In a piece at Atlantic career diplomat William F. Burns urges the U. S. to end its “magical thinking” about the Middle East:

President Donald Trump’s October decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria produced a rare moment of bipartisanship in foreign policy. With a shared sense of alarm, Republicans and Democrats alike accused Trump of betrayal.

Certainly, it was a betrayal of the Kurdish partners who bled for us in the fight against the Islamic State. It was also a betrayal of process—leaving our military leaders and diplomats struggling to keep up with tweets, our allies in the dark, our messaging all over the map, and chaos on the ground.

If all this episode engenders, however, is a bipartisan dip in the warm waters of self-righteous criticism, it will be a tragedy—or worse, a mistake. We have to come to grips with the deeper and more consequential betrayal of common sense—the notion that the only antidote to Trump’s fumbling attempts to disentangle the United States from the region is a retreat to the magical thinking that has animated so much of America’s moment in the Middle East since the end of the Cold War.

an observation with which I agree wholeheartedly. He continues by outlining the efforts of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump which I would summarize as approving, perfunctory, mixed, apologetics, and disapproving, respectively.

He concludes:

So where do we go from here? American policy is in a deep hole in the Middle East, the product of decades of intermittent digging, a major excavation project in Iraq in 2003, and now more determined Trumpian burrowing. Climbing back to more stable terrain post-Trump will require at least three ingredients.

The “three ingredients” are

• Rightsize our ambitions
• Recalibrate our relationships across the region
• “we need to find a better balance between a counterterrorism effort that we can’t afford to neglect and a longer-term drive to help address regional economic and political malaise that we can’t ignore either”

in which he engages in his own magical thinking. I would ask Amb. Burns these questions:

• Was stationing troops in Saudi Arabia at the conclusion of the Gulf War realistic or the product of magical thinking?
• Was the Clinton Administration’s policy of “dual containment” and its emphasis on democracy promotion in the region realistic or the product of magical thinking?
• Was the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq based in realism or magical thinking?
• Was the Obama Administration’s role in the overthrow of Qaddafi based on realism or magical thinking?
• A tougher question: how about withdrawing our troops from Iraq?

I think they were all based on magical thinking.

A realistic policy with respect to the Middle East would include the following elements:

• We must recognized the countries of the Middle East have interests of their own and virtually none of them are aligned with ours.
• The Arab countries of the Middle East have little or no interest in liberal democracy.
• Although we don’t need Saudi Arabian oil any more, the Saudi ability to affect the price of oil means that we aren’t actually disinterested in them, either.
• Although Israel is the closest thing to a liberal democracy the Middle East has to offer, their interests are poorly aligned with ours.
• Government will be either authoritarian or tenuous in all of the Arab countries of the Middle East for the foreseeable future.
• Selling or, worse, giving arms to the Arab countries of the Middle East that we wouldn’t care to have fall in the hands of terrorists is not in our interests.

My conclusion based on all of that is that our Middle East foreign policy has been based on magical thinking for at least the last 30 years and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

The editors of the Washington Post urge President Trump to take Russian Federation President Putin up on his offer:

IT IS not very often that the Kremlin issues a transcript of remarks by President Vladimir Putin with a sentence marked in highlighter, but that’s what happened Dec. 5 when Mr. Putin met with leaders of Russia’s defense industry. The highlighted sentences said Russia is willing to renew the New START nuclear weapons treaty immediately, before the year is out, and without any preconditions. This is an offer that President Trump ought not refuse.

I honestly don’t know enough about the merits to have a strong opinion one way or another but this sounds prudent to me.

I will repeat what I have said for years and what I heard Sam Nunn, now head of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, say yesterday: between our two countries we have 90% of the nuclear weapons in the world. Between us we have the ability to destroy life on earth. Consequently, the bilateral relationship between Russia and the United States is the most important one in the world.

For the last thirty years we have been the aggressors in poisoning that relationship. You may complain all you like about Russian interference in U. S. elections but there is practically no outrage about which we might complain with respect to Russia that we didn’t do first including that one.

Maybe it’s time we should heed that old proverb about not looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Shades of Vietnam. The Washington Post is publishing a series of articles which detail what should be an earth-shattering story:

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

How bad was it?

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

This most telling quotation in the piece is probably this:

“We don’t invade poor countries to make them rich,” James Dobbins, a former senior U.S. diplomat who served as a special envoy to Afghanistan under Bush and Obama, told government interviewers. “We don’t invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful and we clearly failed in Afghanistan.”

None of the key points, e.g. that we didn’t know enough about Afghanistan when we invaded, failed to tailor the post-invasion plan to Afghanistan’s circumstances, that we were able to occupy the country but not to pacify it, are a surprise to me, and that DoD, State, etc. officials have been lying for 18 years, is a surprise to me.

It’s not just that we have learned nothing. It’s that, as long as the same incentives remain in place, the same mistakes will be made.

As I wrote my last post a number of thoughts came to me that weren’t completely relevant to the post but which I wanted to include somewhere. I’m going to try and bring them together in this post.

I think it’s a tremendous irony that in just 60 years the typewriter could go from a symbol of women’s liberation to one of oppression. From the nineteen teens through the 20s, the Underwood Typewriter was probably as great a force for liberating women as has ever been devised. It enabled women with ordinary educations and just a little training to hold jobs that enabled them to support themselves. Previous to that the only honorable jobs a woman could hold outside the home were teacher, nun, and nurse. By 1980 being clerk-typist had come to be considered demeaning. I think that exemplifies the differences between the First Wave feminists, interested in making the lives of ordinary women better, and the Third Wave feminists. I’m not sure what their interest has been but it’s pretty clear that they’re not particularly interested in ordinary working class women whose lives have frequently become much worse over the last 30 years, either trying to raise a family as single mothers or being expected to hold fulltime jobs while also being expected to be fulltime wives, mothers, and homemakers.

A “teamster” used to be someone who handled a team of horses or mules to haul loads. By 1920 the same men who had handled teams of horses were driving motorized trucks, represented by the same union. The skills required were very different but, since loading and unloading was generally the responsibility of the drivers, it still required big, burly men. Hauling the first load by motorized truck across the United States took place in 1912 and took 90 days. In the same period hauling a load across the country by railroad took four days.

Right now there’s a lot of hype about fully automated trucks. We already have them. They’re called “railroads”. IMO hauling loads on the regular public roads with fully automated trucks is far in the future if ever.

IMO American physicians’ greatest accomplishment has not been in the area of public health but organizational and political. They’ve managed to convince people that physicians educated in 1920 still had the skills to do their jobs in 1950, physicians educated in 1950 still had the skills to do their jobs in 1980, and physicians educated in 1980 still had the skills to do their jobs in 2010. When you reflect on it, what physicians did in 1920 resembles what they do today only superficially. Physicians of a century ago simply do not have the skills to practice medicine today and, in all likelihood, vice versa. Most of what they have in common is what they call themselves. Continuing education probably helped but it has its limits. I think that’s an issue that will only accelerate.

At RealClearPolicy former Deputy Secretary and Acting Secretary for the U.S. Department of Labor Seth Harris remarks on other countries’ programs to align their peoples with the jobs that will be available in the future:

Consider Singapore, which launched the SkillsFuture program in 2016 to make career-focused education and skills training more accessible for individuals at every stage of their career. The program provides financial incentives, targeted training courses, and career assessment services to foster lifelong learning and skill mastery across the entirety of every Singaporean’s career. Or the French Personal Training Account (Compte personnel de formation), which all private and public-sector employees and job seekers use to track work hours, which turn into credits for vocational and professional training schemes. Better known are the vocational education and apprenticeship programs that have made countries like Switzerland and Germany darlings of the workforce development discourse.

I’m skeptical that there’s a relationship between education in any form and preparing for future work, other than in credentialization. You can prepare for present work but not for future work other than in the broadest possible terms.

I’m also skeptical that there’s much of a relationship between how much is spent on education and future prospects. If there is, Americans have little to worry about. We spend more per student than any other country in the world and the most overall per student than any country other than Norway.

The one thing about which I do not think we should worry much is that the “robots are coming for our jobs”. What will be true is that automation will change jobs in ways we cannot predict.

I also urge you to read Pat Lang’s assessment of the Pensacola shootings. Here’s the bottom line:

The Saudi who killed three people at Pensacola is representative of the breed.

It is time for a basic re-appraisal of our relationships in the ME.

As I have suggested elsewhere there must be some viable middle ground between isolationism and nursing a viper within your bosom.

I wanted to draw your attention to a comment on another blog that I found interesting:

I am French. And I love this site, always well informed.

The French situation resists any comfortable simplification.

Personally, I think our social and economic system was one of the best. It was evolving and sustainable. The State had an important redistributive role and it was moral. It remains an enviable goal. This is not socialism. I repeat: nothing to do with socialism. Fifteen years ago, the Navy Chief of Staff was able to write that there was an air of freedom in every village in France that was unknown elsewhere. I don’t think he could write it again. The total level of taxation (unduly complex) was high, but so was the redistribution. Over the past 15 years, taxes have increased and redistribution has fallen sharply.

French capitalism has always been deficient. Its followers are not entrepreneurs or directors. This is why the role of the State in the industrial sector was so important. This role, which was carried out without any problems, was rather beneficial. In all this, there is an original French way of doing things that escapes comfortable “isms”. We continue to live on his legacy, squandered more or less quickly. Capitalism dilapidation, of course. Our industrial base has almost been destroyed .

We have a cancer in France: the French-American Young Leader organization (created in 1972). For the past 15 years, all rulers have gone through this institution of intellectual rectification.

Read the whole thing. It touches on a number of notes that have been repeated themes here including the “Yellow Jackets”, the role of social cohesion and “denationalization”. I think he’s pointing his finger in the wrong direction—there are many more factors than those he identifies. For example, how is the European Union not a force for “denationalization”?

How much evidence do we need? The Saudis reject the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they practice slavery in Saudi Arabia and maintain their practices when they come to the United States, as several well-publicized accounts have found, they execute people for witchcraft, the Crown Prince at the very least connived at the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi imams preach hatred, rich Saudis provide financial support for their radical form of Islam all over the world, many Saudis joined Daesh, and 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudis.

Now we learn that the shooter in the murders at the Pensacola naval base was a Saudi officer brought there for flight training. Protestations that the Saudis “love the American people” are nonsense. The “enhanced screening” of candidates for military training in the United States for foreign officers is simple: no Saudis. They are not our friends.

There is an old proverb that characterizes this situation well: he who sups with the devil should have a long spoon.

In her regular Washington Post column Kathleen Parker, no Trump supporter, articulates a view of Trump’s impeachment that approximates my own:

From this set of circumstances, House Democrats and most of the media have inferred that the president variously engaged in a quid pro quo, bribery and/or extortion and, more recently, abuse of power. Democrats have struggled to name that crime, so they might have difficulty landing on the correct language to use in their forthcoming articles of impeachment.

Here’s the obvious sticking point: If the elder Biden were not running for president, no one would question Trump’s request for information related to the younger Biden’s overpaid position on the board of a natural gas company while his father was vice president of the United States and, coincidentally, charged with pushing anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine.

But then, virtually everyone knows that the only reason Trump was concerned about corruption was because Joe Biden was a likely opponent in the 2020 election. We know, too, that military aid was withheld for a time but released once a whistleblower report surfaced. The perceived offense isn’t so much that Trump did these things but that an investigation — or at least the announcement of an investigation by Ukraine — would have directly benefited his 2020 election prospects.

When Biden says he never discussed the board position with his son other than to say, “I hope you know what you’re doing,” I take him at his word. But I also question why he didn’t say, “Son, I love you, but you can’t take this job as long as I’m vice president of the United States.”

Here’s the obvious sticking point: If the elder Biden were not running for president, no one would question Trump’s request for information related to the younger Biden’s overpaid position on the board of a natural gas company while his father was vice president of the United States and, coincidentally, charged with pushing anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine.

But then, virtually everyone knows that the only reason Trump was concerned about corruption was because Joe Biden was a likely opponent in the 2020 election. We know, too, that military aid was withheld for a time but released once a whistleblower report surfaced. The perceived offense isn’t so much that Trump did these things but that an investigation — or at least the announcement of an investigation by Ukraine — would have directly benefited his 2020 election prospects.

When Biden says he never discussed the board position with his son other than to say, “I hope you know what you’re doing,” I take him at his word. But I also question why he didn’t say, “Son, I love you, but you can’t take this job as long as I’m vice president of the United States.”

Let’s be honest: There was something odd going on with Hunter Biden and Burisma. Given his lack of qualifications, Hunter Biden’s hiring by Burisma was transparently because of his last name, as he admitted himself during an October interview with ABC News. This isn’t a crime, either, except perhaps of perception. The younger Biden got lucky when he was born a Biden and, apparently, has enjoyed the benefits without inconvenience to his conscience.

Trump may be everything his critics say he is: corrupt, dishonest, an embarrassment and a liar. But what he did wasn’t illegal in the vein of extortion or bribery, accusations which Democrats used before moving toward a discussion of broader concepts of high crimes and misdemeanors. While an act needn’t be criminal to be impeachable, the argument that Trump’s conduct rises to the level of impeachable offense revolves around the facts that, one, Trump was seeking help from a foreign nation and, two, that he might have benefited personally. Involvement of a foreign nation in the nation’s politics was an early concern of the Constitution’s framers, which is partly why they included the impeachment clause.

Given that Trump didn’t really care about an investigation and sought only to connect the former vice president with a corruption investigation, it is fair to infer that his motives were political. But asking a fellow head of state to investigate a person doing business in another country isn’t quite the same as inviting him to meddle in U.S. elections. Ultimately, the result might be the same, assuming a damaging finding about Joe Biden. But wouldn’t American voters want to know if such were the case? And, isn’t Trump the meddler to the extent that he, not Ukraine, would have used the information?

And abuse of power in the absence of a crime requires corrupt intent. It is true that one may infer intent from a pattern of actions but it is not true that one may infer intent from a series of assumptions. A higher level of proof than that is required.

If we are determined to ratify Gerald Ford’s declaration that a “high crime and misdemeanor” is anything the House says it is, it’s equally true that removal from office is warranted by whatever the Senate says.

To my eye what this entire scandal highlights in practically every aspect is that the real scandal is what is legal.