The Locust Years

We have the politicians we deserve. And they have us.

Stanley Baldwin

Preface

I realize this is a long essay. Usually, I’d break an essay like this into parts and publish them serially. But I decided against it.

As elections approach, journalists tend to temper their criticism of the candidate they favor. But I don’t propose to tell you that Joe Biden is doing a terrific job, because he’s not. Biden’s foreign policy is a dangerous disaster.¹

I nonetheless believe voting for Donald Trump would be insane. I deeply disapprove of the choice to do so. I know I have readers who plan to vote for him. I wish I could persuade you otherwise. But I don’t suffer from the conceit that anything I write will change your mind. American political identities are far too hardened for earnest efforts at persuasion to have any effect. Besides, my audience is so small that even if I persuaded every one of you to vote for Biden, it would matter less than a rainstorm over my precinct on Election Day.

So I write what I think is true. But I refuse to publish anything that might comfort readers who have decided to vote for Trump. If you talk yourself into believing that’s a good idea, it won’t be with my help.

That’s why I’ve published all the parts of this essay together.

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“That old turnip”

Yesterday in The Hill, two national security writers, Mark Toth and Jon Sweet, published an article titled, Biden is losing World War III.

[O]ur nation is being confronted with three wars: the war in Ukraine, the war in the Middle East, and the looming war over Taiwan and the South China Sea. Actually, make that three and a half wars, if you include the war of influence we are losing in the Sahel region of Africa as US forces abandon bases in Niger.

Biden, seemingly caught in the vice grip of November electoral calculus, is refusing even to acknowledge that we are already in World War III, let alone take the necessary measures to win it. As a result, our nation’s military, weapons and munitions production capacity, and its ability to engage with the cyberwarfare and disinformation emanating from Moscow and Beijing, are all woefully lacking. All require an immediate remedy.

The authors liken Biden to James Buchanan, a president who sought to mollify everyone, pleased no one, and allowed the nation to lurch toward civil war.

Perhaps. There’s something to that comparison, yes. Like Buchanan, Biden seems unable to grasp a principle expressed well by Margaret Thatcher: “Standing in the middle of the road is very dangerous. You get knocked down by the traffic from both sides.”

But the comparison to Stanley Baldwin is more apt and more important.

Prime Minster from 1935 to 1937, Baldwin instituted the policy of appeasement. It is not precisely true that Baldwin did nothing when Germany rearmed and nothing again when Hitler invaded the Rhineland. He did superintend over a modest program of rearmament. But he did not do enough. He placed excessive faith in compromise, negotiation, and diplomacy. During the Spanish Civil War, he persuaded 27 countries to sign a non-intervention pact, then stood by and watched as Hitler and Mussolini ignored it.

Baldwin had initially reposed his faith in disarmament. Disarmament would not stop war, he said in 1932, but it would make war “more difficult to start,” and “pay less to continue.” Besides, he told the Commons, in the age of air power, the prospect of war was too dreadful to contemplate: “The bomber will always get through.”² He openly announced that the UK would offer no military challenge to Hitler. In 1936, he said, “With two lunatics like Mussolini and Hitler you can never be sure of anything. But I am determined to keep the country out of war.”

Baldwin did not think Britain strong enough to fight a war, nor, in the wake of the Great Depression, did he want to spend the sums required to rearm. Like many Conservatives, he wagered Hitler would strike East, not West, and he reckoned this wouldn’t be the worst of outcomes. Above all, he knew the that British people, deeply scarred by the waste and futility of the Great War, were dead set against taking up arms or even preparing to do so.

Of late, historians have viewed Baldwin more sympathetically than they did in the immediate aftermath of the war. Churchill encouraged contempt for Baldwin,³ writes Conservative Party historian Lord Lexden, but

[Baldwin] should be praised for launching an ambitious rearmament program in the teeth of widespread political opposition in an attempt to bring Hitler to heel—a mission not helped by Churchill’s habit of exaggerating German capabilities. Forty-one new RAF squadrons were commissioned in 1934, and another 39 the next year. Professor Philip Williamson’s deeply researched Stanley Baldwin: Conservative leadership and national values (1999) concludes that Baldwin “chose to plan for a possible war in the medium term (1939 and later) and in the short term to build a deterrent air force, while seeking to tie Hitler down to negotiated agreements. It cannot be assumed that if Churchill had been in his position his actions—rather than his words—would have been much different.”

Perhaps historians, one hundred years from now, will write something similar about Biden’s efforts. I can imagine that in the wake of World War III he will be reviled by the survivors, if there are any; but in time, historians will come to think that he did what he could, and given the absolute unwillingness of the American electorate to confront reality, he could do no more.

Like the United States now, Britain in 1934 was profoundly isolationist. Appeasing Hitler had overwhelming support. The royal family, prominent business leaders, the press, and the majority of the Conservative Party lent the policy their imprimatur. Among the significant figures of the time, only Winston Churchill stood against it, and Churchill was widely regarded as a warmonger—a figure rather like John Bolton, albeit much, much more interesting.

Baldwin’s son has written that has father planned a rearmament program as early as 1934, but was forced to do so quietly to avoid antagonizing the public, whose pacifism, shared by the Labour and the Liberal opposition alike, had been revealed in the 1934 Peace Ballot.⁴ He argues that his father’s political skill and patience allowed him to succeed in making the case for rearmament, and thus he should be credited for the program that began in 1935. This was the best anyone could have done, he suggests.

But life doesn’t care whether you did your best. He started two years too late, at only half-speed. In 1936, Churchill attacked the Baldwin government for its inaction and its indecision:

… Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have now entered upon a period of danger greater than has befallen Britain since the U-boat campaign was crushed; perhaps, indeed, it is a more grievous period than that, because at that time at least we were possessed of the means of securing ourselves and of defeating that campaign. Now we have no such assurance. The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences. We have entered a period in which for more than a year, or a year and a half, the considerable preparations which are now on foot in Britain will not, as the Minister clearly showed, yield results which can be effective in actual fighting strength; while during this very period Germany may well reach the culminating point of her gigantic military preparations, and be forced by financial and economic stringency to contemplate a sharp decline, or perhaps some other exit from her difficulties. It is this lamentable conjunction of events which seems to present the danger of Europe in its most disquieting form. We cannot avoid this period; we are in it now.

His description of Baldwin’s government is all too familiar:

Anyone can see what the position is. The Government simply cannot make up their minds, or they cannot get the Prime Minister to make up his mind. So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. So we go on preparing more months and years—precious, perhaps vital to the greatness of Britain—for the locusts to eat.

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Back to Toth and Sweet, who continue their criticism of Biden:

“Defending” must no longer be the watchword of the day in Biden’s White House, but “winning.” Winning this increasingly kinetic global ideological war is our only way forward if liberal democracy is to prevail against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s shared vision of a so-called multipolar world, militarily and economically dominated by Russia and China and anchored by BRICS.

Biden’s escalation fears must also end. As evidenced by October 7, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Iran’s April 13 attacks on Israel and now the Bastogne-like battle for the Kharkiv Oblast, fears of escalation have only led to vacuums being filled by our nation’s enemies—and the enemies of our allies in Eastern Europe and the Mideast. Simply put, the more Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, argues for de-escalation, the more our enemies use those windows to escalate. 

Jake Sullivan should have resigned after the catastrophe of our departure from Afghanistan, and failing this, Biden should have fired him. At the time, Brett Bruen, a former Obama adviser, made this case publicly. He was right. While Sullivan “knows all the theories and academic arguments in foreign policy,” he wrote, “his overseas experience is less robust. It can lead to the disconnect between ideas and implementation.” It would be exceedingly good to see the revival of the tradition of resigning after presiding over a catastrophic failure—and not just in the United States.

But this is by the by. Baldwin, in his defense, replied to Churchill:

I put before the whole House my own views with an appalling frankness. From 1933, I and my friends were all very worried about what was happening in Europe. … You will remember at that time there was probably a stronger pacifist feeling running through the country than at any time since the War. I am speaking of 1933 and 1934. … I asked myself what chance was there ... within the next year or two of that feeling being so changed that the country would give a mandate for rearmament? Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming and we must rearm, does anybody think that this pacific democracy would have rallied to that cry at that moment! I cannot think of anything that would have made the loss of the election from my point of view more certain. ... We got from the country—with a large majority—a mandate for doing a thing that no one, twelve months before, would have believed possible.

As Churchill subsequently wrote, “I have never heard such a squalid confession from a public man as Baldwin offered us yesterday.”

Yet it is true that Baldwin, like Biden, faced an implacable electoral logic, with resistance by the public and the House of Commons to rearmament overwhelming. Perhaps a leader of more talent than Baldwin could have persuaded the British public to rally to his cry. But Baldwin was widely reckoned a man of great political gifts. He could not do it. Nor could Churchill. If Churchill had been able to carry the British public with him, he, not Baldwin, would have been the prime minister. Churchill could not even persuade his own party, no less the opposition.

As for that opposition, in 1933 Clement Attlee declared the Labour Party “unalterably opposed to anything in the nature of rearmament.” In 1934, Labour brought a motion of censure against the government for planning to enlarge the Royal Air Force. “We deny the need for increased air arms,” Attlee intoned. When in 1935 Hitler claimed that German rearmament offered no threat to peace, Attlee seized upon it, arguing that Hitler’s speech gave “a chance to call a halt in the armaments race.”

Here is Attlee’s denunciation the Defense White Paper Baldwin’s government produced in 1937. You will sense something familiar in it:

… Every sentence in this White Paper contemplates war, not as a possibility, but as a certainty. Every word in the speech of the Minister for the Coordination of Defence was directed, not to the possibility, but to the certainty of war. It is quite clear that what we have now is the organization of this country permanently on a war basis. The Government have absolutely no policy for peace. There is no suggestion of peace. … Throughout this document and throughout the speeches we have heard, there runs the cry, “The time is short; get ready now.” We hear of two-year plans and three-year plans and five-year plans, but we have not heard one word of what is to happen at the end of five years. What is to happen? War? Is there going to be disarmament? Shall we be safe at the end of five years? Armaments are piling up. …

I should be very glad if the Prime Minister could give me any instance of an armaments race which has not ended in war. That is the position with which we are faced. We are challenged to say what is our position with regard to the amount of these armaments. What is the amount that will make us safe? I do not believe the Government are going to get any safety through these armaments. There is no suggestion that these armaments will make us safe.

Attlee, of course, sounds a fool. Nothing is a better “policy for peace” than rearmament. Si vis pacem, para bellum. But more foolish still are the Americans who channel the spirit of Attlee’s complaints with the benefit of the hindsight Attlee did not have.

Attlee continued:

…. I am not in the least satisfied that there is not gross waste in this [rearmament] program. I am absolutely certain that if by any chance we survive this program and what it leads to, we shall get the same profiteering scandals as we have had before. We have had them after every war. … When we left office the world was moving towards peace. If after six years the Government take credit for what they have done they must also take the discredit for the present situation, although I do not claim that it is entirely due to the incapacity and wickedness of the Government.

You’ve heard that argument only recently. To prepare for war—or arm Ukraine—might involve waste or profiteering. Therefore, it should not be done at all.

And this: “When we left office the world was moving towards peace.” Electorates, then and now, are gullible enough to find that argument persuasive, and politicians, then and now, are cynical enough to make it. They tell the electorate what it wants to hear—that securing peace is entirely within their power. But this is obviously untrue. As James Mattis is fond of saying, “The enemy gets a vote.”

If the world had been moving toward peace during the last Labour government, it would hardly have been because of anything that government had done. Nor was the world moving toward peace. Ramsey McDonald’s second Labour Government resigned in late August of 1931. Less than a month later, the Empire of Japan invaded Manchuria. Some movement toward peace.

Political fairytales like this are not harmless. They indulge the electorate’s dangerous solipsism and its omnipotence fantasies. No one could have deterred Hitler through pacifism or appeasement and no one can deter Putin by “making a great deal” and no one can deter Iran simply by existing.

As for the latter, I am not sure what Trump and his advisers prepare to do beyond that—they’re too incoherent on this point even to guess—but Trump assures us the problems will disappear the moment he retakes the remote control in the West Wing and levers his vasty rump into his favorite television chair. Trump has never said why he believes that Russia’s invasion and Hamas’s attack would not have happened had been in office. He has simply said they wouldn’t have. Since there is no argument, there is nothing to rebut. If you wish to believe, you’ll believe. Whatever the case, if you’re willing to accept that “Trump is the only president in 72 years that didn’t have any wars,” I’m hardly going to convince you otherwise, so I won’t try. (Why 72, for God’s sake?)

Better leaders tell the electorate the truth about the world and its dangers and in so doing prepare them for the terrible choices they will be obliged to make.

At least, unlike Trump and his devotees, Attlee allowed that the situation was not entirely due to the Government’s wickedness and incapacity.

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Lord Lexton tells us that like Biden, Baldwin was widely praised as a kindly man of “profound, yet gentle patriotism.” He believed deeply in democracy. It was Baldwin who made Britain fully democratic by conferring upon all women the right to vote. (Churchill opposed this: Women, in his view, had no business in politics.) Baldwin, also, held that his great project was healing the nation’s domestic divide, which in Britain’s case was one class, not partisanship. He introduced the famous phrase one nation at an election rally in 1924.

The differences end there. Baldwin, writes Lord Sexton, “had the ability, given to few political leaders, especially in peace-time, to address the nation in language—some of the most moving and beautiful language it had ever heard.” No one will write those words of Joe Biden. Or any American politician.

Back to Toth and Sweet:

… Israel is a case study in the madness of Biden’s Buchanan-like approach to handling the nation’s foreign policy. Initially, Biden was strongly supportive of Jerusalem’s right to put an end to Hamas as a military threat to Israel. In the wake of anti-Israel Palestinian protests on US campuses throughout the country and in particular in New York City, Biden’s resolve dissipated. … Defending Michigan’s 15 electoral votes seemingly became more important than safeguarding Israel, destroying Hamas, or alone extricating the eight American hostages still held by Hamas’s military chief …

Biden has lost the plot—or maybe he is incapable of grasping it. Russia and China are destroying the post–World War II global order and the institutions that once safeguarded it—including the UN Security Council and now, indirectly, the ICC. Instead of rallying the nation to fight and win this ever-widening global concerted assault on liberty, Biden and his politicos are sacrificing American national security in an attempt to win in November. World War III is upon us, and our nation is exposed. Fort Sumter stands symbolically empty. The country’s armed forces are overtaxed, facing potentially three wars at once and preparing for only one. Instead of channeling Abraham Lincoln and his resolve to win, Biden is imitating Buchanan, derelict in his duty as leader of the free world. 

It is true. It is horrifying. It is profoundly depressing. Biden should be trying, at least, to lead the public by explaining to the American people the nature of the threats they face and the sacrifices that mounting a defense against these dangers will demand of them. His resolution should inspire in us resolve and confidence. He is incapable of that. It is not realistic to ask it of him. If Baldwin, ultimately, sought patiently to build a consensus, Biden vacillates between mumbling slogans, mumbling their opposite, and gibberish. Perhaps he’s trying to make everyone happy. Perhaps he doesn’t know what he wants.

But would it make a difference if Biden were a better orator, a gifted communicator—if he were a veritable Roosevelt? It’s far from clear to me that it would. I don’t think the American public is persuadable. Like Britain in the 1930s, America is awash in doomed fantasies of isolationism in the face of implacably evil foes. The public is categorically set against recognizing the growing danger and committed to believing in magical solutions to intractable problems.

Also, a very significant part of our public has gone insane. I have no idea whether it’s possible to address Americans rationally about anything now. The effect of the Internet has been an epistemological unraveling that has no precedent in human history. Coupled with the catastrophic failure of the American educational system, I think it’s likely now that somewhere between a third and two-thirds of the American public have acquired the ability to believe absolutely anything. If you’re willing to believe anything, you’ll of course choose to believe what you want to believe.

I don’t believe it would be possible for a candidate to win the presidency in America right now by telling Americans anything like the truth about pretty much any significant topic. This is frightening and sad—and very lonely—to contemplate. Look for yourself:

No, I haven’t checked to be sure every one of these polls is methodologically sound. I don’t need to. The overall picture is only too obvious. A few dud polls wouldn’t change it.

I often complain that Biden is incapable of making a clear and compelling speech explaining, for example, why the United States must be involved in Ukraine. But suppose he were. It’s clear that somewhere between a third and two-thirds of the US citizenry would be incapable of understanding it or would choose to disbelieve it in favor of something they saw on TikTok.

I’m trying not to despair. Despair is a crime. But these numbers have a force no rhetoric can match. How are you supposed to have a rational conversation about the Budapest Memorandum with people who think our government is run by pedophile Satan worshippers who are hiding their contact with aliens?

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Is Trump better for Israel?

Eugene Kontorovich, director of the Center on the Middle East and International Law at George Mason university, has written that the ugly lesson of October 7 is this: The bloodier the terror attacks and the more stark the eliminationist rhetoric, the more support for a Palestinian state.

The article is a mix of depressingly strong arguments and arguments so silly that I’m puzzled a law professor made them. He writes:

Hamas’ grisly terror raid on October 7 has proved to be the single most stunningly successful act in gaining support for the Palestinian cause—not among Israeli or American voters, of course, but among top Democratic policymakers, and their counterparts across the Western world. One might think that a campaign of unrepentant killing, torture, rape, and hostage-taking would be disqualifying for a national independence movement. But in Washington, Hamas’ ongoing crimes have resulted in much of the weight of the US government being brought to bear on advancing the cause of Palestinian statehood, and its correlate, the punishment and demonization of the Jewish state.

I don’t know who he thinks those imbeciles screaming “Free Palestine” on our college campuses are if not American voters, but in the main, I agree with his point: It’s baffling that so much of the world is still talking about a two-state solution as if it were 1993 even though neither party to the conflict is remotely interested in it.

I agree, too, that nothing about the world’s response makes sense:

Whereas less than two years ago, at a meeting with President Mahmoud Abbas, President Biden had declared that “the ground is not ripe” for renewing negotiations between Ramallah and Jerusalem, the October 7 massacres made Biden change his mind—and make the establishment of a Palestinian state with all deliberate speed a central priority of US Middle East policy. Since October 7, four countries have recognized the “State of Palestine,” with three European states indicating their intent to do so in May. That is more recognition than the PA has won in the entire past decade (notably, only one country moved to recognize Palestinian statehood during the Trump administration).

International institutions, seeing that Israel’s protection by the U.S. has been lifted, have also showered gifts on the perpetrators of October 7. In recent weeks, the UN General Assembly voted to upgrade the Palestinians’ status, giving them privileges reserved for member states. On Monday, the International Criminal Court charged Israel’s prime minister and defense minister with committing war crimes, placing them on a par with the terrorist leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar—a huge diplomatic coup for the terrorist group that creates a moral equivalence between it and Israel. Had October 7 only managed to revive the trial of Jews for killing babies, it would have still been a triumph.

I don’t think the ICC has placed Israel on a par with Hamas—they have both been accused of crimes, but this doesn’t mean “placing them on a par.” I agree, however, that the both the ICC’s and the ICJ’s cases appear to be political, not legal, and that both courts have shown themselves contemptible.

An example of a silly argument: He notes with displeasure that in July 2023, the State Department circulated foreign policy guidance to other departments of government advising that engaging in technological cooperation with lsraeli institutions in the Occupied Territories was inconsistent with US foreign policy. But July comes three months before October. The article is undermined by arguments like this and by the typical vulgar exaggeration of our hyper-partisan era. No, the Biden Administration has not, as he says, in recent months “made it clear that Iran, not Israel, is its favored regional client.” He’s mistaking the Biden Administration’s timidity and pathological fear of escalating conflicts for favoritism. This argument makes no more sense than the suggestion that because Biden has demanded Ukraine refrain from striking Russian territory, he has “made it clear that Russia, not Ukraine, is its favored regional client.”

In both cases, the Biden Administration—fearing a wider war regional war—has hamstrung our allies. In both cases, Biden has imposed unreasonable conditions on the use of American weapons and condemned our allies to defeat. In both cases, Biden is undermining both American security interests and those of our allies, and in both cases he is making the wider regional war he fears more likely, not less. But no, this does not mean that Iran is the administration’s “favored regional client.” Iran is not a client of the United States in any way. It is an enemy.

It’s silly to represent the Biden Administration’s policy toward Iran as the manifestation of the Administration’s enthusiasm or preference for Iran. I too think the effort to coax Iran back into the JCPOA is delusional. But those who criticize the Administration’s efforts to do this should say what they propose to do to prevent Iran from becoming a full-fledged nuclear power.

I bring this up because the suppressed argument, in this and so much commentary on the Biden Administration, is that if Biden’s policy is bad, Trump’s must be good, or at least okay. He doesn’t say so explicitly, I should note. But he hints as much.

But it isn’t so. Trump’s policy—tearing up the JCPOA—was even more stupid than negotiating the JCPOA in the first place, because Trump simultaneously made it clear that beyond tweeting out threats and our crown-jewel-classified satellite images—and killing Soleimani, which was refreshing but ultimately made no difference—he had no more appetite for conflict with Iran than Biden.

It dismays me that so much of Trump’s presidency has either been forgotten or was never noticed in the first place. Who remembers that in September 2019, Iran staged a Pearl-Harbor style attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil fields? Trump shrugged. Iran did this—not coincidentally—right after Trump tried to uproot every last American serviceman from Syria, indifferent to the effect this would have on our ability to deter Iran or protect our allies. He was in the end thwarted—barely—by his advisors, who understood why it was in our interest to keep our military in Iran’s vicinity. (He won’t be thwarted by Secretary of State JD Vance and National Security Advisor Tucker Carlson. )

To persuade him to leave at least some troops in place, his advisors had to jolly him with the promise of “taking the oil” in Syria. The amount of revenue from those oil fields is a rounding error in the United States military budget, but Trump didn’t know that. Neither, alas, did the millions of people worldwide who concluded the US really was in the Middle East for the oil. (There’s a connection between a president who say things like that and the efflorescence of campus lunatics screaming about “American imperialism.”) Americans forget quickly and have forgotten that imbroglio, if ever they knew of it to begin with. But no one else has—certainly not the Kurdish allies we left to be slaughtered, nor the hundreds of thousands of people who were displaced as a result, nor the Iranians, nor, really, anyone else in the world.

Trump shattered American credibility and set off a mad dash by Turkey, Russia, and Syria to fill the vacuum left by our withdrawal. Trump was determined—God knows why—to hand Iran a gift it had barely imagined. He all but laid down his coat for the IRGC so it could build its coveted bridge to the Med. (Why doesn’t anyone remember this? It was only a few years ago!) So, no. This man is not going to protect Israel from Iran. He won’t even do what Biden has done. Be serious.

Even if you’re an isolationist to the bone who believes our troops should never be used for anything but parades, the way he did this simply could not have been more injurious to our interests. Had we drawn down our troops in a rational matter, we could have coordinated it, at least, with our allies, and assured a phased handover of ISIS detainees (instead of allowing them to be scattered to the winds). We could have withdrawn our troops in in an orderly way. We could have negotiated a better fate for the SDF. We might have reaped diplomatic benefits, even, with Turkey. Instead we abandoned men and women who fought and died to defeat ISIS—and that is an indelible moral stain, neither the first nor the last, but we shouldn’t get used to it—and got nothing whatsoever in return. Trump didn’t even coordinate with the British or the French, who also had troops on the ground.

He left the SDF maximally exposed, was forced to plead for a “ceasefire” with Turkey (one that ceded everything), and in the end he changed his mind—and then had to send even more troops to the Middle East because the vision of this cosmic omnishambles left our ability to deter Iran in the crapper. Predictably, Tehran seized the moment and attacked Saudi Arabia—and really, that’s what happens when we put in office a president whose mind has all the powers of ratiocination of a pair of drunk fireflies in a jar, and we’re damned lucky it wasn’t a lot worse. In the end, we wound up sending thousands upon thousands of troops back in the Kingdom for the first time since 2003 (those of you with long memories will recall that this was a the casus belli that prompted Osama bin Ladin to attack the US), no deterrence against Iran, and no JCPOA. All of this seems to have gone down the memory hole.

This was Trump’s approach to foreign policy at a far less volatile moment—and again, he was constrained by the people around him, who at least had some grasp of what the US military does and why. Nothing—not one thing—about this put America first or demonstrated a knack for peace through strength or whatever it is people fondly tell themselves that Trump represents. Trump is emphatically worse for America, worse for Ukraine, and worse for the world than Biden. (He’s great for the world’s worst tyrants, though.) He is also worse for Israel, because he is worse for everything. And Biden is just awful.

Even if Trump’s daughter or some advisor persuades him that he favors Israel (despite the grudge he holds against Netanyahu for recognizing the 2020 election and despite his belief that Israel is among the many countries that’s “ripping us off” and should be “paying us more”), he cannot be good for Israel because he is so very bad for America.

If you think Trump would be worse for America than Biden but better for Israel—and you’re therefore not sure how to vote—let me solve this for you. If you’re voting in a US election, your first loyalty is to America. If it isn’t, don’t vote. But fortunately, there is no conflict here. Put on your own oxygen mask first. If Trump takes the US swirling down the drain— and he will—Israel will have a useless ally.

Yes, Biden is bad for Israel. He’s bad for Ukraine, and bad for Taiwan, and bad for the border (I am told), but Trump is worse. Because Trump is not even trying to act in the American interest.

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The truth about Iran

Here’s the truth about Iran. I will reveal the big secret. Broadly speaking, there are three options for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program.

1. Nothing. The first is to accept it and pray that Iran can be deterred in the way we deter other nuclear powers—through the promise of mutual assured destruction.

It is not a good option.

2. War. The second is to invade Iran, kill its leaders, and occupy it indefinitely. No military option short of that is apt to work, although I am open to hearing from you if you believe this could be achieved by means of an attack on its nuclear facilities. Do remember that if we do that, Hezbollah will wipe out much of Israel.

Recall, too, that Iran has seeded Europe and the US with its terrorist operatives. We should firmly expect that this strategy would be extremely costly. It would be a very long time before any of us would feel safe flying or gathering in a large crowd—if it works at all.

I don’t know what military capabilities we have beyond those that are reported publicly. It’s possible—I sure hope so—that we’ve developed secret weapons for exactly this eventuality. But from what I do know, it’s highly unlikely such a strike would succeed. Tehran would probably be able to restart key areas of its nuclear activity soon after the attack.

The Iranian program is not a soft, solitary target like the Osirak reactor. Tehran has had plenty of time to think about our arrival and prepare. Fordow, for example, is hardened and buried under 80 meters of rock. Iran’s research, centrifuge production, uranium mining and processing, and weapons production facilities are dispersed across the entire country, protected in hardened silos, secured under mountains, and surrounded by air-defense systems and electronic warfare measures. The US has some damned impressive bombs, but I don’t know if they’re impressive enough. I suspect that if they were, we’d have done it already. An even bigger problem is that we just don’t know where everything is.

What about we forget the nuclear facilities and target the regime? A decapitation strike might—in the optimal scenario—be the push required to topple the regime. Perhaps what follows would be a new, stable regime that is friendly to the United States and Israel, willing to renounce Iran’s nuclear ambitions, or both. Perhaps what follows would be a civil war that makes Syria’s look like a kerfuffle, spreads quickly to Iraq and Lebanon, drowns the region in blood and agony, and ushers in the return of the Messiah. (Or his first visit, depending on your perspective.) Perhaps the end state will be an Iran that no longer wants the Bomb. Perhaps it will be an Iran—or a something—that wants it twice as much. Perhaps the end state will be an Iran that isn’t as hostile to us. Perhaps—you see where I’m going. Striking Iran is a massive risk. There’s no way to do it with less risk.

It is not a good option.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. An Iran with a nuclear bomb is a terrifying prospect—especially if you’re Israeli, but not only if you’re Israeli. Once Iran masters the ICBM, we’re all Israelis.

But let’s be clear: Neither Trump nor Biden would dream of going to war with Iran to prevent it from acquiring the Bomb, still less occupy Iran indefinitely to ensure that the new regime doesn’t simply redouble the efforts of the old one. If you think either of our candidates for the presidency would do that, you’re just not paying attention. Biden was against the bin Laden raid: He’s deeply risk-averse. Trump? What would he get out of it? It’s all downside, from his point of view. There’s a huge chance it all goes wrong. Oil would shoot up to a zillion a barrel. If Hezbollah does what Iran built it to do in response, everyone will blame him for the second Holocaust. If we don’t get the whole leadership and the ICRG in the first wave, they’ll block the Straight of Hormuz and destroy the oil infrastructure on both sides of the Persian Gulf. There will be a global economic depression. China and Russia will be furious at him. And by the time Iran gets around to nuking someone, he’ll be dead, so why would he want any of this? It’s a lot easier to watch television. This is, after all, the guy who said that if China invades Taiwan, “there isn’t a fucking thing we can do about it.”

Both of these men are too weak ever to consider that. And no one capable of winning the American presidency would entertain the idea, because the American people are dead set against it—and probably rightly.

It’s just not a good idea.

Bribery. That leaves the option three, which is to offer Iran a set of inducements—inducements so valuable to the regime that it’s willing to delay its acquisition of the Bomb—in the hope that if we can string this out long enough, the regime will collapse on its own.

This is not a good idea either. I don’t think that regime is anywhere near collapse. And I think Iran could very well use that Bomb. If they do, won’t we look like schmucks when history records that we all sat around worrying about the price of oil when we still had a chance to stop it.

None of these options are good. No matter which one we choose, it’s awful.

Iran will never renounce its pursuit of an atomic weapon. The best we can hope, so long as that regime is in power—and probably, no matter the regime—is a delay. Until Trump withdrew from the JCPOA without offering a better plan, Iran seemed to be holding up its end of the bargain. Whether this would have continued, I have no idea. But to have screwed that up without having a Plan B was unforgivable.

If you press defenders of Trump’s withdrawal to explain how this helped to prevent Iran from acquiring a Bomb, they’ll invent a Trump Doctrine—there wasn’t one, he didn’t understand anything about the JCPOA and withdrew only because he was determined to stick it to Obama—telling you, usually, that the essence of this plan was “stiff sanctions and terrifying erraticism.”

Yeah, no.

Won’t work. Anyone who tells you it will is lying. The erraticism is okay—it scares the living daylights out of me, so probably it has some effect on them. Who knows. I liked it when he whacked Soleimani. But what actually works, for deterrence, is the adversary’s certainty that you’ll inflict unacceptable pain on him if he transgresses your boundaries. (That’s the “assured” part of Mutually Assured Destruction, and that part is important.) Trump cannot induce this certainty in anyone.

And if you think sanctions, no matter how stiff, will inhibit Iran’s nuclear program, you’ve succumbed to this hooey because you want to succumb. Think about it. Iran wants the Bomb because we’ve carefully taught the world that countries with nuclear weapons won’t be invaded. Iran can see what happened to Ukraine. Which would you rather be: severely sanctioned—or Ukraine? We can sanction Iran from here to Judgement Day. It simply won’t work. The regime will be just fine. (Sanctions, generally, don’t work. Look at Russia.)

Trump’s defenders then say that whether or not they work, easing sanctions puts cash in the Mullah’s hands, which they use to kill Americans—and Israelis, and Syrians (and, I would add, most of all, Iranians). That’s correct. Anyone who says otherwise is also lying. That’s exactly what happens when we ease sanctions. That’s the point. We’re offering them a bribe. Why else would they delay their acquisition of the Bomb? They really want those nuclear weapons. To get them to stop, you have to offer them something else they’d really like, and the only other thing they really like is killing. That’s precisely why we don’t want them to have a nuclear weapon in the first place.

So anyone who loudly attacks the Biden Administration for easing the sanctions on Iran but fails to explain why we’re easing those sanctions—or what other options are available to us—is manipulating you. If you criticize the Biden Administration for easing those sanctions, it is incumbent upon you to explain which of the other two options you prefer.

None of this means that Iran has become “Biden’s favorite client.”

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How I wish that in advance of this election we could have an adult national conversation about the world we really live in, followed by a choice between two candidates for the president who spoke to us like adults. Bribery, war, or perhaps doing nothing and crossing our fingers? Let’s hear them make the real case—the one in which they abandon the pretense there’s no risk or cost to the plan.

I want a presidential race in which we all acknowledge that the world is one tough place, and there are no easy solutions or shortcuts. The one in which our well-informed American electorate carefully weighs our candidates’ well-reasoned proposals—arguments, not slogans—and considers the facts, and the evidence of history, before they vote. I want the electorate that rewards politicians instead of punishing them for treating them like adults.

But you vote with the electorate you have, not the electorate you might want or wish to have at a later time. If Biden, like Baldwin, is looking at the electorate and refusing “even to acknowledge that we are already in World War III, let alone [taking] the necessary measures to win it,” I imagine it is because he is thinking, “I cannot think of anything that would make the loss of the election from my point of view more certain.” Squalid, yes, but I scarcely blame him. I blame us. We have the politicians we deserve.

Soon enough, though, the era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, will come to its close. In its place we will enter a period of consequences. I fear very much that when we do, Donald Trump will be at the helm.

I wish I could offer you a more encouraging vision.

But it isn’t there to offer.

1. Philips O’Brien, whose analyses of the war in Ukraine I admire, recently wrote an essay that expresses my views on the matter. A choice between weakness and evil: And it’s so important to choose weakness.

… we have seen maybe the greatest contrast between one foreign policy which is weak (borderline pathetic) and another which is plotting for the victory of evil. Both are dreadful, but one would spell disaster. It’s important to see the difference and understand that even though the weak and pathetic is foolish and terrible, it must be supported over evil.

He writes, and I agree, that “the Biden Administration is one of the weakest in US history,” strategically incoherent, operating under Russian reflexive control, and doomed to fail and keep failing. The administration “does not understand war, doesn’t understand Ukraine, and doesn’t understand how Putin is trying to control their thinking.” But just when “once again you feel things could not be worse than the Biden administration’s policy towards Ukraine and Russia, MAGA appears to remind you that this is not the case.” The article is paywalled, unfortunately.

I hadn’t quite realized how much it meant to me to be able, every four years, to choose. We now live in the country of that famous Wendy’s commercial: The GOP has presented us with a candidate so uniquely unacceptable that in the coming election I have, in a literal sense, no choice. I hadn’t realized how much it meant to me to have the shy hope, every four years, that things might get better.

2. A Fear for the Future, Speech before the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, November 10, 1932.

3. Told that a German bomb had fallen on Baldwin’s house during the Blitz, Churchill replied, “What base ingratitude.” When Baldwin died, Churchill was asked what should be done with his body. “Embalm, cremate and bury,” he replied. “Take no chances.”

4. The peace ballot was a nationwide questionnaire that endeavored to assess the British public’s attitude toward the League of Nations and collective security.