I thought it prudent not to bundle this into my last post on the war with Iran. Last month President Trump announced and signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I think that was imprudent. Have we learned nothing?

When the Shah was in control of Iran we aided Iran in its own nuclear development program. The Shah was overthrown in 1979 and ever since we have opposed the Iranian regime’s nuclear ambitions. To me at least the moral of the story was clear: we shouldn’t depend on authoritarian states to remain aligned with us indefinitely. Governments change, sometimes literally overnight, and yesterday’s ally can become tomorrow’s adversary.

The same lesson applies to Saudi Arabia.

From the earliest days of our war with Iran I have maintained it did not meet the standards for a just war and I opposed it. Those remain my views.

Don’t construe that as my believing the present Iranian regime is good for us, the Iranians, or for the world. I don’t.

My question today is how will the U. S. achieve the objectives it has articulated for the war? I just don’t see it.

Even “boots on the ground” (which I think remain very unlikely) would make it difficult to achieve that.

I have no insights into the inner workings of Donald Trump’s mind or those of his advisors. My best guess is that the administration believed applying enough military pressure would encourage the Iranian people to overthrow the regime themselves. That hasn’t happened.

So, now what?

In her Wall Street Journal column after a lengthy discourse on Anthony Fauci diary and Congressional testimony, Peggy Noonan has some thoughts I found worthy of reflection:

Looking back on the public-leadership aspect of the pandemic—while we were in the trauma and fear of the first months, while we were banging pots at 7 p.m. to thank hospital workers, and scientists were zooming to find out more about treatments and protocols, and earnest medical officials were showing up on cable explaining what they believed to be true—a lot of people tried to do a lot of good things. But it all became pretty political pretty fast, pretty insidery and groupthinky, and pretty smug as the previously obscure became famous overnight.

It all came together and yielded a little societal Chernobyl.

The reactor blew, causing a calamity. The politicians lied and couldn’t be trusted, the bureaucrats lied and couldn’t be trusted, the government scientists lied about the data in front of their eyes, the national press was a propaganda machine. As much as anything, Chernobyl contributed to the toppling of the Soviet Union.

She concludes:

Looking back on the Covid crisis, a lot of professionals were trusted beyond the point they deserved. So were many politicians. As people on the ground in America rose up against lockdowns, closed schools, mask mandates, closed churches, they were often unheard, or heard slowly, reluctantly and disrespectfully. The medical and scientific establishment didn’t seem to be a part of the public anymore, but handling the public.

And by the end, a lot of people thought they couldn’t trust the politicians and couldn’t trust the scientists.

My fear is that next time, and there likely will be a next time, regular people will think: There’s no one to trust. We’re on our own.

That won’t be a good thing.

I see things a little differently from Ms. Noonan. I don’t think the pandemic made politicians, bureaucrats, physicians, or scientists less trustworthy. It revealed institutional incentives that had always existed but had rarely been so visible. Given sufficient authority and sufficient time, institutions tend to evolve in ways that serve their own interests as well as their stated missions. More than a century ago Max Weber noted that bureaucracies, in particular, gradually come to place institutional interests ahead of institutional purposes. The pandemic did not create that tendency; it exposed it.

And the reality is that we are on our own. We always have been and always will be. Ultimately, each of us remains responsible for exercising judgment rather than surrendering it to authority. We simply shouldn’t allow elected officials and appointed bureaucrats to remain in positions of authority indefinitely. They cannot be a substitute for prudence. Free citizens should seek expert advice but they should never surrender their own judgment to experts, politicians, or bureaucracies. Institutions can inform prudence; they cannot replace it.

I want to agree with those of my commenters who are very tired of the brouhaha surrounding Dr. Anthony Fauci. Enough, already. Let him depart from public view.

Nonetheless, there are several issues that deserve scrutiny and which don’t involve Dr. Fauci personally. First, should any appointed federal official be allowed serve in their posts past age 70? If J. Edgar Hoover had retired at 70, it would have been during the Johnson Administration. If Dr. Fauci had retired at 70, COVID-19 would still have been in the future.

Second, we still don’t know a great deal more about the origins of COVID-19 than we did in 2020. It may have originated in an animal, it may have been a lab leak, or something else. As I’ve said before, I think we’re unlikely ever to know much more unless China presents evidence while defending itself in a civil suit for damages in a U. S. court. That in turn would require changes in the federal law governing sovereign immunity.

I’ve been sitting on this post by Matt Yglesias for a while. In the post Matt chides President Trump for not trying to get an immigration bill passed:

American immigration law is complicated, and almost every provision of this vast corpus reflects some political compromise reached long ago, often under different circumstances. I think it’s fair to say that almost none of it is optimal.

Lenin said of the bureaucracy, “better fewer, but better.” When it comes to immigration, I don’t see it that way. We should try to be more selective, but we should also want more immigrants to come to the United States than ever. So while I agree that many of the current visa programs aren’t ideal, unlike Stephen Miller or Elon Musk, I don’t have my hair on fire about it.

What’s crazy, though, is that for how much conservatives rant and rave about immigration, the Trump administration isn’t even seeking legislative changes to American immigration law.

Now I’m going to go into what may seem to be a long diversion but isn’t because I think that Matt has the wrong end of the stick.

I’ve been pretty clear here about what I think that immigration policy should be. In short

• We should accept more genuine asylees than we do. An asylum-seeker is already defined in statute. It isn’t just someone from a poor, violent country or someone who wants a job.
• We should have a temporary workers program. Many of those who come here do so primarily to work. They have only marginal interest in becoming Americans.
• We should have some sort of DACA program to normalize the status of those brought here as children who’ve never lived anywhere else.
• Beyond that the law should be enforced. It should be enforce vigorously but not harshly. Admittedly, that’s a difficult line to tread.

Note that those preferences can only achieved by a) changing the law and b) enforcing the results. The opinion polls from both Gallup and Pew Research suggest that lots of Americans think pretty much the same way that I do. However, there’s certainly a spectrum of opinion.

At the extremes are two caricatures, “cartoon versions” of the parties’ positions. Those cartoon versions are:

• Republicans want no immigration.
• Democrats want open borders.

Neither description accurately characterizes most Republican or Democratic voters but each party’s rhetoric often caters to those extremes. Most people are somewhere between those poles.

The challenge that we’re facing is that both Democrats and Republicans are catering to their most extreme wings—the cartoon versions.

But this is the first point I’m trying to make. A president can move substantially toward a restrictionist immigration policy simply by enforcing existing law more aggressively. Democrats can only achieve the cartoon version of their views by not enforcing the law. Those may seem to be symmetrical strategies but they’re not. Enforcing the law strictly is the president’s job. Not enforcing the law is dereliction of duty.

My second point is this and I think it’s where I deviate most from Matt’s view. The executive branch should first faithfully enforce existing law. Once that’s happening those who want different law bear the burden of persuading Congress to enact it. If President Trump can achieve the cartoon version of policy above just by enforcing existing law, why should he change the law? Changing immigration law is Congress’s responsibility. If Democrats want a more permissive system, they should persuade Congress. If Republicans want a more restrictive system than existing law provides, they should also persuade Congress.

I wanted to commend Tomas Pueyo’s most recent Substack to your attention. In it he documents a distressing claim: the UK, Europe, and Canada are abandoning freedom of speech. His evidence is pretty convincing.

For decades I’ve been pointing out that we in the United States are operating under a delusion if we think that rights that we take very seriously are universal. Those include freedom of speech and of the press.

It is also true that rights considered fundamental in other countries are, shall we say, considered otherwise here. For example, in the UK there is a “right to cross the land” enshrined in Magna Carta. Here we call it “trespassing”.

In yet other countries establishing a church is an article of faith.

The key point is that other countries are different from us. That should be obvious but, apparently, is not.

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial today on the recently released Fauci diaries. It is sharply critical of Dr. Fauci, portraying him as vain, politically manipulative, and more concerned with his public image than he has admitted.

I don’t know enough about the diaries to judge whether every criticism in the editorial is fair. What struck me, however, wasn’t anything in the diaries. It was something Dr. Fauci himself admitted years ago.

Early in the pandemic Dr. Fauci advised the public not to wear masks. Later he acknowledged that this advice was, at least in part, intended to conserve the limited supply of masks for healthcare workers. In other words, he deliberately told the public something other than what he believed to be true because he thought doing so would produce a better outcome.

I understand the dilemma. There really was a shortage of masks. Healthcare workers really did need priority. But there is a line that public officials cross at their peril. Their most valuable asset is not authority or expertise. It is credibility.

Once a public official admits that he has deliberately misled the public—even for what he believes is a good reason—every subsequent statement becomes suspect. If he was willing to tell me something he believed to be false yesterday because he thought it would produce a better result, why should I assume he is telling me the whole truth today?

Scientists are wrong all the time. That’s the nature of science. New evidence appears. Hypotheses are revised. Recommendations change. I have no objection to that.

I do object to being managed rather than informed.

In a free society, citizens are entitled to the best judgment of their public officials, not what those officials think citizens ought to hear. The moment experts decide that the public cannot be trusted with the truth, they begin to squander the very trust on which their influence ultimately depends.

That, more than anything I have read in today’s editorial, is why my confidence in Dr. Fauci’s subsequent pronouncements was so seriously diminished.

There is a saying attributed to the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In his most recent Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead in analyzing our conflict with Iran writes:

Iran may be a hedgehog, but Donald Trump is a fox, and he’s unlikely to give up until he’s tried every trick in the book.

I confess that I’m baffled by Dr. Mead’s column. Dr. Mead points to President Trump’s willingness to try many different tactics. But Archilochus didn’t say that the fox does many things; he said that the fox knows many things. Those are not the same. A hedgehog may employ a great variety of tactics in pursuit of a single overriding conviction. I agree that the Iranian regime is “a hedgehog”. Their one big thing is that they want the regime to survive.

However, I don’t think he has sufficiently demonstrated that President Trump is a “fox” in Archilochus’s sense. My own view is that President Trump is also a hedgehog. His one big thing is winning. Once viewed through that lens, many actions that otherwise seem disconnected become much easier to understand. Dr. Mead sees Trump’s willingness to employ many different tactics as evidence that he is a fox. I see those tactics as instruments in the service of a single overriding objective.

So, rather than a fox on one side faced by a hedgehog, we have two hedgehogs with diametrically opposed single big things. I don’t see how they can both be right.

The weather in Chicago today was quite nice—sunny, temperature in the 70s, moderate humidity. Much better than it was last week. Last week we had recordbreakingly bad air quality, attributed to smoke from fires in Ontario. President Trump’s response reminded me of Maslow’s Hammer: “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail.” My own response would have been different. As my mother taught me, you catch more flies with sugar than with vinegar.

Still, Americans are bearing real costs due to smoke from Canada. When Canada had its own recordbreaking forest fires in Ontario in 2023, emergency rooms had large numbers of people with breathing problems and many people turned to their physicians for help. The editors of the Washington Post chide President Trump:

The United States and Canada share the world’s longest international border: 5,525 miles. While there has always been friction, the relationship is a model for how trade is mutually beneficial.

The Gordie Howe International Bridge, opening next week, is named for a Canadian who spent 25 seasons with the Detroit Red Wings. There is a tunnel between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, that cannot accommodate large trucks, and the privately owned Ambassador Bridge has long been subject to bottlenecks.

The opening of the new bridge to traffic was already delayed a month after Trump objected to the financial terms. Canada footed the full $4.7 billion construction cost and initially planned to share toll revenue with the U.S. after its initial investment was paid back. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney says the two countries will now split the net revenue for the first 15 years after subtracting operating costs.

The Canadian wildfires introduced an unexpected wrinkle. On Sunday, Trump suggested Canada should be forced to “pay us damages” for “poisoning our air” with smoke. Canada is far from a model ally, but Trump’s approach clearly has backfired and boosted anti-American voices north of the border.

Just as the fog from the fires has lifted, so too can this spat. Trump and Carney spoke Tuesday by phone and agreed to intensify negotiations. Both countries will lose this fight if they can’t find a way out, regardless of who started it.

Whatever role climate change plays, it seems equally clear that forest management practices deserve renewed attention. Historically, Canada and the U. S. have cooperated on managing forests. Whatever our disagreements over trade or other issues, smoke recognizes no border. This might be an opportunity for our two nations to redouble our efforts. Rather than complaining about damages, the president could have proposed a joint review of forest management practices, wildfire prevention, and firefighting resources.