Category: Foreign Policy

The Question of Russia and the Left: A response to Ryan Cooper

For the past week, there’s been a lot of discussion on Russia, Putin, Trump, and how leftists are responding to the issue. I’ve been participating in these conversations on social media. This past weekend, the conversation got a little crazy, when Columbia Law lecturer and Harper’s contributor Scott Horton engaged in some wild and irresponsible speculation about how the Russians may be backing certain Democratic primary candidates in the current elections. This morning, Ryan Cooper weighed in on the issue at The Week. I disagree with where he comes out on the issue. I want to say at the outset that I consider Cooper an ally. I don’t know him personally, but I very much admire his work. We follow each other […]

On the anniversary of 9/11

For me, 9/11 will always be a time of tremendous fear, stifling conformism, forced patriotism, and vicious nationalism. Which is why I’ve always found the claim that Trump represents a new authoritarianism, even fascism, to be so fanciful and false. There was a moment in the recent memory of this country when dissent really was stifled, when opposition really was suppressed, when the military and police were sanctified and sacralized, when the Constitution was called into question (not a suicide pact, you know), when the two-party system was turned into a one-party state, when the entire nation was aroused and compelled and coerced to rally behind the dear leader, when questioning the nation-state’s commitment to violence and war provoked the […]

Morbid Thoughts in Time of Trump

Trigger-warning: some morbid thoughts here, wrought by the day’s events. The one thing that’s made me super-nervous since the election, the major thing that has given me the kind of anxiety a lot of folks have been feeling nonstop since election night, is the possibility of him leading us into war. Not a 9/11-type event but the more old-fashioned escalation to battle, where reckless rhetoric leads nations to stumble or bumble into war. If I’ve had any precedents in my mind for the worst that may lie ahead, it’s not been Hitler, Mussolini, Berlusconi, and all the rest. It’s been World War I. It’s been senseless murder on a grand scale, of the sort the United States is more than capable […]

Migrants and refugees detained at JFK Airport, which is named after a passionate defender of immigration

As I write, migrants and refugees from around the world seeking a respite, refuge, or home in the United States are being detained at JFK Airport. An airport named after a man who, whatever his many failings and faults (I’m no enthusiast or subscriber to the Kennedy mystique), was passionate on the subject of immigration and the migration of peoples. Kennedy was a sharp critic of the country’s immigration restrictions and was, I believe, one of the inspirations, after his assassination, for the 1965 immigration reform bill, which Ted Kennedy pushed hard on the Senate floor. Right now, there is a growing contingent of protesters at JFK; if you can, join them in Terminal 4. In the meantime… We are […]

Share the Earth

Donald Trump thinks it’s appropriate to leave out any mention of the Jews on Holocaust Remembrance Day. So what happens when we remove any mention of the Jews from Hannah Arendt’s final statement in Eichmann in Jerusalem? And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with…the people of a number of other nations…we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. We get an apt description of Donald Trump’s executive order regarding immigrants and refugees—and of our revulsion for it, and for him.

January Journal

As some of you know, more and more of my commentary now appears on Facebook rather than on this blog. If you’re not averse to joining Facebook, you can catch it there; I encourage you to do so, as the conversations can be quite lively and good, involving lots of different folks. I’m maxed out on friends, but you can follow me. But since a lot of readers don’t want to join Facebook, I’m going to try to make it a regular feature—monthly or semi-monthly—to catch you up to speed on what I’ve been saying there. I’m going to collect various Facebook posts and post them here as a kind of regular journal or diary. Some will be out of date […]

Tim Kaine, and Other Faith-Based Politics

1. Christ on a stick, this is what I didn’t count on with the Kaine pick as VP. The problem isn’t the pick itself: it is what it is (see #2 below). The problem is the ejaculations of joy it prompts among the pundit class and the Twitterati, who now have to sell it to us as the greatest choice of a second since Moses appointed Aaron. And not because the pundits are on the Clinton payroll: I’d have a lot more respect for them if they were. No, they do this shit for free. Out of love. Rapture. And bliss. 2. I’m not one of those people who cares much about a VP pick. I don’t think it tells you […]

Check Your Amnesia, Dude: On the Vox Generation of Punditry

Last night, Donald Trump shocked the world, or at least the pundit class, when the New York Times published a wide-ranging interview Trump had given the paper on the subject of foreign policy. Trump said some scary things: that he didn’t think, for example, that the US should necessarily come to the aid of a NATO country if it were attacked by Russia. But he also said some things that were true. Like this: When the world sees how bad the United States is and we start talking about civil liberties, I don’t think we are a very good messenger. And while the article makes a muchness of Trump’s refusal to pressure Turkey over its response to the failed coup, the fact is that Obama hasn’t […]

What’s Going On? Thoughts on the Murder of the Police

On Friday, in an email to a journalist with whom I had been discussing the murder of five policemen in Dallas, I repeated a point I had been making since Dallas to various friends in private conversations and on Facebook: We’re going to be seeing more [anti-police] violence. The combination of returning military vets, with real training (and in some, perhaps many, cases, PTSD); the widespread availability of firearms; and the persistence of the fundamental grievance at the heart of all of this: it’s a witches’ brew. On top of that, I just have to believe there are some groups out there — less the lone wolves, more little groups — who are asking themselves these very questions [about the legitimacy […]

Michael Tomasky, from June to December

Michael Tomasky today, seven days after the attack in Orlando: I want to advance a theory: Americans in 2016 may have a less reactive response to terrorism than they had 15 years ago….We may also have figured out, or most of us may have, that the bluster and gasconade of the fear-mongers hasn’t really done us much good. Michael Tomasky in December, four days after the attack in San Bernadino: …the rights you [Muslims] have as Americans have to be earned, fought for….If anything Obama should have been more emphatic about this. He should now go around to Muslim communities in Detroit and Chicago and the Bay Area and upstate New York and give a speech that tells them: If […]

Robert Kagan, Donald Trump, and the Liberal Imagination

Robert Kagan has an oped on Donald Trump in yesterday’s Washington Post. It’s called “This is how fascism comes to America.” It’s got the liberal chattering classes chattering. It blames Trump on democracy and the mob, it cites Tocqueville, it gives a hand job to the Framers. For the liberal imagination, it’s the equivalent of a great massage. And it’s got critics on the left clucking. Kagan, you see, is a neocon who supported the Iraq War, so he’s not above suspicion as a commentator on the American way of violence. But if you say that, liberals will cry, Ad hominem! So let’s pay closer attention to what Kagan says, while being mindful of who he is. The two points, as we’ll see, are not unrelated. Trump, […]

Liberalism and the Millennials

Last night, Hillary Clinton and her online supporters went after Bernie Sanders over his support in the 1980s for Fidel Castro and the Sandinistas. Glenn Greenwald shows why Clinton is in no position to be lecturing Sanders about tyranny in other countries. Clinton has not only walked the walk, but also talked the talk, on behalf of serial violators of human rights across the globe: Saudi Arabia, Syria, Israel, Honduras, the Gulf states, not to mention “Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state.” As I said in a tweet last night, “Sanders stood with the Sandinistas, Clinton stands with Kissinger. Is this really a tough one?” But Glenn raises another […]

If Europeans are from Venus, and Americans from Mars, where’s Trump from?

Robert Kagan, the neoconservative writer on foreign policy, was in the Washington Post yesterday announcing his defection from Donald Trump and embrace of Hillary Clinton: For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be. That’s got centrist Democrats like Jonathan Chait excited. Not only because Kagan is/was a prominent Republican and supporter of George W. Bush but also because Kagan doesn’t treat Trump as a GOP aberration but as the logical outgrowth of the Republicans’ opposition to Obama, which Kagan admits has a lot to do with bigotry and racism, and their general penchant for lawlessness and xenophobia. But before anyone gets too […]

On Islamist Terror and the Left

Glenn Greenwald speaks to and rebuts a rhetorical move that’s become common across the political spectrum: when it’s pointed out that US and European foreign policy makes some contribution toward radicalizing Muslim populations, including the turn to terrorism, the response is that anyone who makes such a claim is: a) denying the agency and autonomy of terrorists; b) overlooking the role of religion as an independent variable, which some want to see as completely unrelated to any other variable. You see this response increasingly among certain parts of the left, and Glenn shows why it’s wrong. I would add two points to Glenn’s analysis. First, with regard to the agency/autonomy claim, it surprises me that leftists would repeat an argument […]

This Muslim American Life: An Interview with Moustafa Bayoumi

Moustafa Bayoumi is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, where I teach political science. His book, “This Muslim American Life,” came out in September. It’s a fascinating collection of pieces—sometimes hilarious, often unsettling, always probing and provocative—about, well, Muslim life in America, past and present. There’s a mini-memoir about the time Moustafa worked as a Middle Eastern extra on “Sex and the City 2″; a Philip-Roth-like story about his discovery of a terrorist named Mustafa Bayoumi in a detective novel (that really did happen); a loving deconstruction of the Islamic undertones and overtones of John Coltrane’s music (“A Love Supreme” becomes “Allah Supreme”); a harrowing essay on how the American military uses music to terrorize and torture its victims […]

Trump and the Trumpettes: In Stereo

Everyone’s worried about Donald Trump. As they should be. They should also worry about his friends across the aisle. Division of Labor Monday, which saw Trump reveal his plan to stop all Muslims from coming into the United States, also announced this convergence between right and left. Newt Gingrich: Nine percent of Pakistanis agree with ISIS, according to one poll. That’s a huge number. We need to put all the burden of proof on people coming from those countries to show that they are not a danger to us. Michael Tomasky: It [Obama’s statement] says to Muslim Americans that the rights you have as Americans have to be earned, fought for. And you know, that’s OK…But I do know that if other Americans had some […]

The Moloch of National Security

Of all the smart recommendations Steve Walt makes in his post, “Don’t Give ISIS What It Wants,” this is the most important: No. 2: Accept that 100 percent security is not possible. As I’ve written before, of all the ideological Molochs that modernity has spawned—communism, fascism, liberalism, conservatism, whatever—none is as potent and enduring, none demands so much sacrifice, as the idea of security. If we’re going to get past the permanent state of emergency we seem to be in, we have to accept that 100% security is not possible. Risk is part of life. While the siren call of safety has an irresistible lure—though we should always remember that not everyone’s safety has the same lure to policymakers; security […]

NYT Public Editor Says NYTBR Conflict of Interest Is a Conflict of Interest

Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times public editor, writes a quietly devastating critique of the preferred authorized biographer writing a review of the authorized biography of Kissinger: In the italic identification line appearing with his review of a new biography of Henry Kissinger, Andrew Roberts is described only as “the Lehrman Institute distinguished fellow at the New-York Historical Society.” And that is true. But what is also true is that Mr. Roberts had what many reasonable people would consider a conflict of interest as a reviewer: He was Mr. Kissinger’s first choice to write his authorized biography. The Times Book Review editor, Pamela Paul, told me Thursday that she was unaware of that fact before the publication of a Gawker piece that […]

Clusterfuck of Corruption at NYT Book Review

Greg Grandin takes to Gawker to report on a clusterfuck of corruption at the New York Times Book Review: This Sunday, the New York Times Book Review will publish a review of the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s authorized biography of Henry Kissinger, Kissinger: The Idealist. The reviewer is Andrew Roberts. Roberts brings an unusual level of familiarity to the subject: It was Roberts whom Kissinger first asked, before turning to Ferguson, to write his authorized biography. In other words, the New York Times is having Kissinger’s preferred authorized biographer review Kissinger’s authorized biography. … Oh, and Roberts isn’t just close to the subject of the book he is reviewing. He has also been, for a quarter-century, a friend of the book’s author. … The Times, too, normally checks those things. When I’m approached about […]

Flaubert on Kissinger/Nixon

Speaking of Kissinger/Nixon, less flat-footed defenders of the Dynamic Duo like to take a tack that goes like this: “Yes, yes, massive violence at the periphery—Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, and elsewhere—but what about their more prosaic and peaceful achievements at the center: detente, the treaties with the Soviet Union, opening relations with China, and so on?” Flaubert had their number many decades ago: “Be regular and orderly in your life,” he is supposed to have to said, “so that you may be violent and original in your work.”