bush to a single term as president. For, as I wrote in The Atlantic back then, the objectives of U.S. foreign policy became increasingly remote from the most pressing concerns of the American people, and Bush never understood the gap. Indeed, he not only became known as a “foreign policy president.” He actually admitted he found dealing with overseas matters much more interesting than addressing issues on the home front – notably a short, shallow recession that struck the electorate as much more serious because the recovery remained “jobless” for so long. When his main 1992 rival for the White House, Bill Clinton, ribbed Bush’s indifference with the slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid,” the fate of “41” was all but sealed, and history served up what should have been a glaringly obvious lesson for the globalists.

That this political lesson has been both ignored and often emphatically rejected by America’s bipartisan globalist establishment is clear from its ostentatiously teary eulogies for Bush – and its contempt for a chief executive with at least a gut-level awareness of the popular appeal of the non-globalist approach he calls “America First.”

Moreover, in a stunning irony, the globalists keep ignoring how thoroughly their own approach has failed – and how quickly. How else to explain that, over the course of the three globalist post-41 presidents, Russia and China have reemerged as major security threats to the order they constantly deem an unprecedented and historic success? And don’t forget how globalism’s economic and political roots have been shredded by a worldwide financial crisis and painful recession stemming directly from its failures on the trade and investment front.

At the same time, precisely because this globalist establishment remains so powerful, and President Trump’s departure from its orthodoxy so partial, it’s premature to view George H.W. Bush’s passing as symbolizing the true end of a policy era. As the former president once said in another context, that would require more of a “vision thing” than the nation has been capable of producing for many decades.   

Im-Politic: Listen Closely to the Florida Students

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adolescence, families, Florida school shooting, gun control, guns, Im-Politic, mass shootings, mental health, Nikolas Cruz, Peggy Noonan, pop culture, Ron Powers, school shootings, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal

As I’ve written before, the upsurge in school shootings and other mass shootings in America must surely stem from multiple causes. Aspects of U.S. gun laws clearly are defective. But broader social and cultural trends are at work as well.

The student survivors of last week’s Florida school shootings who are demanding that their elders more effectively protect them and their generation – and of course all other potential victims – deserve major credit not only for the passion and eloquence with which they are pressing the case, but for recognizing that better mental health care is essential along with better ways of keeping guns from the other Nikolas Cruz’s in U.S. classrooms.

Nonetheless, there’s a gap between their clear prioritization of gun control on the policy level, evident in their anger at the National Rifle Association, and an emotion that seems much more elemental – and compelling. Moreover, it’s doubtful that any single new law or set of new laws will make a major difference on this particular front. Consider the following statements:

>From a student survivor: “We had been doing drills on this in the past month. In every single class period, my teachers had gone through safety protocols. We have safety zones, we have protocols for every single emergency….”

>From another student survivor: “If our legislators don’t take action, how can we ever feel safe?” (Same source.)

>From that same survivor: “…I will not feel safe going back to school myself until reasonable mental health care legislation and gun control legislation is passed. Because, at this point, it’s unacceptable. How many more students are going to have to die and have their blood spilt in American classrooms, trying to make the world a better place just because politicians refuse to take action?” (

>From a student at a neighboring school: “I’ve seen these shootings happen my whole life. I’ve grown up with them. I remember Sandy Hook. I remember every single one.” (Same source as the second quote.)

It’s painfully obvious, at least to me, that what we’re being told here is that these young people are literally terrified that the kid sitting next to them, or the one sitting alone at the far end of the lunchroom, or the one who was just expelled, or one of the aimless, surly slightly older kids or twenty-somethings hanging around the neighborhood or the mall, literally is a ticking time bomb capable of exploding at any times. Moreover, the adults who have raised them and teach them are alarmed by these threats, too.  And these (all too believable) fears reinforce can’t help but reenforce the contention that something terrible has happened in America in recent decades that has turned entirely too many adolescent boys in particular into actual or potential killing machines.

Columnist Peggy Noonan made this point with her characteristic common sense and eloquence in The Wall Street Journal last week. It’s definitely worth your while. (For the record, however, I’m not entirely convinced about the abortion point.) And if you think such claims are simply right-wing talking points, take a look at this 2002 piece in The Atlantic – no conservative stronghold.

As I’ve written, it’s absolutely true that school and other mass shootings don’t happen in other high-income countries where young people are exposed to the same kind of toxic pop culture that prevails in the United States (although where the breakdown or family and community haven’t been nearly so advanced?) – which strongly supports the belief that tighter gun control is the key to stopping them or dramatically reducing the numbers. But it’s also true that these tragedies were much rarer earlier in American history, when guns were much more widespread.

So again, I strongly applaud the activism of the Florida students. I hope it doesn’t fade. I hope it helps shame American leaders into taking more productive action. But I also hope the students, their peers, and other Americans start asking more persistently not only why so many young people can so easily buy or otherwise access shockingly destructive weapons, but why they want to.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Establishment Goes Farther Off the Deep End on North Korea

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alliances, allies, China, Cold War, deterrence, James Jeffrey, Japan, North Korea, nuclear war, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, South Korea, Soviet Union, The Atlantic, Trump

James Jeffrey’s new post in The Atlantic on the North Korea nuclear crisis has so much to commend it. (Yes, there’s a “but” coming, and it’s enormous, but let’s give him his due.)

The former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and Iraq valuably reminds readers of the dangers of assuming – as per the latest conventional wisdom – that North Korea’s motives for developing nuclear forces potent enough to threaten the American homeland are purely defensive. This confidence, he notes, may be convenient for justifying a call for the United States to clear the way for a negotiated solution to the crisis by backing off its longstanding insistence on Pyongyang’s denuclearization. But no one aside from Kim Jong-un himself can have any confidence in assessing what’s inside his head.

As a result, Jeffrey also recognizes that the nuclear deterrence strategy that helped prevent Soviet and Chinese aggression during the Cold War (and so far seems to be helping curb Russian and Chinese expansionism nowadays) is far from guaranteed to work against a leader with a history of erratic and even violent behavior, and who is heir to a regime with a similar history – including absorbing enormous sacrifices to “reunify” the Korean peninsula under its rule. (At the same time, Jeffrey seems to undercut these arguments at the end by calling the denuclearization goal unreasonable, and signaling his support for a compromise that would leave the North with “some nuclear capability” in exchange for “a ‘temporary’ diplomatic solution that stops North Korean development of systems that can strike the U.S.”

In addition, Jeffrey forthrightly explains that both the Cold War deterrence strategies and their latter-day Korean counterpart depended on a gamble that involved putting the U.S. homeland at risk of nuclear attack, and denying an American president any real choice but to push the nuclear button that would surely bring this about.

Finally, the author understands that U.S. security interests could be powerfully served – and deterrence on the Korean peninsula strengthened – by encouraging South Korea and Japan to develop their own nuclear weapons (although he never addresses the objection that neither country would likely go to these lengths as long as they can free-ride on the American defense guarantee).

So Jeffrey deserves great credit for going beyond conventional foreign policy thinking in many important respects. But in the most important respect by far, he’s solidly inside the consensus – which astonishingly, and let’s face it – derangedly – believes that there is any objective that the United States could achieve that’s worth any significant risk of nuclear attack on one or more major American cities.

Specifically, the author believes that North Korea may indeed have aggressive aims, and that the nuclear forces it will soon possess will be powerful enough to keep the United States on the sidelines if he attacks the South for fear that he will strike at the American territory. As a result, he believes that “the possibility of military action against North Korea could be understood not as a ‘good thing,’ but as the ‘least bad.’”

And although he does not call on the Trump administration to launch a “preventive war” to take out the North Korean nukes, he insists that steps that could result in such an attack on the United States, namely “a preemptive strike (or generating a credible threat of one to frighten China to act against Pyongyang), however awful, could be the least risky” way to a avoid several even worse alternatives.

And what are these alternatives? On top of the conquest of the South, and “abandoning 80 years of global collective security,” or watching “China intervene to ‘check’ Pyongyang, thereby pulling South Korea (and Japan) into China’s security orbit and ending the security regime the U.S. has maintained in the Pacific since 1945.”

I agree that these would be important setbacks for American interests. But would they be worse than watching several major U.S. metropolitan areas become burning, glowing wastelands? This is where I get off the boat – and I believe anyone with a lick of sanity should follow.

Do you and the rest of the American people agree? I strongly suspect the answer to both questions is “Yes,” but re the latter, here’s what’s most outrageous, and indeed unacceptable: We have no way of knowing, because all wings of the nation’s foreign policy establishment have pursued a strategy of hiding these risks from the public.

That’s why I keep contending that, given North Korea’s impending ability to hit the United States with nuclear weapons, the only policy capable of eliminating this threat (to the extent possible) is pulling the American forces out, thereby removing any reason for North Korea to launch a nuclear strike on American territory, and allowing the powerful, wealthy countries of the region handle Kim anyway they wish. Alternatively, let’s at least put this question – literally one of life and death – directly to the Americans who have been hoodwinked for so long and who would pay the price of hewing to the status quo, and see what they think.

Im-Politic: Some Major Surprises in Trump Poll Numbers

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African Americans, Hispanics, Im-Politic, polls, SurveyMonkey, The Atlantic, Trump, whites

Even if you’re skeptical that pollsters are great at divining public opinion, you’ll probably agree that the results of a recent survey about President Trump’s popularity are absolutely stunning. In particular, the findings, reported last week in The Atlantic, show Mr. Trump has made notable strides in winning over African-American men and women, and Hispanic men – groups that overwhelmingly voted against him in the 2016 presidential election.

At the same time, the news wasn’t all rosy for Mr. Trump. The same poll showed that he’s lost ground with key constituencies that supported his run for the White House – namely among white voters.

The results reported by The Atlantic come from an on-line poll, so there are some reasons for skepticism. But the sample size was unusually large – more than 605,000 Americans were interviewed in this manner.

According to the exit polls, the President won only eight percent of the black vote in 2016. But the new findings, from SurveyMonkey, shows that his popularity with African-Americans has grown over the last year. The firm says that 23 percent of black men and 11 percent of black women currently currently approve of his performance.

The exit polls surprised most observers by pegging Mr. Trump’s share of the Hispanic vote at 29 percent. The Atlantic piece doesn’t give an Hispanic total for the newest findings, but the author of the article, Ronald Brownstein, writes that, “Trump’s 2017 approval rating slightly exceeded his 2016 vote share among Hispanic men, and was slightly below it among Hispanic women. ” Indeed, among Hispanic men, Mr. Trump’s support hit 40 percent.

More good – though not great – news for the President: SurveyMonkey reports his overall approval rating at 42 percent. That’s low historically, but it’s a bit higher than reported by the smaller, though more frequent, soundings from the major polling companies.

But that’s where the good news for the President stops. Principally, Mr. Trump carried 66 percent of the overall white vote in 2016. The SurveyMonkey report shows that his approval rating among whites is now just 56 percent. Among college-educated whites, his favorability numbers are down from 48 percent to 40 percent, and among whites without a four-year degree, his support has slipped since Election Day from 66 percent to 56 percent. And his position weakened considerably among white women however this population is sliced and diced.

If you’re a glass half-full Trump backer, you could be heartened upon realizing that most of the negative trends could easily be reversed with just a little more discipline and reasonably good judgment from the Oval Office. If you’re a glass half-empty type, you’ll emphasize that both qualities remain in distinctly short supply.