In his Washington Post column David Ignatius takes note of some developments in the Middle East. I reflect on the developments he reports and draw a very different conclusion. Mr. Ignatius points to elements of a feud between the Saudis and the UAE:

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the two drivers of modernization in the Middle East, should be rejoicing together these days. Iran is weak, its proxies are on the run, and an American armada approaches the Persian Gulf. But instead they have stumbled into an epic feud that could polarize the region.

When the quarrel detonated in late December, it seemed like a fight over strategy for resolving the forever war in Yemen. But it has since escalated into a social media battle in which Saudis have attacked the UAE as “Israel’s Trojan horse” and denounced the Abraham Accords, joined by the UAE in 2020, as “a political military alliance dressed in the garb of religion.”

After reporting on several aspects of the “feud” he observes:

For the Trump administration, which has close ties with both countries, the Saudi-UAE wrangle illustrates the difficulty of working with two headstrong regional powers at once. The administration is said to have offered to mediate, but both sides have balked, according to several knowledgeable officials. Because of the intense personal feelings, one official told me, “This is not something you mediate.”

with this point:

“The Saudis want obedience, or at least alignment with their regional policies,” said Jonny Gannon, a former senior CIA officer with decades of experience in the Middle East. “The Emiratis don’t want to be obedient. They want optionality.”

I think that Mr. Ignatius is operating under some shaky premises. Those are highlighted by his use of this phrase: “an Arab official”. And the United Arab Emirates is not an “it”; it is a “they”—a loose confederation of seven emirates, each with different histories, rules, goals, and objectives. Here’s his conclusion:

Family feuds come and go in the Middle East, as around the world. What concerns me about this quarrel is the growing attacks on the UAE because of its opening to Israel. No country has a bigger stake in stopping the spread of Islamic extremism than Saudi Arabia. In its seeming encouragement of vitriolic Saudi attacks on the UAE as a “Devil of the Arabs” that takes orders from Israel, the kingdom is playing with fire.

I understand why Mr. Ignatius uses the phrase “an Arab official.” He is protecting a source. But the phrase quietly implies a degree of common political perspective that does not exist. “Arab” is a linguistic designation, not a strategic one. A Saudi official and an Emirati official do not represent variations within a common bloc; they represent competing sovereign regimes with distinct ambitions.

My read of the “feud” is different from Mr. Ignatius’s. Mohammed bin Salman is less “modernizing” Saudi Arabia than consolidating power and asserting Saudi primacy among the Gulf states. UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed resists that not because the UAE is drifting toward liberal democracy, but because Abu Dhabi wants autonomy in regional strategy.

“Modernization” in the Gulf should not be confused with liberalization. Civil liberties remain tightly constrained and the religious and patronage networks that have long exported conservative Islamist ideas have not evaporated simply because senior leaders now speak the language of “tolerance” and “reform.”

Nor are Israel’s interests synonymous with America’s. Trade and diplomatic rapprochement are welcome, but they are also transactional and reversible especially when domestic legitimacy, regional rivalries, and succession politics are always in play.

That is why I’m wary of treating a Saudi-UAE rupture as a solvable “family feud.” The region’s alignments can shift quickly, for reasons outsiders only partly perceive. He who sups with the devil needs a long spoon.

Nearly 20 years ago, I predicted that no street-legal, fully autonomous automobiles would be operating on the streets of American cities for the foreseeable future. That was received with scoffing by some of my readers. If Waymo is to be believed, nearly 20 years have now elapsed and the fine print tells the real story:

The Waymo Driver autonomously navigates tens of thousands of rider-only miles across San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Austin daily. It can navigate common scenarios, like adhering to a crossing guard directing traffic, as well as more unique interactions like avoiding a swerving vehicle. As the Waymo Driver travels across town, it might contact fleet response for additional help.

Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver.

or, in other words, Waymo’s robotaxi is not fully autonomous. If the system requires human judgment to resolve edge cases in real time, it is not fully autonomous. It is largely autonomous and that is a development to be applauded.

The irony of this is that what they’re actually doing is the right way: autonomous with human oversight. For decades I have said that I would joyfully accept fully autonomous vehicles in our streets if strict liability applied. That would align incentives properly. Waymo’s mistake is in advertising their robotaxis as “fully autonomous” rather than what they actually are.

The main open question is whether you trust operators potentially thousands of miles away to get Waymos in San Francisco out of tricky situations.

I only have one problem with the editors’ of the Washington Post’s joy over Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi’s overwhelming victory:

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi won a mandate for her ambitious reform project after years of listless leadership in Tokyo. Her success is good news for America, and now Washington can help her succeed.

Takaichi supports a major military buildup in Japan. In addition to boosting defense spending to at least two percent of gross domestic product, she ran on expanding offensive military capabilities and lifting a ban on lethal weapon exports. The sweep of the victory, which gives her muscular majorities in parliament, might even allow Takaichi to repeal the pacifist clause written into Japan’s constitution after World War II.

Before we rejoice we might want to make up our minds. Either the United States intends to remain a global military hegemon with dependent allies or it intends to lead a coalition of capable, autonomous partners. We cannot pursue both simultaneously.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has pursued a policy of military supremacy. Strong allies were seen as an impediment to that hegemony and their autonomy was carefully contrained. For the last roughly ten years we have demanded in increasingly harsh tones that our allies spend 2% of GDP on defense. I have long thought that both policies were mistaken.

We should not demand military hegemony or that our allies spend some arbitrary amount or percent of GDP on defense. We should want strong allies with defined, dependable capabilities. Capabilities including anti-submarine warfare, air defense, sealift, munitions stockpiles, and independent logistics capacity matter far more than whether a country reaches an arbitrary spending threshold.

If Japan is to “shoulder more of the security burden for countering China”, that has certain implications. One is that we are abandoning our heretofore split-personality in policies. We don’t want to be global hegemon any more and we do need strong allies.

Another is that we cannot maintain an adverse balance of trade with China any longer. China uses that trade imbalance to strengthen its own military. A strategy that relies on allied military power while simultaneously financing the adversary’s rearmament through persistent trade imbalances is not merely incoherent but self-defeating.

We should also recognize that autonomous allies are equipped to pursue their own foreign policy interests. Takaichi’s mandate is driven as much by Japanese perceptions of China and North Korea as by American pressure.

I use the word “lie” in a very specific sense. I mean the knowing telling of an untruth with an intention to deceive. At RealClearPolitics J. Budziszewski considers why politicians lie so much these days. Dr. Budziszewski examines multiple reasons including

• Fewer consequences for lying
• Advances in the technology of lying
• Changes in motives for lying

Here’s a key snippet from his post:

Lying could not make way so easily were it not for the fact that we are passing through a pandemic of lunacy, in which huge numbers of people, on both sides of the spectrum, hold beliefs that are not just loopy, but harmful and contagious. In a recent book, I detail 30 of these delusions, but for the moment, let me focus on two that are especially relevant to political lying.

One concerns the nature of right and wrong: Sometimes we just have to do the wrong thing. We think that to make things come out right, of course we may lie. More and more of the things that pass under the name of making things better make them inexpressibly worse. We justify burning down neighborhoods “to advance racial justice.” We lie about political opponents “because they want to do bad things.” We give false testimony “because we just know” the accused person must deserve something bad. We unjustly penalize honest people “just to give others a chance.” We “solve the problem” of unwanted children by killing them all, telling ourselves that they aren’t really children unless we choose to believe that they are. We slaughter countless numbers so that no one will have a “poorer quality of life.” We lie about all of it.

The other concerns the nature of reality: Things are whatever we say they are. It’s easy to be indifferent to the facts if you think saying something makes it true. One day in a university course I teach, we were discussing the nature of marriage. Some students were puzzled: How could marriage have a nature? As one said, “We can define things however we want.”

Being human I lie occasionally. I try not to. To the best of my knowledge I have never lied on this site. From time to time I have posted something that was pointed out to be untrue and I generally acknowledge that.

Does Trump lie? Of course he does. As has every president in the history of the Republic, indeed, every politician. Does he lie more than other politicians? I think he does but that one is complicated. As I’ve pointed out in the past, it has been my observation that people who’ve been rich all their lives live in a different reality than I do, one shaped by their own wishes. That is one of the several reasons I have never voted for him. What looks like lying may sometimes be a refusal to acknowledge disconfirming reality but the effect on public trust is the same.

The notion that “truth is whatever works” is simply too post-modern for me. There is such a thing as objective reality and disprovability. I do not think that when something you believe or that’s worked for you is disproven that acknowledging that is a sign of weakness. Quite to the contrary, I think it’s a sign of strength. Many politicians these days seem to think otherwise. A politics that treats changing one’s mind as weakness cannot survive contact with reality for long.

I am always reminded of the remark made by Paul Samuelson (paraphrasing John Maynard Keynes), “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”.

A strict adherence to the facts can have a cost, not just for those found to have been mistaken (or lying) but for those who point it out. Continuing to support a politician who you know to have lied to you whom you would otherwise support makes you complicit in his lies. A society that tolerates lying eventually loses the ability to distinguish innocence from guilt. We should keep in mind George Bernard Shaw’s observation:

Just as the liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else; so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent.

One of the memorable things in our trip to New York City to see our beloved dog, Jack, compete in the Westminster Kennel Club Show was that we travelled with some dear friends. We have known them for 50 years—since they were in college. I cannot say how grateful I am to them. Thanks to the husband of the pair being a multi-generational member of a club with reciprocity with New York’s Union League Club we were able to have a room there for our stay. A picture of our room is at the top of this post.

The club has a strict dress code so I wore slacks and a jacket (no jeans) the entire time I was there. It’s reasonably convenient to the Javits Center and Madison Square Garden where the dog show was held.

We did a lot of walking—twelve miles the first day, eleven the second. I probably should have taken pictures of the snow and trash piled on the sidewalks, a strange sight for a Chicagoan. Chicago is prepared for snow and, consequently, has it hauled away. That is not apparently the case in New York.

I’m not a fan of professional athletics or the Super Bowl more generally. I can’t remember when I last watched a Super Bowl halftime show but I’ve been surprised at the kerfuffle over this year’s show.

I think it will be interesting to learn whether the NFL attracted the audience they apparently are pursuing with its halftime show selection. I’m guessing they won’t but not for the reasons some might suggest. I suspect that selection reflects a strategic mismatch. The audience in question is far more likely to watch the halftime show later, via streaming, than to watch the entire game, halftime, and, vitally, the commercials in real time.

I wanted to call attention to some remarks by former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel at the Cornell Club in New York, reported by Jonathan Alter in the Washington Monthly. Here’s a sample:

If Democrats win the House, which I believe they will, what they do between 2026 and 2028 will determine not just whether we win the White House, but whether our relationship with the public becomes transformational rather than transactional.

Ken Martin and the DNC should be living in Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. There shouldn’t be a single empty spot on the ballot, from school board to governor. If there isn’t a Democrat on every line, riding the wave of 2026, the whole operation deserves to be whupped. This election is a wave election. You build school boards, you build a farm team, and you organize early in the places that will decide 2028.

Remember this: We’ve had three elections in a row where just 600,000 Americans in seven states decided who runs the country. We should have started a year ago, but at a minimum, before filing deadlines close, every office should be contested. All you’re going to hear about is US senators. I want to hear about school boards. Look at the attention paid to a public utility commissioner race in Georgia. Most people didn’t even know the job existed, but it told you more about Georgia’s governor and Senate races than any national chatter.

I think you’ll find his remarks interesting.

I’ve ridden in the elevator in the Thompson Center with Mayor Emanuel on more than one occasion, chatting casually with him on our ride. I think he’s a personable guy. I think he wants to be president but I do not believe he will be the Democratic candidate in 2028.

I don’t think he realizes that the Democratic Party which he led to victory in Congressional elections as chairman of the DCCC twenty years ago no longer exists. It has passed him and center-left Democrats like him by. I think what he is expressing is nostalgia.

I also think that the Democrats could do much worse than heeding his advice for the midterm elections or picking him as their 2028 presidential candidate. Emanuel’s advice is sound, but the Democratic Party no longer values the kind of politics that would implement it.

At Time in an article about the boos and jeers that Vice President J. D. Vance received at the Olympics opening ceremonies Rebecca Schneid writes:

A new YouGov poll released Feb. 6 found that favorable views of the U.S. among Western European nations have fallen sharply since Trump’s return to office, following the President’s aggressive attempts to annex Greenland, his Administration’s ongoing trade war with most of its European allies, and a years-long divide over the future of NATO and European security.

Perhaps predictably, the biggest impact was seen in Denmark. Some 84% of Danes now hold an unfavourable view of the U.S., compared with an average of 36% during former President Joe Biden’s term. Only 26% of Danes view the U.S. as an ally or friendly nation, compared with 80% in July 2023.

The same trend is seen across Western Europe, in countries that were once considered U.S. allies. In Spain, only 39% of people see the U.S. as a friend or ally today, down from 73% in 2023. In Germany, the number is 41%, down from 70%; in Britain, 46%, down from 69%; in France, 53%, down from 64%; and in Italy, 52%, down from 61%.

I have travelled in Europe for more than fifty years, mostly for work. I have never experienced a time when Americans were liked or admired. I have never understood why so many Americans assumed that was the case. I don’t even think I know any American who has lived abroad who thought people overseas liked or admired Americans.

This isn’t new. The play that Abraham Lincoln attended that fateful night at Ford’s Theater was Our American Cousin, a satire of the disdain that Americans experienced abroad.

Even after World War II, gratitude did not translate into affection. The British, French, and Dutch were relieved that the war had ended but there is extensive contemporary and postwar commentary expressing disdain for American soldiers, particularly among elites, for their informality, their money, their lack of deference to class, and their cultural self-confidence.

Americans were welcomed as liberators and resented as disruptors. That tension is not new, and it did not begin with Vietnam, Iraq, or Donald Trump. Donald Trump has aggravated a situation that was already bad. It has been present since the moment the United States first arrived in Europe as a decisive power.

I’m grateful that MSN repeated this Bloomberg Business article so I could read it. In it the author, Swiss journalist Fabienne Kinzelmann, decries the policy changes put in place by the Trump Administration:

(Bloomberg Businessweek) — For the past few years, Swiss oncologist Christoph Renner has treated blood cancer patients with Lunsumio, a new drug that helps the immune system recognize and destroy malignant cells. Then, last summer, Renner got an email from Roche Holding AG, Lunsumio’s manufacturer, informing him the treatment would no longer be available in Switzerland because health insurers there wouldn’t pay for the infusions. “You see what’s possible,” says Renner, a professor at the University of Basel, “and then you’re told you can’t use it.”

The move was a response to rules President Donald Trump introduced that force drugmakers to reduce their prices in the US to the lowest level paid in other developed countries. In Switzerland, new medications typically cost far less than in the US, so in theory Americans should benefit from the change. The problem is, instead of bringing prices down in the US, pharmaceutical companies are raising them elsewhere.

Yet Switzerland has shown little political willingness to pay more—threatening both the availability of medications in the country and its role as a global leader in developing therapies. Drug prices are the primary driver of the increasing cost of mandatory health coverage, and the topic generates heated debate during the annual reappraisal of insurance rates. “The Swiss cannot and must not pay for price reductions in the USA with their health insurance premiums,” says Elisabeth Baume-Schneider, Switzerland’s home affairs minister.

The global pharma industry sees an existential threat in amped-up efforts to rein in drug costs. That’s particularly true in Switzerland, where operating costs are already among the highest in the world. As pressure to cut prices spreads from the US around the globe, pharma companies say they may be forced to scale back operations in the Alpine country. Trump’s pricing scheme is “a direct attack on Switzerland as a pharma hub,” says René Buholzer, chief executive officer of Interpharma, a Swiss industry group. “Doing nothing and carrying on isn’t an option anymore.”

I’m not entirely sure what conclusion we are to draw from this. Should the U. S. continue to subsidize overseas pharmaceutical manufacturing? That’s the most obvious inference. I can see how the Swiss may have become accustomed to our paying higher prices than they do but I’m not sure why we should continue to do so.

Is it that overseas drug manufactures should make more prudent choices? Why are the costs of Swiss pharmaceutical companies high? The article is mute on that subject. I don’t know much about Swiss pharmaceutical companies but, unless they’re a lot different from U. S. companies, I don’t take her gesturing towards high research costs seriously. In one of my earliest posts here I demonstrated, conclusively I think, that U. S. pharmaceutical companies treated research as overhead (like telephone expenses) rather than production costs.

Using a comparative advantage approach, wouldn’t that suggest that Swiss companies shouldn’t be in the pharmaceutical business at all?

I know what my hypothesis would be: U. S. healthcare policy skews the cost of healthcare everywhere. But exploring that is beyond the scope of this post.