I’ve mentioned this before but it bears mentioning again. Our relationship with Saudi Arabia goes back to the 1950s and it was part of what was referred to as the “Twin Pillars” strategy. We had close relationships with two Middle Eastern countries: Iran and Saudi Arabia, one Shi’ite and one Sunni. The idea was that between them we could maintain a shaky balance in the Middle East. That was long before we had become Israel’s primary patron or were importing the volumes of oil from the Saudis that we later did. Keep in mind that the Soviets had already cultivated cozy relationships with the two largest Arab countries: Egypt and Iraq.

Of course the “Twin Pillars” strategy collapsed when the Shah was driven from power. Why then have we maintained the supine posture with respect to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that we have? I think it has to do with presidential politics and psychology. No amount of failure can cause a president to abandon a bad policy because no president wants to be criticized for it. It’s why we still have troops in Afghanistan, why we still rubberstamp so much of what the Germans want to do, and why we tolerate the demilitarization of our NATO allies.

I don’t think I’ve ever linked to the Research Digest of the British Psychological Society before. The link is to a list of the bad traits that psychological studies have found to be parts of human nature. Here’s the list:

• We view minorities and the vulnerable as less than human
• We already experience schadenfreude at the age of four
• We believe in Karma – assuming that the downtrodden of the world must deserve their fate
• We are blinkered and dogmatic
• We would rather electrocute ourselves than spend time in our own thoughts
• We are vain and overconfident
• We are moral hypocrites
• We are all potential trolls
• We favour ineffective leaders with psychopathic traits
• We are sexually attracted to people with dark personality traits

Read the whole thing for supporting evidence. Note that the “we” does not refer to Americans but people in general.

The only solace I can take from that is that psychological studies are routinely awful, unrepeatable, and just plain wrong. And that the follow-up to that post might be a list of our best qualities.

However, one conclusion we might draw from that list is that a worthwhile goal for our institutions would be to restrain our worst impulses.

Why is it that Americans think we have “moral standing” in the world? Not only do we not presently have moral standing we’ve never had moral standing. I write in reaction to this headline in the Washington Post: “Are We Willing to Sacrifice Our Moral Standing For This?” (referring to the disappearance and presumed murder of a Saudi journalist).

We have military and economic standing. We’re doing what we can to erode the latter and every non-decisive year we spend in Afghanistan damages the former.

Where did the idea of our moral standing come from? Why does it persist?

I’ve posted a number of times on what I think will happen should the Democrats take control of the House in November.

Here’s a question I want to throw out to the floor. What will happen if Democrats fail to gain a majority in the House?

I think that the anger and, well, mania we’ve seen since Trump’s election and then Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment will be nothing in comparison with what will happen. Democrats will blame everything except the DNC.

Over at OTB Steven Taylor has returned to his long-promised musings on political institutional design so I thought that, rather than cluttering up his comments section with it, I’d contribute a little color commentary.

The Founding Fathers, classicists that they were, were clearly familiar with Aristotle’s taxonomy of government (not to mention recent European political experience). In Aristotle’s Ethics he analyzes governmental forms in two axes: the number of people who make the decisions (one, a few, many) and whether the government pursues the public good which he refers to as “correct” (when it does) or “corrupt” (when it pursues personal interests). That results in this matrix:

He also envisioned these forms as progressing from one to another, from correct to corrupt, cyclically. “Polity” means a sort of constitutional arrangement.

The Founding Fathers clearly attempted to arrive at an arrangement in which the process of transformation from one form to another avoided one-man rule and avoided becoming corrupt. A government of limited powers in which decisions were made by a relatively small group who were selected by the greater body of the people was the form they arrived at. As practical politicians they also made compromises, the greatest and most damaging of which involved slavery and regional differences and the contrasting interests of small states and large ones.

Two questions arise from this. In this conceptual framework where are we now? How can we improve things?

IMO there is practically no question that we are alternating, even vibrating, between oligarchy and democracy (meaning in this case something more like mobocracy). This has come about through the abandoning the constraints of the our constitutional framework (required for a polity) and the pursuit of the personal goals and benefit of elected officials. Evidence for the former is the many federal programs which exceed anything actually in the Constitution and the significant extra-constitutional measures effected by Supreme Court decisions. The most obvious evidence of the latter is the accumulation of vast wealth by politicians during and after their terms of office.

I’m skeptical that anything meaningful can be done about either. We are a very large, incredibly diverse country. Consensus, required for republican government, is declining if anything. You cannot turn around without stumbling over an assertion in one form or another that the end justifies the means. That can only lead to oligarchy or mobocracy.

I’m particularly skeptical that electoral reform can heal what ails us. In the absence of more basic moral or ethical reform I don’t see how that will accomplish anything but I’m willing to learn.

I sometimes wonder whether Americans will ever recognize that every report from an international institution be it the UN, the World Bank, or any other reflects the prevailing wisdom among the European intelligentsia and that is only tangentially related to reality.

Our own elites with their well-earned feelings of inferiority respect those views far beyond their actual worth because they think the European intelligentsia are the cool kids.

Face it. The entire world is like high school.

At Politico EU there’s a sort of symposium on African immigration. In it a group of European worthies hold forth with their views on how the countries of Europe can regulate immigration from Africa including foreign aid, overseas development, better border control, and so on. IMO almost all of it is wishful thinking.

They have forgotten what used to be a widely-held foreign policy view. Buffers. It used to be that the countries of North Africa served as buffers against immigration from farther south and that is no longer the case. Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt. Strong governments in those countries regulated immigration from farther south.

Using that line of reasoning the worst thing that ever happened to Italy, Spain, and so on was the overthrow of Qaddaffi. The so-called “Arab Spring” will have repercussions that are likely to endure for decades if not forever.

I have my disagreements with China perma-bear Gordon Chang. However, I encourage you to read his piece at The National Interest explaining how China’s ascendancy and America’s decline are both greatly exaggerated:

Xi’s reversal of liberal economic policies has been matched by his reversal of political and social policies. He has de-institutionalized the Communist Party, thereby heightening the risk of political instability. At the same time, he has demanded conformity—“absolute loyalty”—and tightened social controls. The institution of a nationwide social credit system , which will assign a score to every resident for all his or her actions, is but one example of the state’s attempt at total control of society.

China, as a result, is moving from authoritarianism back to totalitarianism, readopting a model that brought the People’s Republic to the brink of economic failure twice, once during the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s and early 1960s and again during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s. China’s economy cannot be expected to do well in an increasingly intolerant political atmosphere, as the country’s own history suggests.

And there is one more reason to doubt Chinese economic dominance: demography. China will soon join the ranks of shrinking nations. The population will peak somewhere around 1.44 billion people at the end of next decade according to the U.N.’s World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision. By the end of the century, China will have a population of 1.02 billion.

That’s why I continue to say “don’t worry about China, worry about the U. S.” China’s problems will catch up with it soon enough. In the meantime we should stop reacting as though they had already surpassed the U. S. and look at them more critically and skeptically.

Americans need to look more closely at the most reliable gauge of the relative status of China and the U. S. There are presently about 110,000 Americans in China, an all-time record. At the same time there are about 3.8 million Chinese in the United States. Look at the direction the canoes are paddling in.

The disappearance and presumed murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi is certainly evoking a long-overdue reaction from the major media outlets. The editors of the New York Times declaim:

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy that has long imposed an intolerant form of Islam, with a liberal use of cruel punishments such as beheading, stoning, amputation, lashing and the like. On being named heir last year, Prince Mohammed, 33, generated a reputation as a reformer by allowing women to drive; detaining hundreds of businessmen, including fellow royals, in an “anticorruption” campaign; and proclaiming grand visions for the future. But then he jailed the women who had campaigned for the right to drive and violently overreacted when Canada protested. He is also behind a barbaric war in Yemen, in which American weapons have been used to kill untold thousands of civilians, and a bitter feud with neighboring Qatar.

Basically, he appears to be revealing himself to be a ruthless tyrant, only with a different social and economic agenda from his predecessors. It is not hard to believe that he is behind Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance, especially given the reports of American intelligence intercepts in which Saudi officials discussed a plan to lure Mr. Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia and detain him.

President Trump is obviously troubled by this possibility. “We don’t like it, and we don’t like it even a little bit,” he said on Thursday. But he seems to like even less losing a $110 billion arms deal and a Middle Eastern comrade in arms.

I guess that’s a start. It beats their prior lauding of him as a reformer when it was obvious to anyone but a gullible fool what he was actually doing. I should add that “absolute monarchy” misrepresents Saudi Arabia’s actual nature somewhat and that last paragraph calls their intentions into doubt a bit. How much is genuine outrage and how much just something else to bash Trump about?

The editors of the Washington Post are equally incensed if not more so:

On Friday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he was still “planning on going at this point” to the conference, adding, “If more information comes out and changes, we can look at that.” That is the opposite of the appropriate position, which would be to suspend official U.S. participation unless and until Saudi authorities provide satisfactory answers. As they did before Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance, Mr. Trump and his aides are sending the message that they will tolerate even the most reckless and unlawful adventures by the crown prince, provided he buys U.S. weapons. It’s hard to imagine a more irresponsible and amoral stance.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal react as well:

Mr. Khashoggi is a more complicated figure than the liberal democrat he is portrayed to be in the Western press. He is a longtime member of the Muslim Brotherhood and favors Islamic theocracy, as John Bradley explains this week in the British Spectator. He has longtime ties to the Saudi royal family as a journalist and adviser, and some reports suggest MBS recently offered him a significant government post if he returned from exile in Washington, D.C. Some speculate that his refusal to accept that offer may have triggered the Saudi assault in Turkey.

None of this justifies a brazen murder, if that’s what happened, which would be a blunder and a crime. The fiasco puts enormous pressure on aging King Salman, who put the Crown Prince in charge. The Saudi royal family can be like feuding Borgias in the best of times, and the rivals of MBS will see a moment to strike at his power and agenda.

The episode is not the fault of Mr. Trump or son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner, despite the predictable claims of the American left. Any sensible U.S. Administration would support a Saudi reformer willing to help restrain Iranian military adventurism. But a murder of this sordid kind would inevitably have bilateral consequences.

I guess there’s nothing like violence perpetrated against journalists, even journalists with which they have nothing else in common, to get the dander of journalists up.

When will Americans recognize that we have enemies in the Middle East and we have clients there but no allies or friends? It is incomprehensible that two consecutive administrations have supported KSA’s war against Yemen. There is plenty of evidence that Saudi Arabia is supporting our worst enemies in the Middle East. If we were living according to our purported values, not only wouldn’t we be supporting their war or trading with them, we would be blockading them and tossing their royals into jail here. For goodness sake, the Saudis still practice slavery (including here in the United States) and execute people for witchcraft.

I don’t know why we put up with the Saudis’ reprehensible behavior. We don’t need them any more and they’ve hated us for decades.