US Naval Air Station Sigonella, Italy

The Pentagon is currently considering potential consolidation and reduction options for U.S. forces in Europe, part of a six-month review labeled “NATO 3.0” and led by DoD Under Secretary for Policy Elbridge Colby. The results are expected to be announced this fall. The U.S. currently keeps about 80,000 military personnel in Europe, more than half of them in Germany, with the others spread out very unevenly among the UK, Italy, Spain, Poland, Romania, Greece and a few other states. American forces in Europe are concentrated on a few major bases that serve the dual purpose of defending the continent and our NATO allies, on the one hand, and facilitating U.S. military operations “down range”, mainly in the Middle East and Africa.

Whatever choice the Pentagon makes, a substantial reduction in the American military presence in Europe is bound to be controversial on both sides of the Atlantic. Most commentary in the United States has embraced a few basic ideas:

1. That the U.S. military presence helps protect America’s allies, including the countries in which U.S. forces are based.

2. That the Pentagon might well seek significant reductions, reflecting both Washington’s rebalancing toward other strategic priorities (with Europe fading and China and the Western Pacific surging) and the serious operational strains caused by the ill-considered and costly U.S./Israeli war with Iran.

These two ideas underpin an informative article by Sam Skove in today’s Foreign Policy, entitled “Don’t Freak Out Over the Pentagon’s Europe Plans”. The subtitle, however, “Congress, European nations and Trump himself stand in the way of major changes”, conveys the bottom line. No matter how keen Under Secretary Colby might be to shift U.S. resources to the China “threat”, and however successful he is in persuading the Pentagon to follow such a path, a range of external factors beyond the Pentagon’s control will likely limit the extent of force changes in Europe. Major drawdowns are therefore unlikely. Or so the article claims. (As a general rule, continuity and incrementalism are always the safest bets in the American security policy establishment and policy circles in general.)

Here is a gift link to the article (hopefully you can get past the FP paywall):

FP Don't Freak Out

Skove’s article also focuses on the possibility that the choice of countries for major drawdowns of U.S. forces “may be driven more by professions of loyalty to the Trump administration than pure military considerations”. This is indeed a recurring theme in American coverage of the “NATO 3.0” process, and is bolstered by threats by Trump, SecDef Hegseth and others to pull forces from allies like Spain, Italy, and Germany.

Skove notes that such a politicized force reduction process could have real operational costs for the United States. For example, he points out that U.S. Naval forces based in Rota, Spain, are important for ongoing missions in the Middle East as well as the defense of Israel, and I would add that U.S. forces based in Sigonella, Italy, figure importantly in contingencies across a wide geographic space. Major U.S. installations in the UK and Germany serve an even larger array of American strategic objectives.

So there are real, operational reasons for the United States to retain such bases and keep the associated forces in Europe.

Divergent Threat Perceptions Persist …

I am more interested here in the perspective of Europe, and not only Europe, but individual European states. Especially southern European states. Recent history is instructive.

In the four-and-a-half years since Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, much has changed, but not to the degree that is often assumed. Solidarity in support of Ukraine has been strong, though not strong or effective enough to move Moscow closer to a settlement. Nor have reinforced efforts toward rearmament and defense integration moved ahead smoothly or quickly; Europe’s frontline states in the east (and some others) continue to regard active American support and even “leadership” as essential to their defense and deterrence. Real European “defense autonomy” remains a work in progress, supported by some but not nearly all European NATO allies and EU member states. The response to economic and political challenges presented by the Trump Regime has likewise been ineffective and has tended to weaken, rather than strengthen, European institutions. Over all, Europe has not responded to the threat from Moscow or from Washington with the degree of solidarity that many may have hoped and even expected. With important elections coming up in Germany and France, it could be that the high-tide of European unity on these threats has already been reached (though I personally hope that is not the case).

There are real and legitimate national differences in threat perception that persist in Europe and continue to affect decision making in important ways. They are evident in NATO as well as in the EU.

Within NATO, Spanish PM Sanchez has made clear that Spain will not raise defense spending to the Alliance’s 5%-of-GDP benchmark. Sanchez has been criticized for this on both sides of the Atlantic; at home, not so much. The conservative opposition has tried to make the issue a political cudgel, but Sanchez supporters and the broader Spanish public seem quite comfortable with Madrid’s opt-out. This seems to reflect a very reasonable perception that Spain does not face defense threats that merit such a heavy investment in armaments and the military. Furthermore, Spaniards are ambivalent about NATO. In the latest Pew survey results, published this past July, 48% of respondents had an unfavorable view of NATO, while 44% had a favorable view.

To my mind, such reluctance to commit resources to common NATO defense commitments should come as no surprise. And it is not at all the same as being “soft” on Russia. In the same Pew survey, 81% of Spanish respondents had a negative view of Russia, compared to 78% of respondents in France and the UK and 73% in Italy. Threat perception is a complex and squishy concept, and is sometimes best measured when the time comes to allocate resources.

Interestingly, something similar - involving a broader set of protagonists - is playing out in discussions over the European Union’s long term budget for 2028-2034. As so often in the past, familiar fiscally conservative (tightwad) member states in northern Europe, led by Germany, want to see major cuts to the European Commission’s proposed 2 trillion Euro budget proposal. Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden - the usual suspects. Unlike in the past, however, the same states are pushing for shifting EU budget resources toward defense. Meanwhile, a large number of other member states, notably in the west and south, want no overall budget cuts, especially at the expense of traditional flows to agriculture, adjustment and convergence. In the view of these states, and some on the Commission, any increase in common defense expenditure would need to come from new resources.

This is the classic north-south divide in Europe, with a new common defense twist. But the addition of defense only amplifies the divide. The countries of southern and western Europe are further from the Russian threat; it is only natural that they perceive it as less acute than eastern and northern member states. Moreover, NATO and the EU have historically neglected southern European threat perceptions and shown only limited solidarity to southern European member states in crises, most recently in the case of large-scale migrant incursions into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in North Africa.

Bringing the argument back around to the Pentagon’s “NATO 3.0” review and possible drawdowns in American forces in Europe, it is not all that clear how much Spain and Italy would be “punished” were the Trump Regime to close bases in Spain (Rota) and Italy (Sigonella, Aviano and Naples/Gaeta). There have long been frictions involved for both countries in hosting the bases. These installations have relatively little to do with threats that directly confront Spain and Italy. Skove is right in his FP article: they are far more relevant to the broader defense of Europe and American military operations “down range.” Closing or downsizing the bases would have negative local economic effects, and the Spanish and Italian militaries would likely object, as well. But such a move would not render Spain or Italy less safe in any meaningful way.

… And Are Exacerbated by the Iran Effect

The perception that the presence of American forces enhances host country security has also been undermined by the illegal war on Iran that the U.S. and Israel launched six months ago. Among the many consequential mistakes that U.S. forces have made in that misbegotten war, failure to adequately protect American facilities in the region and the countries that host them has been particularly notable. It is not only that American air- and missile-defense stockpiles have been depleted over the course of the conflict; that would be bad enough. Instead, even early on, the U.S. deprioritized protection of America’s regional allies (except Israel) when they came under retaliatory attack from Tehran. Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE have all suffered from Iranian retaliatory attacks. It has been widely reported that perceptions in the Persian Gulf have shifted, from regarding U.S. force presence as a deterrent against Iran to instead regarding it as a vulnerability and provocation to Iran. Indeed, an American military presence has itself become a threat factor. The extent of this shift in threat perception is not clear. Some countries, most notably the UAE, seem to be doubling down on aligning with America (and Israel) in the context of this conflict. But others like Saudi Arabia, arguably more important, have distanced themselves from the U.S. and begun to hedge more actively with other security partners. It is hard to assess where this is all headed, and I am far from an expert.

In Europe, however, and especially in Spain and Italy, the experience of countries like Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain is likely to reinforce the political rift with Washington over the Iran War. This, in turn, could feed the perception that U.S. military presence is a net negative for host country security, and render opposition to U.S. base closures and troop drawdowns less potent and effective. Do Rota, Sigonella and Aviano make Spain and Italy more safe or less safe in the present international security environment? From a national perspective, the answer could well be “less safe.” That is up to Spaniards and Italians to judge. Northern and eastern Europeans may have a different view; indeed, they almost certainly do. Removed, however, from a strong sense of Alliance and European solidarity - the former already crumbling under pressure from Trump, the latter not yet fully developed - Spain, Italy and possibly other European countries may choose to support, rather than oppose, even the strongest drawdowns under “NATO 3.0”.

The Steady State

Make America Yesterday Again

Trump promises to restore an America that no longer exists. But the America he wants to recover was built for a different economy, a different technology, a different world, and a different strategic environment. Trying to resurrect it means dismantling institutions designed for the world we actually inhabit…

Read more

12 days ago · 24 likes · 3 comments · The Steady State and BILL PIEKNEY

The Steady State is a grouping of former national security officials who actively engage in support of democracy in line with their oaths to defend the constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic”. I belong to the group with some reservations*. But it mainly does good work.

I share the view that the Steady State and Bill Piekney posted this morning on Substack - that Trump and the Trump Regime (my term) have launched an all-out assault on the future in some misguided (at best) or evil (more likely) drive to restore a fictional American past that is thoroughly unsuited to present challenges. Piekney does a good job of summarizing the many ways in which Trump is dragging us down and rendering our lives more precarious going forward. Here is a key passage:

“It’s safe to say that among this American litany of legislated paring [of humane and forward looking government-funded programs rolled back or eliminated by Mr. Trump], the most important are (1) biomedical and scientific research, (2) the soft power of American foreign aid through AID, and (3) the social safety net of SNAP and medical assistance.

‘And for his mismanagement of a particularly crucial 21st Century need, Mr. Trump has trashed a number of promising renewable energy initiatives that constitute an urgent public necessity—done against the backdrop of his ignorant denial of the reality of climate change.”

So far, so good.

Then - immediately, very predictably and almost inevitably - comes this:

“This is not to say that many if not all of the above programs did not need a scrub for waste and effectiveness. Certainly they did.”

[Emphasis mine.]

Why is this part of the argument? Why must this feature in the presentation? Is this intended to bring along readers focused on government waste, those who are generally skeptical of government programs? Those who still hold with Ronald Reagan when he said (ad nauseam) that the nine scariest words in the English language are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help"?

I don’t mean to pick on the Steady State or Piekney. Almost everybody does it. It is an inevitable part of any presentation in legacy media like the New York Times on the Trump Regime’s dysfunctional and destructive cuts to a wide range of government programs. Somewhere - often after reciting the terrible human costs of cuts to social programs, foreign assistance programs, and scientific research - the authors acknowledge that these programs needed reform in any case in order to stamp out waste.

It is just so stupid.

The Trump Regime always claims - cynically - that it is making deep (and sometimes illegal) cuts to programs in order to stamp out waste and fraud, and to align them with Executive Branch priorities (on matters like DEI). Of course, the defenders of the same programs realize that there is some waste, as there is in all programs in the public sector (and the private sector, for that matter). But why flaunt this acknowledgment in a presentation meant to decry the cuts and defend the programs? Why grant this opening to the Trump Regime? Why expose this political Achilles Heel so incessantly?

No one on the other side does this. Nobody really serious about persuading an audience or a reader does this. Nobody advocating things like increased defense spending does this. I am especially alert to debate on the defense budget, where the two sides align fairly clearly. Those opposed to increasing the budget argue that it is already bloated, and much of it is already wasted, as indicated by the fact that the Department of Defense has never passed an audit. But the proponents of growing the DoD budget do not acknowledge waste. For good reason. They realize that doing so undercuts their argument and weakens their side. They are right.

Nor would one expect the defenders of a program in other circumstances to grant so much to their opponents. To take an example from professional ethics, it would be like acknowledging that you and your colleagues pad your expense accounts in an argument over expense accounts. One can come up with countless other examples. It never makes sense to grant the other side the essence of its argument, even as a throw-away meant to show that one is not naive.

This seems to be a particular liability of the polite political center. We saw it recently in the rather feeble defense of Anthony Fauci, the former chief medical advisor to the president. Almost all of his purported supporters went out of their way to acknowledge that he made mistakes while arguing that he was being persecuted by Sen. Rand Paul for political reasons. They threw in a few qualifiers - that Dr. Fauci was operating amid great uncertainty and tremendous risk - but still let stick the tar and feathers applied by Sen. Paul, Trump and the rightwing media machine.

This foolishness should stop. The presumption of good will on the other side is misplaced. Show your Achilles Heel and they will kill you. Haven’t we learned that yet?

*My reservations are the same as those described yesterday by Ben Rhodes on “Where the Resistance Went Wrong” during the first Trump Administration:

“… the constant refrain about a virtuous federal bureaucracy willing to stand up to the president played into Trump’s narrative of a Deep State hellbent on sabotaging him. Every letter signed by former officials condemning Trump (I signed a bunch of them – more on me later) reinforced that perception while making the Democrats seem like the party of the Establishment.”

Ben Rhodes Where the Resistance Went Wrong

I often get the impression that many, many Americans - perhaps most - don’t really understand the world at all. They don’t understand science, they don’t understand economics, they don’t understand foreign affairs. I often doubt whether they even bother to try.

That attitude of mine is probably too snooty and basically unfair. But in one area I know that Americans are woefully inadequate in ways that make them awfully easy to dupe: mental math. Basic arithmetic, done inside your brain.

This will be a short article, because the observation is so simple and, I believe, incontestable. Americans can’t do mental arithmetic. They are drowning in zeros in ways that I sometimes find hard to fathom.

The Geddry newsletter is one of my favorite things on Substack, and it is usually informed by a strong grasp of pretty weedy stuff. In three words, I love it. But today’s update included a somewhat delusional discussion of Trump’s wild claims on Friday about the U.S. government’s investment in Intel:

[Trump] also informed his audience that the government’s stake in Intel had produced $82 billion in profit. “Do I get credit for that? No,” Trump complained. “Did anybody say great job?” Then came the necessary clarification: “It’s for the country. It’s not for me.” A few seconds later, $82 billion had become “about 80 billion,” with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick enlisted to certify that it was “pretty close to 80.” …

So there you have Friday according to Donald Trump: America is richer than any country has ever been, coal is beautiful, wind is a disaster, elections are rigged, MAGA is furious but not with him, Democrats may end Republican presidencies forever unless he ends the filibuster first, Iran may require another “hit,” and the government has apparently made both $80 billion and $82 billion on Intel, simultaneously, from the same stake.

Here is a link to the full Geddry article:

Geddry He Also Wanted the Gold

The problem is not the $2 billion discrepancy, though. The problem is much simpler - both $80 billion and $82 billion are completely beyond the realm of possibility for Intel’s profits. Recognizing this doesn’t take any serious knowledge about Intel, just a decent grasp of numbers, the economy, and a capacity for rudimentary mental math.

The most profitable US company is Alphabet (which owns Google), and it has an annual profit of about $160 billion on more than $400 billion in revenue. Trump made the U.S. government take a stake in Intel because the company was failing. That should shape our expectations about numbers. Intel’s total revenue has risen since, but it was just $16 billion in the last quarter, and the company lost money. It’s profit was less than zero.

Trump was evidently referring to an $8.2 billion cash infusion to Intel from a new investor. That has nothing, however, to do with revenue, profits or anything that Trump (or Lutnick) actually said, and was, of course, an order of magnitude smaller than the number Trump claimed.

In other words, the biggest problem with Trump's claim of $80 billion or $82 billion in profit for Intel is not that the numbers diverge a bit. It is that Intel is not nearly that big, profits cannot possibly be that high, and the whole thing is just complete gaslighting BS.

I don’t mean to come down hard on Geddry - as I said above, the newsletter that she and her colleagues run is superb, well-informed, and a whole lot of fun in a sardonic, Trump-era way. The problem is that if Geddry does not immediately recognize the phantasmagorical gaslighting in Trump’s Intel profit claims, who does?

I think zeros have become a national emergency of sorts. Americans have long been pretty pathetic at mental math. I have seen it in the classroom (where foreign students did much, much better), in my work as a diplomat, and in everyday life here in the Pacific Northwest. My expectations are honestly pretty modest on this one. I realize some math is really hard. Nobody needs to roll out a differential equation to impress me. I just think folks should be able to divide fairly small numbers accurately and spitball an order of magnitude calculation of the product of two fairly large numbers. Demonstrate a basic understanding of interest and compound interest, and what “discounting the future” means. Maybe even less than that - maybe just tell me, instantly, what the number 1 trillion is - Can you write it out? How many zeros are there? How many billions or millions are in it?

The proliferation of zeros has made things worse for a long time, and now it’s messing with people’s minds as far as I can tell. It’s as though the addition of more zeros just causes many of us to throw up our hands and say “beats me. I can’t deal with this.” It is not just childish; it is weird and somehow foolish. We’re just talking numbers here, after all. No need to convert our antiquated Fahrenheit scale to Celsius or our preposterous inches and pounds to centimeters and kilograms. We all have the same numbers. Numbers are abstract, which may make some of us nervous. But it’s just arithmetic.

It makes me want to gag when Trump says he has lowered drug prices by 200 percent. Still, I think just about everyone must recognize that is completely illogical. We all recognize that prices and fractions don’t work that way together, right? Right?

But the zeros problem exists on a higher and more abstract plane. It seems that a lot of Americans - even the ones who can still count change at the drugstore - just come to three or six more zeros behind a number and their minds seize up. I don’t get it. It was most visible when news hit that Elon Musk had become a trillionaire for a few days after the SpaceX-AI IPO. There was a political backlash, mainly on the left, against this further evidence of the enrichment of one of the most detestable of America’s oligarchs. But there was also a kind of childlike fascination with the number itself. A sort of “Wow. That’s too many zeros for me” moment.

This inability of so many Americans to cope with zeros makes us the perfect marks for a corrupt bullshit artist like Trump. It distracts us when Trump and Lutnick can’t say whether Intel’s profits were $80 billion or $82 billion. It opens the door to false equivalencies between, for example, Hunter Biden’s pathetic influence peddling and the hyper-scaled graft and corruption of the Trump-Kushner-Lutnick-Bessent crime family. It makes many Americans believe a proposed Pentagon budget that rises by 50% in one year to $1.5 trillion is somehow reasonable (even when the DoD has never even come close to passing an audit). It puts the discussion of the cost of servicing the national debt into a kind of vibe-dominated twilight zone, filled with a lot of big numbers that we just can’t stretch our minds to comprehend.

Many things contribute to making today’s America so feeble, our ability to compete in a more multi-polar world so doubtful, our resilience as a society so stunted, our national debates so vituperative and irrational, our capacity to recognize and address systemic challenges so pathetically weak. But one of them is surely our loss of the ability to perform mental math and our incapacity to digest so many zeros.

Many of us - perhaps even most - have either forgotten or never learned some of the most basic numerical skills we should have mastered before we left middle school. It is, to my mind, a huge national vulnerability. It’s not that we can’t find and even use the tools that enable us to balance our checkbooks or calculate expected earnings on our 401K. It’s that we can’t recognize bullshit when we see it at a time when we are being inundated with it. And the bullshit we find easiest to swallow is the biggest bullshit of all - the bullshit that comes with lots of zeros.

Foreign leaders and policy makers increasingly need to grapple with an America that is growing weaker and weaker while at the same time behaving ever more belligerently. Both wittingly and witlessly, the United States has become the most disruptive and destructive actor on the map. Trump is the proximate cause of this corrosive dilemma of dependency, weakness and malevolence; back in 2016, I already called him the world’s most dangerous man, and he has lived up to the label. In his second term, Trump may have even exceeded my expectations. But it was not hard to foresee the broader trend toward failure long before Trump descended his golden escalator and entered the White House a decade ago. It could have been anticipated for the past 25 years or more, as the precarity of American defense commitments and deterrent capabilities grew ever more apparent. It all reflects the hollowing out of America, the dysfunction of our political system, our incapacity to address existential threats at home or abroad, and an incapacity - at least so far - to change.

Phillips O’Brien has written a great article in The Atlantic on the implications of America’s rapid depletion of its weapons stocks for allies, and then elaborated further in an even better piece for his Substack, focused on the Persian Gulf. Here is a link to the Substack article (which includes a gift link to the piece in The Atlantic):

Phillips Obrien American Age Is Over

Here is a critical point near the end in O’Brien’s Substack piece:

As I mentioned above, the entire security architecture that was constructed by the states in the Persian Gulf and wider Middle East, will have to be entirely remade. There are signs that they already know that. The US, in showing its weakness so dramatically and in adding to that its unreliability and fickleness, is compelling the states to think more regionally.

To my mind, O’Brien is the best military analyst out there and makes very insightful points about strategy, but he can sometimes be too narrowly focused on military matters. I think that is the case here. O’Brien’s analysis hinges on the depletion of key U.S. weapons stocks, the resulting vulnerability of U.S. forward-based and deployed forces, and the consequent collapse of American credibility as a security guarantor in the Persian Gulf. All valid points. O’Brien also makes the right connections to the flawed nature of the U.S. military and the U.S. defense industrial base, and the weakness of national-security decision making in the American system.

But O’Brien does not go far enough, in my view, to address the long-term political and strategic fallacies that brought us to this stage. As I see it, there is a deeper story that has even stronger implications.

At the same time, another analyst I admire, Stephen Walt, has written an interesting article for Foreign Policy on “Why the United States Keeps Losing Wars.” Here is a gift link:

FP Walt Why the US Keeps Losing

Walt, a prominent realist scholar, points out that the U.S. keeps losing because it chooses to fight the wrong wars - wars that are unnecessary, in which our adversaries are far more committed than we are, and which cumulatively weaken America over time. Walt is a major critic of the foreign and security policy establishment, or The Blob, and he correctly ties the failures of U.S. military engagements abroad to the complete lack of accountability and self-awareness that prevails in the unapologetic American foreign and security policy establishment (citing Robert Kagan as an example).

All valid points, again, but Walt also does not go far enough.

Leading lights in the foreign and security policy establishment like to scold advocates of restraint and other critics of American primacy by saying “you will miss the rules-based order when it’s gone.” But it is gone, and it has been gone for two decades, and that was largely the work of the American foreign and security policy establishment itself. What was built up in the post-Cold War period was not just hypocritical or unduly self-serving. It was entirely unsustainable, based on a lie about power, shared values and solidarity that was never close to true. The fallacy of American credibility. As the United States has grown steadily weaker, the fallacy has become more obvious.

The broad points that O’Brien and Walt make - poor military planning at every level, a mismatch between level of ambition and capacity, disastrous strategic choices and a lack of accountability - have been glaringly apparent since at least 2004. By that time, it was already clear that the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operation in Afghanistan were headed for failure. In the intervening years, the United States has opened new overseas military bases, broadened its military strikes on nonbelligerent countries, enlarged the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, undertaken more security commitments outside Europe, and lost two major wars - Iraq and Afghanistan - and many minor interventions.

Through it all, until the advent of Trump’s second presidency, allied foreign governments and the American foreign and security policy establishment behaved as though nothing was fundamentally wrong. As though the entire house of cards that we were building was somehow sustainable despite the profound weakness at its core: the United States.

America in the 21st Century is a country that cannot build infrastructure, a country that cannot address systemic problems, a country that does not respond to popular will. It is an increasingly feeble, oligarchic state and has been now for two decades or more. We are not without sources of potential strength. The size of the United States and its economy, the wealth it has accumulated over many decades, its favorable geographic position and resource endowments are inherent sources of strength. But we have squandered our resources, mainly to the benefit of the most affluent, through increasing their private wealth and bending our public spending in ways that disproportionately protect and benefit them.

Why is that?

Much commentary on America’s obvious failure to develop effective solutions to systemic problems focuses on political polarization, as though that were an independent factor that arose and persists out of some inherent feature of technological progress or human psychology. To my mind, political polarization is a symptom of our fundamental systemic failures, not the cause. The causes are deeper: our neoliberal, financialized and increasingly oligarchic and monopolized economy; the institutional capture of key institutions by the wealthy and other entrenched, narrow interests; the easily exploited flaws of our constitutional and legal systems. These are the drivers of not just our weakness, but of an emerging sense of fatalism. Our most basic problems, we seem to believe, are just too big to fix. We can’t control guns or regulate crypto currency; how could we possibly regulate AI or decarbonize our economy? Galloping climate change, rampant inequality and inequity, a dysfunctional system of for-profit health care, disruptive and intrusive technology, the enshittification of everything - there are no public solutions for these problems. We seem to agree that each of us can and should look out for ourselves, our families, our friends and communities. As a larger society, though, as a nation, we are hopeless. That is the prevailing vibe, in my view, which tends to suffocate new ideas and public initiative.

Such fatalism is not confined to the United States, but it is worse here, and it matters more here because of America’s impulse to dominate the world. I focus most of my thought on foreign affairs. This is where The Blob’s lack of imagination and devotion to serving power are most destructive. Apart from nostalgia for a more benign past, the American foreign and security policy establishment cannot imagine a better world than this one. Seriously, it is focused on American primacy and how to obtain it, to “restore” it for the most part, and a thousand other specific and relatively minor problems, rather than the most fundamental strategic question facing us and the world: managing America’s decline. Those words - “managing America’s decline” - are anathema to most of The Blob. They are so stewed in American Exceptionalism and the sense that their role is to realize that delusion rather than escape it that they deny the “inconvenient truth” of American decline. Every U.S. failure is a “setback”, every strategic blunder or cruel act of international vandalism is a case of “falling short” of our noble aims on behalf of Americans and all humanity.

It is worse than a waste. It is in itself destructive.

I think the best minds in America and abroad should be focused on how we can address the truly existential threats facing us in ways that minimize harm to humanity. Things like global warming, pandemic disease, disruptive technologies, global inequality. Peace, to name an aspiration that hardly registers in today’s foreign affairs lexicon. To the extent that foreign and security policy types apply their energies to geopolitics, it should be in finding ways to manage America’s decline (whether relative or absolute; I think both apply) in order to minimize the terrible risks that process entails: for war, for environmental destruction, for distracting us from the truly existential dangers we face.

We need to be able to imagine a world in which America does not have military bases around the globe, does not devote most of its discretionary budget to the military, does not engage in thoughtless and destructive wars with impunity, does not seek to dominate the rest of the planet. By “we”, I mean people everywhere, not just Americans. We need to have a vision for a better, safer world that does not rest on the illusion of American power in a time of American weakness. “Peace through strength” has been a lie for most of my life; “extended deterrence” was always a game of three-card monte. The entire system has been moving toward collapse, and is now a wobbly Jenga tower that threatens to topple and destroy everything around it.

Will we have the sense to start removing the top pieces of our Jenga tower and rearranging the whole game to be flatter, more stable, more equitable than what we so foolishly built up over the past two decades? Frankly, I doubt it.

Both O’Brien and Walt make a point to say how much they regret having to point out the weaknesses of the United States and our costly strategic mistakes. Such elegiac laments are de rigeuer in American policy writing, an obligatory nod to patriotism, I suppose. But how do we expect the United States to mend its ways if it never pays for its mistakes? Walt in particular stresses the corrosive impunity of the foreign and security policy establishment, the lack of accountability of key figures for even catastrophic mistakes. What does accountability look like if it is not based on driving home the damage being caused by the errors we continue to make?

O’Brien is better than Walt in this regard. But again, neither goes far enough, to my mind. If we don’t learn our lesson from this war with Iran, from this emerging AI disaster, from this gathering climate maelstrom, how will we correct course before it is too late? We need to recognize the failures of America and American primacy for what they are - the signs that we need to make a fundamental change in our approach, to rethink what we want and imagine a better world.

We need to get started. Now.

Time is short. The cascading planetary disasters are telling us this. Fatalism is not the answer. Nor is winning or “bouncing back.” We need better ideas, more focused on humanity and our shared fate.

We are teetering on the edge of the abyss.

I have often said that spending December 1973 in Pakistan changed my life. My parents sent me to accompany a friend, Barbra, who was visiting her family at a mission clinic north of Rawalpindi. I had just turned 15. After that, I was hooked on the world outside the United States. I embraced a dream of becoming an anthropologist that I ultimately discarded to join the Foreign Service (that is another story).

I brought back a lot of great photos from that trip, some that I took myself and others - the best ones - taken by David Mitchell, Barbra’s brother-in-law. We spent a day in Karachi, hung out in Abbottabad, made road trips to Peshawar, the Khyber Pass, the ruins of Taxila, and Lahore, collecting wonderful images and memories along the way.

I only have two fuzzy pictures from the Badshahi Mosque in Lahore, both taken on Barbra’s little Instamatic. In the photo above, I am walking with David and his son, Jonathan, toward the main prayer hall of the Badshahi Mosque. Over time I have come to realize that those few days in Lahore in 1973, and especially the visit to the Badshahi Mosque, set me on a mental path that would never converge with most of my colleagues in the Foreign Service and the American foreign and security policy establishment.

I just couldn’t be all that impressed by the United States anymore. I could never understand, let alone embrace, the notion of American Exceptionalism. For me there was no grand American project, no “national purpose”, no mission or message to the world emanating from America an sich. The United States was just a normal country; what set it apart was the refusal of many Americans - perhaps most - to accept that reality. America was favored by geography, large, wealthy, with its own set of joys and troubles, and its own rather short but dramatic history. Otherwise the U.S. was just like the rest of the world - like the rest of humanity. It caused problems for itself and others when it embraced the illusion of American Exceptionalism and sought to impose its will. When, in the parlance of the foreign policy establishment, it tried to “lead”.

What does this have to do with the Badshahi Mosque? It’s about the formative years of a curious and sensitive kid. Me.

I grew up in the Puget Sound region and had an idyllic lower middle class childhood with some special perks, like the boats that my dad bought and fixed up for our family and summer vacations in the San Juan Islands. When I turned 15 I had never traveled further than British Columbia. The most impressive buildings I had seen with my own eyes were the BC parliament in Victoria, the Smith Tower in Seattle, and Husky Stadium at the University of Washington. I loved to lose myself in distant places in the huge collection of old National Geographics my grandparents kept in their hall closet, and I also enjoyed the films about foreign countries we watched at Curtis Junior High.

Then, out of the blue, I was flying over the Nile Valley on the way to Pakistan. Once on the ground - in Karachi, in ‘Pindi, wherever we went - I was overwhelmed with everything. It was everything, everywhere, all at once.

Among all these intense and vivid experiences, the Badshahi Mosque was profoundly different. It was easily the most impressive structure I had ever seen. Indeed, even now, 53 years and 60-odd countries later, it would still make my Top Ten. It was grand and austere and utterly beautiful, and the vast courtyard - the largest of any mosque in South Asia - was quiet. Amidst the furor of Lahore, the glitter and dirt and noise, it was tranquil, just distant city sounds, the rhythmic sweeping of palm fronds on stone, and hushed voices in alcoves. This, I thought, is a place of dignity, a magnificent place of worship, a place that elevates humanity.

Wikipedia Badshahi Mosque

I knew then, and I know better now, that the Badshahi Mosque was built in the mid-17th Century by the Emperor Aurangzeb, a cruel man who extended the Mogul Empire’s boundaries into south India but wasted its energies on religious dogmatism and conquest. The Mogul Empire flamed out, in a way, with Aurangzeb, although it endured in some form until extinguished by the British East India Company in 1857. But that does not detract from my admiration for the Badshahi Mosque.

Last year I had the chance to visit the Jama Masjid in Delhi, which was built by Aurangzeb’s father, Shah Jahan, whom Aurangzeb deposed to seize the throne. It is sometimes called the model for the Badshahi Mosque. Compared to the Badshahi that I remembered so clearly, however, the Jama Masjid seemed small and too dainty, all scalloped fussiness. Not so the Taj Mahal in Agra, also built by Shah Jahan, which I saw later on the same trip to India. The Taj Mahal is breathtaking. But I was no longer the impressionable kid I was in 1973.

I have seen so many great things in the world since that December 53 years ago. The Taj Mahal, Angkor, Petra, Istanbul, the Vatican, the Great Wall, the Potala, the Registan in Samarkand, Rio from Sugar Loaf - all of these are imprinted on my mind. My favorite built structure of all may be Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. And there is nothing to compare with the three sunny days I spent in Antarctica a few years ago.

But the Badshahi Mosque changed my life. How could I feel that America’s achievements were uniquely important after seeing this astonishing achievement on the other side of the planet? How could I believe our ideas were exceptional and our talents unmatched when I saw what others’ ideas and talents had created? How could I imagine that destiny had something special in store for the United States once I knew what had become of the creators of the Badshahi Mosque and the Mogul Empire? Aurangzeb was a fanatic Muslim, but Islam is a tolerant faith - or at least as tolerant as other faiths. I saw that again in Indonesia, and have never doubted it.

Across the world, across boundaries, across cultures, it is our common humanity that calls out for us to listen, to understand, to find ways to improve our lives and those of our fellow humans. To my mind, appreciation of this simple truth was never manifest in the Foreign Service, the foreign and security policy establishment (or, as I often call it, The Blob). Most of my colleagues, as I recall, had more faith in a national purpose, the U.S. constitution, and our policy objectives. They found more inspiration in America. I don’t fault them for that. I was just different, not better. For me, it was always more the region where I grew up and then the world, all humanity. The structures in between were all relative, interesting taken as individual entities, fascinating when taken as a whole. The nation never meant as much to me.

I am astonished I did as well as I did in my profession. I was not a fraud - I was a loyal, dedicated American diplomat. I worked hard. I wore a suit to work when I had to - which was most of the time - and did my best to advance our policy aims. But in my mind I never really took off the kurta pajama that a Pakistani tailor made for me in Abbottabad in 1973.

Too much has been written over the past several months about the divisions in the Democratic Party between progressives and centrists, what they mean for the coming midterm elections, and whether they demonstrate a generational shift toward the left in the Party. Some of this discussion - maybe even a lot of it in some quarters - is intended to damage the Democrats, but I don’t have a problem with the topic overall. Enough is enough, but the discussion is interesting, especially to me, a Democratic Socialist who consistently votes for Democrats.

Here is a fairly good example from this morning of how this conversation is carried out by sympathetic characters on a major legacy media platform, the New York Times:

NYT Opinions Working Class

I especially like Jamelle Bouie and his ideas, many of which are more incisive than those he presents in this piece. As so often with these proprietary presentations from the NYT and other legacy media, the participants try to cover too much ground, prevaricate and waffle a bit too much, and end up after many minutes having said relatively little. It’s elevated infotainment, but not bad if one recognizes its limitations.

MAGA and Democratic or Alterna-MAGA

I think there is a better way to look at this situation, however, one that more concisely and completely describes the differences in the Democratic Party, broadly defined:

The Democratic establishment and many professed Democratic centrists support Democratic MAGA. A diverse group of Progressives, Democratic Socialists, outsiders, and populists are trying to break Democratic MAGA. One side takes a short-term, managerial approach; the other takes a more radical systemic approach. The latter, the proponents of systemic change, are pushing against those who seek only a restoration of Democratic electoral success within the present system.

Looking back on the past decade or more in American politics, including the Biden Administration, it is hard to deny that the rise of Donald Trump and MAGA and their capture of the Republican Party have been the top story, the dominant narrative and the most consequential development. The implications are severe - rampant oligarchic control of American economy and society, the erosion of the rule of law, the rejection of science and the empowering of the most destructive elements of capitalism, to name a few. Many, many authors have dealt at length with the horrific consequences of this evolution (or devolution) of the United States, for our country and the world.

Against this background, the Democratic Party likes to present itself as anti-MAGA. That includes the Democratic establishment. Anti-MAGA was the leitmotif of the Biden Administration in all that it set out to do (quite ambitious) and did (much less consequential than expected).

But Biden was not anti-MAGA. He and his Administration, and the Democratic Party under his leadership, were other-MAGA. Or, as I prefer, alterna-MAGA.

Biden’s We Are Back was the B-side of Trump’s Make America Great Again, not its antithesis. Build Back Better was its domestic formulation. It was an alternative restoration project, not a path to the future.

The Vague Nostalgia of MAGA

MAGA is vague about the time and conditions it seeks to restore in national life:

Does it include Jim Crow?; Does it impose Christianity?; Should companies be allowed to pollute?; Do public lands really belong to the public, and aren’t mining and oil companies part of the public anyway?; Is climate change a problem?; Should gay marriage exist?; Is all immigration bad? Should Social Security be privatized? Do the poor deserve to suffer?

MAGA is just a jumble, a blank slate that accommodates every form of bigotry and prejudice and boutique nuttery and conspiracy theory. For some it includes Jim Crow, for others the Rapture or Crypto or MMA, while for others still it has to accommodate Medicare. That is why MAGA is such a successful branding exercise and such a crappy political movement; it is always at risk of being turned toward a set of ideological objectives (such as Project 2025) that puts strain on its all-enveloping, abuse-tolerating, defiance-performing nostalgia. That is also why MAGA cannot, to my mind, survive Trump. Trump has often been called a “branding genius”, and he may have earned the moniker in this case (though I find it hard to stomach such close juxtaposition of the words “Trump” and “genius”). MAGA is Trump’s brand, and only he can obscure and overcome, through his personality and alleged charisma, the debilitating contradictions at the heart of the MAGA coalition. Trump has often said “I am MAGA.” Let’s grant him that. Trump is MAGA.

Obama and Alterna-MAGA

What about alterna-MAGA? Biden’s We Are Back and Build Back Better. The restoration project that Biden promoted and that remains so dear to much of the Democratic establishment. What about that?

It is likewise vague about the time and conditions it seeks to restore in national life. Most obvious is a nostalgia for the Obama Era. There is the intense devotion to Barack and Michelle, and to their friends - most notably Oprah. One can indeed say many good things about the Obamas and their time in the White House, particularly their pathbreaking role as African Americans and their personal probity while in office. Barack Obama clearly exuded charisma.

But the Obama presidency is perhaps most remarkable for the modesty of its ambitions and its devotion to the system that exists in the US. The Obama Administration restored financial stability by protecting banks while sacrificing small borrowers. The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was a notable manifestation of political realism that helped many people, but it did not challenge the basic inequities of our for-profit health system in the United States. Instead, it played on the margins. Similarly, in foreign policy, Obama’s achievements and failures were very modest and marginal. There was lofty rhetoric but no vision, no drive. Obama came to office promising to close Guantanamo but quickly gave up. He oversaw the capture of Osama bin Laden but also stepped up targeted assassinations of terrorist suspects abroad, despite a horrible record of mistakes and “collateral” casualties. Although Obama won the 2008 election in part because he opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he vacillated once in office, overseeing futile “surges” in both Iraq and Afghanistan while in the White House. He stoked the Arab Spring and then quickly washed his hands of the Arab reality. It was the same on social issues. Obama came around very slowly on same-sex marriage. He was remarkably conservative in office.

I suppose I should not be surprised that a professor of constitutional law would show a lack of imagination when it comes to novel solutions to our country’s problems, but I am still astounded at the very low level of ambition Obama demonstrated as president. After his first two years in the White House, he was hemmed in somewhat by GOP majorities on the Hill, first the House of Representatives in 2011 and then the Senate in 2015. But he truly pulled in his horns, surely more than was necessary. Obama also seemed unduly impressed by his access to the highest echelons of the American economic and cultural elite. He seemed perfectly content to tweak the system within very narrow limits, and to carve out a safe and comfortable private life for himself and his family after leaving office. To use an over-used phrase, the Obama Years have not aged well.

The Defensive, Self-Limiting, System-Serving Essence of Alterna-MAGA

Cuing off Obama, Biden and other “restoration” Democrats since have defined their alterna-MAGA within narrow limits. Their aims are best understood in the conceptual constraints they sets themselves:

Should we assert our devotion to capitalism or show some socialist leg? Are market-based solutions always best? Can’t we just tweak regulations and thereby transform outcomes without hurting anybody? Can’t everyone be patient enough to allow a modest program of redistribution that inflicts minimal pain on the affluent play out over a decade or two? What about all those high-income voters who might turn against us if we raise their taxes or even their Social Security contributions? Aren’t our largest, champion companies our economic national champions? Even if what’s good for Wall Street is not good for Main Street, isn’t what’s good for Wall Street good for me and the US? Do I care about unions or just union votes? Will we lose gay marriage if we support a broader range of LGBTQ rights? How do we defend immigration when it’s not always popular to do so? Is immigration even good? Isn’t American primacy good for everybody, and don’t we need to beat China, whatever that means? Isn’t Israel our best ally in the Middle East, and don’t we owe them our support? Shouldn’t market-based solutions to climate change be all we need?

The other focal points for alterna-MAGA nostalgia are LBJ’s “Great Society” and FDR’s “New Deal”. On foreign policy, alterna-MAGA nostalgists love Truman and the beginnings of the Cold War. In other words, they admire periods of genuine redefinition of social, political and economic relations in the United States, and between America and the world, under Democratic presidents. Alterna-MAGA types even contend that the high marginal tax rates under Eisenhower, and Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex, belong to Democrats as much as Republicans, thereby invoking another of their favorite themes - bipartisanship and a longing for amicable centrism.

More and More Americans Want Systemic Change

But more importantly, like MAGA, alterna-MAGA is entirely defensive. Democrats may have carped that Make America Great Again implies that America is no longer great. Touché! But Democrats clearly believe in American decline as much as Republicans do, if not even more so. It is simply a fact of life, obvious to everyone here and abroad. In place of MAGA, establishment Democrats offer another, slightly different version of the past as the limits of what America can be. They are trapped in the 20th Century, the time of FDR, Kennedy, LBJ, and Clinton. They look back fondly to LBJ and FDR not as examples of political innovation and courage, but as the Democratic leaders who defined American greatness - including its limits. They want to preserve as much as possible of what was achieved by FDR 90 years ago, and by LBJ 60 years ago. In that they are still like Bill Clinton. Their message to voters: “that is enough; this will have to do.”

Yet the 20th Century is receding in the rear view mirror, increasingly irrelevant as we move ahead in a world that has been profoundly transformed. More and more of us were born after 1999. By that point - more than a quarter century ago - our national trajectory was downhill - and we continue our slide under Democrats and Republicans. Voters want more than a celebration of history and “accept these limits” scolding. They especially DO NOT want to hear “Who’s gonna pay for this?!” from Democratic officials who support massive defense spending and global primacy and take election contributions from big banks and big business. No more lectures, please, to tell us this is how things have to be because this is how they have always been. We want to see ambition and innovation matching the magnitude of the challenges before us. We want to see a will to fight that matches the injuries and indignities that we have suffered.

Increasingly, we want systemic change.

This is why so many in the Democratic Party are screaming against the Democratic establishment and demanding a more radical approach. Many of those voices, and many of the most strident, come from the Left. Mamdani. Bernie. AOC. Warren.

Robert Reich is one such voice on the Left. He has begun work on a series on Substack that lays out a “Realist’s Guide to the American System”. I think it’s brilliant. The key word is “system” - we need a systemic approach, because the problems are systemic. The first weekly installment appeared yesterday. Here is a link:

Robert Reich Realist Guide

But there are also some very powerful voices rising from other parts of the Democratic spectrum, like Talarico in Texas, Ossof in Georgia. Even Pritzker in Illinois. They are mainly young. To my mind, this is not because of a drive for generational conflict, but a reflection of a perception of reality that is broadly shared among young people - including grave disappointment in the system as it exists - and the huge stake they have in the choice between stasis and change. The present system does not work for the vast majority of us, but the implications are much more ominous for the young. And young people are on the whole more creative, more integrative in their thinking, than those who are older. I am nearly 68 years old and make a conscious effort to stay open to new ideas and learn more broadly, but I am also aware that I was smarter and more intuitively systemic in my thinking as a young man. All I have to do is open one of my old college blue books from the 1970s (I still have a few around; I am that kind of guy).

Against MAGA and Against Alterna-MAGA

The fight, in other words, is against both MAGA and alterna-MAGA. It’s a bitter fight, and it will surely get uglier, regardless of the outcome of the midterm elections in November. Because the stakes are high. They are about more than elections or electoral politics. Only those who seek systemic change are truly oriented toward the future, in my mind. They want new, more radical solutions to address new, more challenging problems. I see that modeled by Mamdani and AOC and Talarico.

There is another possible opening, as well, something potentially catalytic that is too often dismissed as the convergence of right-wing and left-wing populism. It is a broad upwelling of demands for systemic change that draw on disaffected MAGA supporters and more ambitious opponents of alterna-MAGA on the left. They have more in common than we sometimes realize, and many in the establishment - especially the Democratic establishment - find that unsettling. I think they are painfully mistaken. It is a good thing. Populism has its risks, but the nostalgia-obsessed alternatives - MAGA and alterna-MAGA - offer no hope at all for the future.

There is a real craze right now for ancient Greece and Rome, driven in part - and driving - the blockbuster release of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. I have more than a dilettante’s interest in ancient history - the entire sweep from the Bronze Age to Late Antiquity - but am also a sucker for the Fractured Fairy Tales of my childhood. So this is my Fractured Antiquarian Legend of Trump as the ancient Lydian King Croesus.

I am thus inspired by early childhood viewing of Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons on Saturday mornings and the latest “Midweek Update” by Phillips O’Brien, the best military analyst out there (some of which will be behind a paywall):

Phillips Obrien Midweek Update 21

Read O’Brien’s article, entitled “Iran Is Toying With the USA”. And then use a little childlike imagination. Bear with me - there are some interesting parallels here, and I have been somewhat obsessed by them for a few weeks now. My Fractured Antiquarian Legend is really quite on the nose:

• Parallel Number One: For those who are not so familiar with ancient Asia Minor, King Croesus, who ruled the Kingdom of Lydia (in western Anatolia) from 585 to 546 BCE, was renowned for his wealth and his love of gold. Think Trump’s golden Oval Office gewgaws and lucrative crypto schemes.

• Parallels Number Two and Three: Croesus was interested in expanding Lydia toward the east, across the Halys River, at the expense of his neighbor King Cyrus of the Persians. (His initial target was Cappadocia, a Persian vassal state.) Thus the Iranians - in this case ancient - enter the picture. Then there is the bizarre parallel that certain Evangelical Christian yahoos have drawn between Trump and the Biblical Cyrus - only they got this, like so much else, entirely backward.

• Parallel Number Four: Before launching his war of aggression against Persia, Croesus asked the Oracle of Delphi for advice. The Oracle was notoriously inscrutable, its words hard to interpret. A modern equivalent, pictured above, might be the combined counsel of Laura Loomer, Benyamin Netanyahu and Mike Huckabee. I could have added others, such as Pete Hegseth, Franklin Graham and the late, great Lindsey Graham, but the AI-generated picture would have gotten very crowded.

  As Wikipedia describes the ancient episode in its article on the Battle of Pteria:

  The Oracle suggested vaguely that, "if King Croesus crosses the Halys River, a great empire will be destroyed." Croesus received these words most favorably, instigating a war that ironically would eventually end not the Persian Empire but his own.

  Verily, King Trump received the words of his oracles most favorably.

• Parallel Number Five: The Lydian forces under King Croesus enjoyed early success, capturing the capital of Cappadocia, Pteria, sacking the city and enslaving the inhabitants. King Cyrus advanced to meet the invading Lydians, defeating and annexing kingdoms along the way, until the two armies met near Pteria. A bloody battle ensued. It is said that the Persians were greatly outnumbered, but their determination - including the refusal of the Persian Immortals to retreat - enabled them to carry the day. Croesus withdrew to regroup and await reinforcements from allies which never materialized. Cyrus seized the initiative, invaded Lydia and sacked its capital, Sardis.

  A “great empire” had been destroyed. Croesus’ own empire, Lydia. Lydia never regained its independence, being incorporated in other states and empires down to the present day.

Here are two relevant articles from Wikipedia, the first on the Battle of Pteria, and the second on King Croesus:

Wikipedia Battle of Pteria

Wikipedia Croesus

After the Lydian Kingdom was extinguished, Croesus the man vanished into obscurity. Except, that is, as a cautionary tale of hubris and the love of gold.

"By the fifth century at least", J. A. S. Evans has remarked, "Croesus had become a figure of myth, who stood outside the conventional restraints of chronology." (Wikipedia)

Cyrus became Cyrus the Great, builder of a mighty empire that eventually extended from the Aegean to the Indus, including Egypt and parts of Central Asia.

Finally, Croesus was also famed in antiquity for inventing gold coinage. Many of the coins he had struck have survived to this day in museums. So, in conclusion I will add

• Parallel Number Six:

“Bleed out.”

As I recall from growing up, this was a term for butchery and hunting. It was used to describe draining the blood from a dead animal in order to prepare it for eating.* When did it start being used for humans? When did it replace the phrase “bleed to death”? When did we adopt this brutal, dehumanizing vocabulary in our daily discourse?

The shift apparently occurred over the last 25 years, during America’s forever wars in the Middle East. “Bleed out” had been used more sparingly before that time, in more specific contexts, but somewhere in the past couple decades it took hold in popular culture. It was the name of an HBO documentary film released in 2018. It was the name of a pop music album. It was the term I increasingly heard on the news, as people described what happened to the victims of accidents. It found its way to depictions of violence on television and in video games. It also began to appear in the language of people around me.

“Bleed to death” was gone, replaced by “bleed out.” The latter term is technically correct but morally problematic. The focus on the death of an individual is gone, replaced by a term from butchering that takes greater emotional distance and shows less human sympathy. This is the story of the American vocabulary of violence.

Earlier this year I wrote an article here about the Trump Death Cult that tried to come to grips with the Trump Regime’s fascination with death and its broad acceptance by many if not most Americans.

The Trump Death Cult

In this, as so many of the ugliest features of American society and culture, the Trump Regime is a kind of apotheosis, an elevation of the very worst. For some months, pundits and commentators used the word “kakistocracy” to personalize this feature of Trump’s government: rule by the worst. But personalization obscures too much of the story of how we got here, and why. We need to look deeper, at more systemic problems.

I don’t mean to sound like a petty moralist, but across my adult lifetime there has been a great debasement of American public discourse across a wide range of topics that is far more significant in my view than anything that might be described as “political correctness” or “woke” speech. In the name of candor or honesty, we have embraced dehumanizing crudeness. It is such a massive disconnect that I can hardly get my head around it. We seek candor and immediacy but instead find crudeness and brutality. From stand-up comics to influencers to screen writers to advertisers, there is a “guardrails-down” assault on privacy, decency, and in my view humanity.

Let’s start at the most innocent level: children’s movies. Why are bodily functions centered at every level of children’s humor? Like everybody else, I grew up sniggering at farts and still can’t help myself at times, but I did not grow up with an endless stream of flatulence humor courtesy of Disney Corporation. I don’t think this is such a big deal, but maybe it is a bad sign. Would Bambi have been better with more farts? Snow White?

Let’s leave potty humor aside, along with all the cringe-inducing sexual humor that dominates stand-up. It is all secondary. I am more concerned - even alarmed - with the gradual embrace of language in our popular discourse that simultaneously glorifies and sanitizes violence and dehumanizes its consequences. Things like “bleed out”, only worse.

I am a child of the Vietnam War era. Body counts on the nightly news, protests in American cities, veterans returning to public indifference, swings in the public mood and a lack of any real curiosity about the places and lives that we were destroying in the name of defending freedom. Defense Secretary McNamara and his Rand Corporation Wizz Kids set a high and dehumanizing standard for doublespeak and meaningless quantification that was carried forward after McNamara himself moved on (ultimately to lead the World Bank - go figure). But after the disaster of Vietnam, America tried to rebound, to rediscover humanity, at least for a few years. The late 1970s - generally defined in retrospect as a time of national malaise - witnessed a massive reset in which public discourse was thrown wide open. We need to revise our negative assessment of that period and consider it more carefully. We have tended to look away from the 1930s and the 1970s in the United States, but today they are the most instructive parts of our history.

The late 1970s saw a resurgence of rootedness, in my opinion, but also a discarding of norms and niceties that had previously prevailed but which appeared increasingly hidebound and hypocritical. The long-term results were disappointing. Somehow, Trump can now pervert the message of one of the periods most powerful anti-war films to advance his aggressive agenda - in this case against Chicago (see picture at the top). For a while, though, this period of reflection and rethinking held some promise. There was new legislation to limit Presidential powers and strengthen Congressional oversight. Things like the War Powers Act. And there was a new vocabulary of governance.

Once I began my diplomatic career in the mid-1980s, I became familiar with the terminology employed to describe military operations and other applications of state violence by the U.S. government. A mixed bag. It was a sanitized and bureaucratic vocabulary that conformed to our policy and messaging objectives. Targets were “neutralized”. Enemy equipment or even entire armored columns were destroyed, as in the first Gulf War, without talking a great deal about the personnel who manned them. Civilian suffering and casualties were centered, especially when wars occurred in Europe, as with Bosnia and Kosovo (and, much more recently, Ukraine and even Russia). Suspects were apprehended or “rounded up”, extradition requests were made, terrorist cells were “busted”.

We employed a bizarre and rather dainty bureaucratese to focus on the policy objectives of state violence rather than the violence itself. In retrospect, considering the subsequent evolution of our discourse and vocabulary, both official and general, I believe this past practice was relatively humane. Even healthier than today’s practice, if I may use a very loaded word.

This all changed with the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent forever wars launched by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. I noticed it immediately in my work. Suddenly there was a new lexicon that embraced violence in a puerile and even obscene way that was simultaneously overtly righteous. Our enemies were dehumanized. Terms like “kill chain” came to the fore. “Kill” appeared everywhere as the operative verb of our operations. Civilian casualties were once again reduced to cyphers, the niche concern of human rights activists and other pinheads. Abu Ghraib, black sites in Asia and Europe and Guantanamo - all were rationalized at first and then set aside in our minds as relatively trivial if not entirely justifiable. (Guantanamo is still there, of course, always available as a convenient potential site for future American horrors. Out of sight, out of mind.)

It is perhaps natural that confused, futile and ultimately immoral counter-insurgency operations such as those undertaken in Iraq and Afghanistan should lead to the glorification of a more brutal, personalized violence and disregard for non-American victims. We were not entirely blind to the moral hazard of our course of action and way of thinking. We just didn’t really care. There were innocent victims everywhere and almost daily, on the streets of Baghdad and the villages of the Hindu Kush. The victims were Asian this time, not European (I say this because I think it matters a lot in racist American culture). We realized early on that frontline combat deployments to these conflicts was destroying the minds and souls of many of our military personnel. That became another strain in our embrace of brutal, personalized violence. For 20 years, the foreign policy establishment - The Blob - accepted this as the price of defending American values in a hostile world. And the brutalized language of violence became more entrenched in an increasingly debased national discourse.

Finally, over the past three or four years, with the Gaza genocide and more recently the grotesque excesses of Trump Regime, we may have reached a critical moment, a time of reckoning. The inhumanity of Israel’s Gaza campaign (supported by the U.S., of course) and the Trump Regime’s wanton glorification of violence and death have brought us face to face with reality. Human reality. The focus on “lethality” as a guiding principle, even a virtue, has made an impression. The exultation in death and destruction, justified solely on the sense of “us” v “them.” In Gaza, in Iran, in Venezuela and Cuba, on the Caribbean and the Pacific and on the streets of American cities. We have seen the consequences of indecent violence, the destruction of lives and communities, of cruelty and the senseless glorification of pain. We have sensed the implications of our discourse, its immorality, its role in eroding our own humanity.

Language is not the essence of the problem. But language matters. I studied cultural anthropology and took a lot of linguistics courses in the process. Language molds our perceptions and organizes our thoughts.

“Operation Epic Fury”, the name Trump gave the illegal war of aggression that he and Israeli PM Netanyahu launched against Iran in February, epitomizes the apotheosis of violence and rage. My reaction to the language employed by Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Katz, and by Trump and “Secretary of War” Hegseth, is visceral. It induces a feeling of shame, outrage and almost nausea. The way we talk about violence in America makes me sick. I don’t think I am alone in this.

America is a very divided nation, and Trump has millions of supporters who either embrace, tacitly condone or at least tolerate his depravity and brutality. Could things change? Perhaps enough of us will realize this is a crisis with profound implications for our own moral character in order to find a better path. To restore a healthier, more human discourse and develop the more sustainable and humane policies that we need for the future. To cultivate a more decent society with a more human culture that values solidarity and equity and abhors needless violence, that nurtures rather than seeking to dominate. What are we teaching our kids? What will we tell our grandkids? Do we value human life? It really is that basic. Language matters. I will never say “bleed out.” Let’s drop the antiseptic discussion of “kill chains.” Perhaps our humanity can prevail and save us and all those who suffer from our thoughtless embrace of violence and the infliction of pain. It will be a close call, but I see a glimmer of hope.

___________

*In fact, “bleeding out” generally referred (and refers) to a more gruesome practice - draining the blood from a slaughtered animal, often assisted by the pumping of its dying heart. This has more to do with slaughtering than butchery. It’s formal name is “exsanguination”, and it is standard practice with most animals in slaughterhouses. Back in the early 1950s, my dad worked as a meat cutter at what he called “Federal” on the Tacoma waterfront, a packing house attached to a slaughterhouse.

I launched my Substack blog 15 months ago and changed the name to Terminal Velocity last December. I have enjoyed writing it and appreciate all the feedback and comments I have received. I will never charge for my blog, but it tickles me to see that a few readers have offered money as a form of encouragement. I remain committed to Substack, first of all as a reader and follower, and second as an author and “content” provider. At a time when traditional media seem irredeemably bland and, to my mind, compromised, Substack is the best place for finding fresh takes and incisive analysis.

But there is a problem: Substack-maxxing costs too much. I am a median (at most upper-median) guy in terms of income and assets, a standard deviation out in terms of time available, and more than two standard deviations from the mean in terms of curiosity about policy and world affairs. I may never be the ideal Substack contributor - my blog has a small and (to my mind) very discerning following that grows slowly if not steadily - but I believe I am, in fact, an ideal Substack consumer.

Except for the money. I am tapped out.

I spend about $200 per month on Substack subscriptions. This is in addition to the money I can’t help but fork over for other, more traditional media, ranging from the New York Times and The Guardian and the Seattle Times and Cascadia Daily News to Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy and my Xfinity bill (yep, it still seems more reasonable to keep the cord rather than cut it, for a variety of reasons). Different sources - both on Substack and traditional media - have different approaches to paywalls and content, and I take advantage of those that are essentially free. I have to be selective about paid Substack subscriptions; I cannot afford otherwise.

Still, I feel a bit guilty whenever I receive a plea to “upgrade to paid” from one of the blogs that I follow without paying. This is especially the case when the blog does not have a large following. Some sites plead almost daily and still manage to tug at my feelings, while others hardly put their hands out at all. I enjoy reading Heather Cox Richardson’s posts for free, for example, but would never even consider paying for them and therefore appreciate not getting hit up. I go out of my way to pay for the smaller blogs that I find to be most interesting, like Van Jackson’s and Elias Rutten’s. For one or two very popular blogs, such as Phillips O’Brien’s, I feel compelled to pay to access the paid-subscriber content. Generally, however, I forgo venturing “beyond the paywall” on popular, excellent blogs like Paul Krugman’s. The same goes for Adam Tooze. I can’t keep opening my wallet for these folks, and I don’t think I should really need to.

I thought I had reached a decent if rather expensive and emotionally troubled equilibrium with all my subscription choices. (My wife, who manages our finances, did not fully agree.) Then yesterday I got an ad from BBC to subscribe to their full offerings - news, blogs and newsletters, and streaming video including dramas and documentaries, the works - for $50 per year. I signed up, of course. It is an incredibly good deal, with so many benefits at such reasonable expense.

That got me thinking about books - I am an avid book reader with a “to read asap” list as long as my arm, divided more or less evenly between “for work” and “for pleasure.” Some of my paid Substack subscriptions intrude on my time - especially my time for books - since I feel almost obliged to read all of the articles that I am paying for on the platform. Often, at the end of the day when I have not even cracked open a book, I resent the intrusion.

This leaves me in a quandary. I hate it that part of my New York Times subscription money goes toward the salaries of Ross Douthat and Brett Stephens, to name two columnists whose tendentious and corrosive ideas appear regularly on the NYT site. I hate the NYT’s militarist editorial line, both-sides-ism, sane-washing of Trump and horse-race election coverage. I wish I didn’t have to spend so much for the news coverage that, unfortunately, only the NYT and the Wall Street Journal (even more deplorable) can provide (though The Guardian and Al-Jazeera come close). As mentioned in an earlier Substack article here, I cannot wait to cancel my subscriptions to Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy as soon as I wrap up my teaching career next summer. I will continue to support local and regional reporting, even though it is not a bargain.

Substack is different. I love this platform. It is where I find insights I cannot find elsewhere, hot takes that are on target and well-researched pieces that are just a half-step away from peer-reviewed journal articles. Substack is unbelievably rich. It’s just that I can barely afford it. If someone like me can’t afford to get the most out of Substack, what does that mean for other readers with less means and more competing demands on their resources? The way it generates income for its content creators is a major constraint that to my mind does not bode well for the future of the platform. It creates a painful set of trade-offs that begs for some kind of remedy. The Substack community is very diverse, but who is being priced out? I would like to think of Substack as a tremendous public good, but it seems full of toll booths. Perhaps that is inevitable given the platform’s corporate nature and the need to compensate many content providers, but it is nonetheless disappointing.

I will stay and remain engaged here. But I cannot afford Substack-maxxing. At a macro level, there is something basically broken in a media and information ecosystem that is dominated to such a degree by corporate interests and toll booths. Substack is in some ways a remedy, a breath of fresh air. But I wish it could be more, for me and for all of us.

Natalie and I spent most of the past week with our son and daughter-in-law in Chicago. We were lucky - we arrived just after the terrible heat dome had passed and left just before the choking blanket of wildfire smoke arrived.

In another way, we were doubly lucky. We experienced a vibrant American city breathing deeply, laughing, enjoying the crowds and noise of brilliant summer days, reveling in its own diversity and the diversity of its visitors. A city that had no need - no use whatsoever - for anything that the Trump Regime is trying to push on us.

The photo above was taken from our picnic spot for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s performance last Friday at Millennium Park. The crowd was large but not close-packed, with people lounging on blankets and lawn chairs, mostly barefoot. Kids ran around chirping lightly, not disturbing anyone, just lifting the mood. Two pieces were performed, the premiere of an interesting but very accessible new composition by a Chicago composer, and then Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. The latter performance was enhanced - not disrupted - by Chicago’s Independence Day fireworks display just a short distance to the south over Lake Michigan. It had to be postponed on the Fourth due to the heat dome, so we had a chance to see it over our shoulders on this perfect July evening in this perfect setting. The conductor noted that there were no cannons in the score for Tchaikovsky’s Fifth - a symphonic dad joke. The photo below was taken at the conclusion of the concert. I also took video that shows the silhouettes of kids still running back and forth. It was magic.

Natalie and I love Chicago. Each time we visit we find new things to see and do, and the city cooperates by creating new places and new events for us to learn and enjoy. This time round, we walked out on the Navy Pier for the first time and encountered hundreds of local kids performing dance routines for their parents (and others) at the end of summer camp.

We saw the Broadway musical Suffs at the Chicago Theater; the crowd went wild for its message of empowerment. We caught World Cup matches in sports bars near our hotel on Clark Street, an incredibly lively entertainment district. That was also where we saw the World Naked Bike Ride Chicago - “Less Gas, More Ass” - over 1000 riders along a route that was revealed just hours before the event.

I had my first “Chicago Handshake” - Jeppson’s Malört and Old Style beer - at the legendary Billy Goat Tavern, famous for many things that are quintessentially Chicago:

• As the favorite haunt of Mike Royko and other Chicago Tribune writers (including, for some years, our daughter-in-law);

• As the source of the Curse of the Billy Goat that blocked the Chicago Cubs from the pennant from 1945 to 2016;

• As the inspiration for John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s classic Greek diner skits on Saturday Night Live.

We had a chance to visit the Shedd Aquarium after its recent upgrade and renovation; it was mobbed with excited kids.

We strolled through the Lincoln Square Street Fair - the “Square Roots Fair” - and had an absolute knock-out dinner at Mariscos San Pedro in Pilsen.

All this was only the half of what we did in Chicago on our latest visit.

So what’s my point? It’s that this city has no use at all for Trump, his corruption and bigotry and DHS thugs. Chicago has no use for his illegal and failed war against Iran and his campaign to delegitimize and subvert the elections in November. I am not saying that none of the thousands and thousands of people we saw in Chicago were Trump supporters. Even in a blue city like this, there were surely many Trump voters in the crowd. I am just saying Trump and his Regime have nothing at all to offer these people but pain, division, lies and abuse. Trump has his name on a tower on the Chicago River; people variously have their pictures taken with it as background and give it the finger.

But this is very much NOT a Trump city. Chicago - what I regard as the greatest American city, the most American American city - has no use for Trump. I spend a lot of time worrying about the great damage that Trump is doing to our country and the world. I feel that I have to worry, and also do what I can to limit damage and end this reign of abuse. Yet this visit showed me that, most of all, I just want Trump and his lieutenants and enablers to go away. I have no use for them. They are far worse than just a waste of time; the Trump Regime is helping drive the heat dome and wildfire smoke that bracketed our visit to Chicago. At the most basic level, though, this corrupt grifter with his authoritarian impulse and his baked-in bigotry needs to go away.

The news from Ankara and the NATO summit is depressing. Not only because U.S. President Trump has made an ass of himself, as has been duly noted in the media. That’s hardly news. Not even because NATO Secretary General Rutte has again debased himself and exceeded his remit by supporting America’s renewed attacks on Iran in the Persian Gulf. Nor because Trump thanked Turkish President Erdogan for not joining in the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, evidently believing that Ankara would otherwise have sided with Tehran. This is all just the maddening drama and nonsense that surround any international meeting involving Trump.

What is depressing for me is the reaction of our European allies and all the Atlanticist pundits who continue to call for a “Europeanized” NATO. The latest, “new-and-improved” formula, as I understand it - and I have read many over the past year-plus - is for European members of NATO to move as quickly as they can to fill all conventional defense and deterrent requirements while the U.S. retains the lead for strategic nuclear deterrence. The hope is that the U.S. will cooperate with a more-or-less planned burden-shifting scheme while remaining sufficiently committed to Europe’s defense in the long-term to provide a credible strategic deterrent. There would need to be a realistic timeline to which both sides would adhere. Both European officials and Atlanticist pundits acknowledge that Washington could let them down on both sides of this equation - both the conventional transition and the strategic commitment - but believe it is best to focus on a more best-case scenario, at least for now.

Timothy Garton Ash came out with a very cogent and digestible version of this scenario in an article posted today on his Substack and in the Financial Times:

Timothy Garton Ashe Dual Core Europe

This is the essence of Garton Ashe’s argument:

• Today’s Europe has two cores. Its economic-political core is the EU, its military-political one Nato. Both are based in Brussels but for decades they talked to each other remarkably little. Yet Europe’s strength has derived precisely from having this dual core.

• The reconstruction of Europe’s second core [NATO] is therefore at once important and urgent. The EU has a vital role to play in increasing and co-ordinating the funding for European rearmament, as it has begun to do with initiatives such as Safe (Security Action for Europe) and the European Defence Fund. The more money it can raise, the better a catalyst it will be. But it would be a dangerous illusion to imagine the EU can itself become Europe’s military-political core, with its mutual defence commitment, article 42.7 of the Treaty on European Union, playing the role of Nato’s article 5. Rather, the two Brussels-based organisations need to see themselves for what they have been at their best and should be again: two deeply complementary and mutually reinforcing cores.

There are two, intertwined and fatal flaws in this approach.

• NATO cannot be “Europeanized”

• America is hostile toward Europe - not indifferent or distracted - malevolent

NATO Cannot Be “Europeanized”

There is no doubt that Europe can undertake a larger share of the defense and deterrence burden within the framework of NATO. This was the case for most of the Cold War, after all, and really only ended after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, European allies have stepped up to increase their defense budgets and capabilities and reinforce their commitments to NATO. This has led to a rebalancing in NATO that is likely to grow as European defense plans evolve and mature, both in NATO and the European Union. The most impressive example so far is mainly outside the direct framework of NATO: Europe has stepped up mightily to support Ukraine in its war against Russia, filling almost the entire gap left by Trump’s withdrawal of U.S. assistance for Kyiv. More generally, the European allies have mobilized politically, militarily, and even economically to meet the Russian threat, relying heavily on NATO for planning and other mechanisms.

The rebalancing of NATO toward Europe is significant and in some ways impressive, but it should not be misunderstood, either in its attainments or its potential. It cannot produce a genuinely balanced Alliance that relies on European capabilities but can draw as needed on American capabilities, either conventional or nuclear. Decision-making in NATO always has been - and always will be - dominated by Washington.

Otherwise the Alliance will no longer exist. (NB: In my view, it is already a zombie, a limping set of formal arrangements without a mind or soul.) Some useful planning may still happen there, at NATO HQ in Brussels and in SHAPE and the command structure. But the United States is only interested in groupings it can dominate; it simply does not accept the notion of sovereign equality. There are a million data points that show that America refuses to support bodies it cannot dominate and seeks to contain and undermine any organization that poses even a mild threat to Washington’s perceived interests. Let’s start the list from the top: The United Nations. Run through all the UN’s subsidiary bodies. The International Criminal Court. Then the World Trade Organization. The Paris Climate Accord and the IPCC. NAFTA-USMCA-perpetual extortion machine. Our approach to treaties and sovereign immunity and secondary sanctions and “rendering” of criminal suspects and the laws of armed conflict and the transfer of jurisdiction for U.S. military personnel. The list is endless.

And the list includes NATO. The U.S. is not interested in a North Atlantic Alliance in which authority is balanced between America and Europe. It never has been. The bargain that underpins NATO is not based on equality. It is based on American dominance. The United States underwrites Europe’s defense, and Europe conforms to a wide range of American security, economic and political interests. This bargain sharpened in the post-Cold War period, as Europe reduced its defense expenditures and capabilities and the U.S. increased its domination of Europe economically and politically. Much of my work in the Alliance revolved around this bargain. Twenty-five years ago, Secretary General Robertson’s signature phrase - NATO will go out of area or out of business - expressed this bargain. NATO’s long engagement in Afghanistan, the U.S. coalition of the willing in Iraq (an exercise in mining NATO militarily and undermining it politically), and Trump’s current temper tantrum over European allies’ refusal to contribute to the U.S.-Israel war on Iran all reflect this bargain.

This is not a recent, Trump-era phenomenon. Trump and his belligerent and ignorant lieutenants have exacerbated the problem, but it has been there for decades and always will be: The United States is not interested in a genuinely, fully “balanced” NATO, and will never truly support a more autonomous, European-led decision making process in Brussels.

This brings us to the second, closely related fatal flaw in the “Europeanize NATO” scheme.

The United States Is Hostile to Europe

For most of my professional life as an American (and NATO) official, Washington was decidedly ambivalent about Europe, especially the European Union. Quite naturally, there were things we liked and things we did not like about European integration, though we typically took a hard line against moving any real defense responsibilities from NATO to the EU and even opposed the formation of a “European bloc” in NATO. There were even periods - especially during the introduction of the Euro and the parallel expansion of NATO and the EU into Central and Eastern Europe - when Washington was almost bullish on the European Union. The sky was never entirely clear, however, and clouds began to thicken by the end of the first decade of the 21st Century. Major and minor events darkened the atmosphere:

• the mounting failure and repercussions of the Iraq War;

• the 2008/09 financial crisis that began in the U.S. but struck even harder and longer in Europe in the form of the Euro Crisis;

• the Afghanistan quagmire that drew heavily on European allies;

• the persistent excesses of the Global War on Terror, including Guantanamo;

• the refugee flows driven by U.S.-led military operations;

• the breakdown and abandonment of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership;

• any number of scandals, from Wikileaks and eavesdropping on Merkel’s phone to kidnapping Islamic clerics and killing skiers in Italy.

These “clouds” had more than one thing in common. Most fundamentally, they demonstrated a divergence of interests between the U.S. and Europe, and a divergence of values with regard to the rule of law and human rights. But they also illustrated something else that was equally important and already reflected in Robertson’s Out of Area or Out of Business formula: Washington had only an instrumental interest in Europe, not an essential one. Europe was useful to the U.S. to the degree that it could help Washington achieve political, economic and military objectives outside Europe. There would be no special regard for Europe as a partner or ally, only as a subordinate and a platform.

By the time Trump reached the White House in 2017, the situation was already gloomy. Trump, of course, drove it toward darkness. He was and is openly hostile to NATO, the EU and other Europe-based organizations. (He even prefers FIFA to UEFA, it seems.) The Trump Regime is hostile to European democracy, political independence and the EU’s role in global commerce and finance. To be sure, Trump has expressed an almost creepy fondness at times for certain European leaders, their countries and even their wives, but the motivation behind this - attempted manipulation and dominance - is always transparent. Trump also loves to sell weapons - to anyone, really, including Europeans. He loves money. He is as happy to sell F-35s to Türkiye as he is to sell the Patriot assembly line to Ukraine. Or nukes to Saudi Arabia - he really loves making lucrative deals on hot stuff.

But Trump hates Europe. He hated it in his first term, and he hates it even more in his second term. The Biden interregnum was only that - a brief vibe shift of little consequence. For all his Atlanticist, America Is Back rhetoric, Biden did not represent a restoration of healthy relations with Europe. It was the same basic, ambivalent-instrumentalist-domineering approach with more of a retro-Atlantic vibe. Biden’s engagement in support of Ukraine demonstrated a certain concern for European security and its erstwhile centrality to America’s own security. But only certain and erstwhile. The Biden Administration was always much more focused on China.

So America is, in fundamental ways, indifferent and even increasingly and openly hostile to Europe, both the EU as an institution and European values and interests.

So Now What?

How, then, can it make sense to build Europe’s future security and deterrence around an organization - NATO - that is by history and American insistence dominated by Washington? Why would Europeans grant any role to America in deciding the future of Europe? Why would Europeans want Americans in the room when they plan for their future in defense? How can you possibly believe - or convince yourselves - that America’s extended nuclear deterrent is in any way credible for Europe? You can deal with Russia without whatever Washington is doing - it certainly is not helping under Trump.

NATO leaders and the Atlanticist media have portrayed the Ankara meeting as yet another crucial Alliance summit. Oh, please. The Ankara Summit Declaration, prepared in advance, is the ultimate nothing burger. It reaffirms Article 5, ticks off some defense investment achievements and pledges, and promises continued support to Ukraine. Managing Trump’s mood and weathering his nasty, imbecilic outbursts are the main real time tasks. Could the bar be lower, really, without simply dissolving the Alliance?

There is no easy answer to how to organize the future defense and deterrence of Europe. The challenges are real, important and urgent, in terms of resources, capabilities and structures. There are models out there - centering efforts in the EU, relying more on a coalition outside the EU framework, focusing more on minilateral initiatives, etc. Perhaps all of the above. Any of these might make sense and deserve work.

I have spent more than half of my adult life in Europe, working with Europeans, including on defense and security policy. I am a loyal American. But I say to my European friends:

Please don’t invest your time and effort toward rebalancing or “Europeanizing” NATO.

In Garton Ash’s words, it is a “dangerous illusion” to believe effective European defense and deterrence can be based in NATO in the future. It is a waste and a distraction. It can’t work. You wouldn’t want it to work. It would just mean perpetuating domination by an unreliable and increasingly malevolent former ally on this side of Atlantic. Do you want more of what you have seen over the past two years? Is this what you like? The chaos, the threats, the extortion, the insults and lawlessness and utter disregard for your interests. Work as fast as you can to put NATO behind you (us). It will be better for all of us, for both sides of the Atlantic and for the world.

“The Overton window is the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse. The key to the concept is that the window changes over time; it can shift, shrink, or expand. It exemplifies ‘the slow evolution of societal values and norms’.” - Wikipedia

I had planned to write today about the NATO summit in Ankara and will try to get around to that topic by next week and deal with the (probably meager) results. That is my field of expertise. Instead I am taking up something that, to my mind, is more urgent, to make a point that seems to be missing from everything I read. A message to the centrist/center-left Democratic establishment, which seems determined to police the Overton window in order to marginalize genuine leftist voices.

It is this: We need to speak honestly about socialism. What it means, what it doesn’t mean, and how its history in America - the history of an idea - has been one of repression and indoctrination at the expense of the American people.

Today the establishment will have a heyday trying to exploit the collapse of Graham Platner’s candidacy in Maine. Partly to salvage the Democrats’ election prospects against the long-time GOP faux moderate Susan Collins, but mostly to undermine the left in the Democratic Party itself. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand have already spoken out. Platner’s personal flaws have caught up with him, and that has created a problem for the Party, including for those who supported his candidacy for too long, through too many credible allegations. I was one of them. Platner needs to back out of the race. That much is clear.

But hold on a minute. Let’s pause here. This is time for all of us - on the left and in the center of the Democratic Party, and Democratic Socialists like me - to consider what we are doing, how we are conducting our discourse, and what is good for our country and its people. Even before Platner’s implosion, there was a strong impulse in the Democratic establishment, even the center-left, to sideline and neutralize the left. Democratic Socialists and other leftist voices have taken more care to soften their right flank, but we, too, have sometimes been unduly harsh in our criticism of the Establishment. We need an open dialogue. The Overton Window has opened to the left, and we would be foolish to ignore this opportunity out of caution, reflex, and fear.

I was particularly annoyed by a recent article by Paul Krugman, whose insight and analysis I usually admire.

Krugman Very Few Socialists

Krugman’s main point - that most Americans are social democrats, whether we know it or not - was welcome, and one I agree with. But there was really no need to throw socialism under the bus using some antiquated definition of the ideology harking back to the early 20th Century. Here is the key paragraph of Krugman’s essay:

The fact is that very few Americans — even among politicians who call themselves “democratic socialists” — are really socialists. What many, I’d say a majority, of Americans support is what Europeans call social democracy — an ideology that is OK with living in a mostly market-driven economic system in which some people make much more money than others, but one that advocates policies to tame markets and inequality with progressive taxation, safety net programs, and regulations.

Krugman pretends here that socialism means collective ownership of the means of production and even the abolition of private property. In some, very isolated ivory tower world, this is perhaps correct, but it is historically illiterate and purely theoretical. Others have pointed out that this caricature of socialism is just a blunt rhetorical instrument - one wielded mainly by the right. Around the world, socialism as a social and political philosophy underpins a wide range of parties and movements, including social democrats in Europe and elsewhere.

One can debate why socialist ideas became so destructive in the Soviet Union, especially under Stalin, and in the People’s Republic of China under Mao. The horrors they inflicted are legitimate warnings about excess. One can also debate how social democracy in Europe came, during the Interwar period and Cold War, to distinguish itself so strongly against parties further to the left. But to tar socialism in general with the Stalinist and Maoist brush is just demagoguery and political posturing.

It is, moreover, the argument that big business and the right have historically used in America not just to crush socialism, but to hamstring social democratic initiatives and solidify political power at the expense of the common good. I certainly cannot blame Krugman for the fact that forces on the right - conservative business interests, for the most part, with allies in the media and politics - have used such rhetoric to undermine and repress left-wing ideas and organizations for well over a century - even during the New Deal. But I can fault Krugman for playing their game in this instance.

A few points to wrap this up; I will return to this topic in the future, in different ways.

First and foremost, I am not arguing that all of us, a majority of Americans or even a majority of Democrats should embrace socialist ideas. Rather we should stop stigmatizing the word, trying to fence it out of our accepted political discourse. For decades, socialism was taboo in America. Anyone who spent a lot of time in Europe like me saw this as a peculiarity of American political discourse, and generally not a good one. It seemed that an intense phobia against socialist ideas, like love of guns, weird fundamentalist Christianity and persistent racism, was just one of those irrational things about America that could be explained in cultural terms but not really justified. To me, this American peculiarity was not somehow innate, no more so than racism is innate. It is the product of socialization, built into our social structures and ideology, and perpetuated through indoctrination.

How many times did the American left come up in your social studies, social science and history classes in high school and college? In a positive light? How much time was spent on the repression of workers during the Gilded Age, and how much time on the titans of industry and finance? Why did we read The Great Gatsby without talking about its political and social implications? How much did you learn about the Depression and the New Deal before jumping into World War II? Why did we read Steinbeck without talking about politics? Why did learning about labor and the labor movement seem to end with Eugene V. Debs?

The picture at the top of this article was taken by Dorothea Lange, the amazing New Deal photographer, in the Yakima Valley of Washington State. It is not one of Lange’s most famous images; that would be this unforgettable portrait of a mother and her children, refugees from the Dust Bowl:

As I explore Washington State in the 1930’s, the Writers’ Project and the American Guide Series, I am learning more and more about the national, state and local politics of the New Deal era. They were vicious and messy and wide-open in ways that we have not seen in this country in three generations. Everything was on the table. For a decade or more, American political discourse was open to new ideas, especially on the left, ideas that were later repressed and suppressed. The campaign to suppress socialist ideas didn’t begin with McCarthy. It didn’t even begin with World War II. The right always had more resources, so the impulse to dominate and repress was always present, waiting to take advantage of every opening to stigmatize and marginalize the left.

My Semiquincentennial

Now, suddenly, surveys show that young people have a greater affinity for the word “socialism” than for the word “capitalism”. This is a powerful evolution of American thinking that holds great promise. At long last, there is a dawning consciousness in this country, an appreciation of socio-economic dynamics and interests, a rejection of oppressive ideological indoctrination. Yet the entire American establishment - even including Paul Krugman - is freaking out. We see a strong defensive reaction to Mamdani and AOC and even Bernie - and today, especially, for Platner - as though these leftwing voices are the real threat to democracy, the rule of law and the vestiges of our social safety net.

I think I understand where Krugman and others of good will are coming from. They are scared. They are worried that opening the Overton Window to the left to embrace socialism will scare off voters in the center and open the Democrats to GOP Red Scare tactics. Yet we see Trump launching his Red Scare campaign anyway, in an effort to retain power and extend his authoritarian and kleptocratic regime-building project. The response on the center-left is disappointing, defensive. The Democrats chuckle nervously at Trump’s baseless charge and insist that no, we are not communists, we are not socialists, we are … We are …

The question is what? What are we? What do we stand for? I know that most of us will not say we are socialists. But even now, with just a few months remaining before November 2026, we need to have a more open discussion about what we stand for and who we are, and we need to include those among us who are attracted by socialism - whether genuinely, as I suspect, or through ignorance or delusion, as Krugman claims. James Talarico is a better candidate for Texas than Zohran Mamdani. That is settled and there is really no debate, least of all from the left. At the same time, however, it is clear that the energy in the Democratic Party is coming from the left, and left populism - which draws on socialist ideas - is a political force with great potential.

What difference does it make whether socialism is genuinely popular when the establishment’s impulse is to crush the idea? The effort to close off dreams and discourse is powerful, and it is clearly motivated by insecurity. But also a lack of conviction, and misplaced distrust. This is no way to run a political party - except into the ground. It reverberates with the interests of donors and the advice of paid consultants. In a country so clearly dominated by a grasping oligarchic class and their repressive political and media allies, we should fear the right, not the voices on the left who seek a better future for the American people and an open discussion of their policy ideas.

If social democratic ideas are as popular as Krugman says - and I think he is right - let’s not close off discussion of the intellectual movement and organizations that inspired them: Socialism.

Point Roberts, WA, is the most arbitrary place in America. Enlarge this map if you can. Do you see Point Roberts, dangling down from British Columbia into the Strait of Georgia? It exists, awkwardly, because of the 49th parallel and a 19th Century treaty between the United States and Great Britain. Here ends the boundary between the U.S. and Canada that runs westward from the Lake of the Woods in Minnesota for 1,270 miles (2,043 kilometers) in a perfectly straight line across prairies, through lakes and over mountains. That line does not end on Boundary Bay in Blaine, but here, across the water, in the tiny enclave of Point Roberts.

How the Heck Did This Happen?

The Oregon Treaty of 1846 ended the contest between London and Washington for control of the vast territory between the Columbia River and the Russian colony of Alaska by setting the boundary on the 49th line of latitude while granting Vancouver Island - long a focus of British interest and soon to become home to the Royal Navy’s key base in Esquimalt - to the United Kingdom. The jagged boundary line running from just west of Point Roberts down between the Canadian Gulf Islands and the American San Juans to the Strait of Juan de Fuca was finally established by German Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1871 following the buffoonish Anglo-American Pig War of 1859. (As buffoonish as it was, I am glad America managed to hold onto the San Juan Islands.)

Through it all - for 180 years now - Point Roberts has remained a tiny American enclave. For centuries, the peninsula was visited regularly by Central Coast Salish fishing parties. They established a large, seasonal settlement that housed 300-400 during the Fraser River salmon run. Non-native fisheries came to dominate in the late 19th Century, and the first year-round residents - Icelandic immigrants - arrived in the 1890s. The enclave now has a little more than one thousand inhabitants.

Point Roberts is in Whatcom County, where I live; on the center-right of the map above, my neighborhood is marked out by the blue dot on the east side of Bellingham, at the northwest tip of Lake Whatcom. Like the vast majority of folks from Whatcom County and Bellingham, I had never been to Point Roberts before today. It is a small place, without its own pharmacy or clinic, and can only be reached through British Colombia. There is only one grocery store. The local elementary school ends at grade three.

Point Roberts last attracted nationwide attention in America and Canada during the COVID pandemic, the plague years. The U.S.-Canadian border remained closed for 19 months, turning life on the peninsula upside down. The enclave became almost a trap. Older residents missed doctors appointments and even surgeries. Businesses went broke. As pandemic restrictions eased, Point Roberts kids had a hard time getting back to in-person learning; some transferred to Canadian private schools, others were ferried to Blaine by boat, a distance of almost 40 miles (64 kilometers). Here is a sympathetic article from CBC from July 2021, that describes how July 4 was observed in that plague year:

CBC Point Roberts Border Restrictions

The ferry service has since been cancelled. There is no direct connection between the peninsula and the United States. It is not especially difficult to get there from here, despite needing to pass the border twice. It helps to have a NEXUS pass. But Point Roberts is a small place, and out of the way. Most visitors are Canadians. Neighbors, that is.

A Point Roberts Semiquincentennial

What better place than Point Roberts, then, to observe and celebrate the troubled 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence? As far out on the 49th Parallel as one can get from Washington, DC, and still be on American soil. A place where life is conditioned by geographic isolation and the need for friendship with Canada and Canadians, which - apart from COVID - always came naturally until last year. An enclave where folks from both sides of the border - long lauded as the longest unfortified boundary in the world but nevertheless under appreciated - come together to share a beer and take advantage of exchange rate and price differentials. Canadians have weekend homes there and use the enclave to fill up their gas tanks.

Across the water to the east, the Peace Arch straddles the border in Blaine, and its inscriptions say it all: on the American side, “Children of a common mother”; on the Canadian side, “Brethren dwelling together in unity.” For some reason, the authorities recently put up a stanchion line on either side of the Peace Arch, so that a visitor cannot easily see both sides. The whole border area is crawling with police. In Point Roberts, however, both inscriptions still hold true. Despite the sense of betrayal that now hangs over us, Americans and Canadians still come together as brethren.

July 4 is Point Roberts’ biggest day of the year. When Natalie and I arrived this morning, the pancake breakfast in the community center was just wrapping up. It was time for the flag-raising ceremony out front. First, the Canadian flag was raised without a hitch, on the shorter flagpole, to an austere rendition of “O, Canada.” Then it was time for the Stars and Stripes, and while a local singer belted out a heart-felt “Star Spangled Banner”, the actual flag-raising got snarled in tangled lines. Never mind. Take it down and try again. Turned out the third time WAS a charm.

Meanwhile, down the street, a crowd began to gather in preparation for the parade. Local businesses were full of customers, and the stress was clearly getting to the staff at the Saltwater Cafe, which offers reservations for prime viewing spots along the parade’s short route. Natalie and I found seats a bit further along, on the curb beside some friendly Canadians, folks from Vancouver who had a summer place at Point Roberts. On weekends, especially in the summer, Canadians outnumber Americans in the enclave by more than two-to-one. But everyone, Americans and Canadians alike, knew each other, and it was greetings and jokes all around as the parade got underway.

It was the sweetest, homiest expression of civic togetherness I have seen in a long time. The Fire Department led off the procession, but it seemed just about anybody could join the parade as long as they put on red-white-and-blue and had candy to throw to the kids. The candy throwing, and the beads, created a small-time and family-friendly carnival atmosphere. Half of Point Roberts was parading and throwing candy; the other half was watching, cheering and catching candy.

Our Canadian curb mates asked how it was that Natalie and I chose to spend July Fourth in Point Roberts. I explained that this Independence Day, our Semiquincentennial, felt very weird, so why not come to the most arbitrary and random place in America to celebrate the occasion. They loved that, and one young woman laughed that everybody in Point Roberts just thinks of it as Point Roberts Day. I loved that. While we were there, news came through that Canada had lost its World Cup round-of-16 match to Morocco, and there were sighs and moans along the pavement. “But we still have this parade to lift our spirits”, the woman beside me chirped, with a huge and infectious grin. I think she really meant it.

After 30 minutes or so, the parade petered out, and we headed for the Boundary Monument, the north/northwestern-most point in the lower 48. We found it easily - it’s where the American road ends and the Canadian road begins, in a quiet corner of Point Roberts. Actually, the road is only broken by a low curb, painted yellow, a narrow band of lawn, and some warning signs. The driveways and porches of South Delta, BC, began right on the other side, and some of their backyards opened onto Point Roberts. This really is an unfortified border that almost runs on the honor system.

Natalie and I then drove around to the other corner, where there was no monument but the lively settlement of Maple Beach. It was the same story; brethren dwelling together in unity, on either side of an almost invisible line.

We left Point Roberts in the late afternoon, long before darkness fell and the fireworks were launched. I love fireworks, but today I didn’t need them. I carried a warm glow and sparkles inside me, from Point Roberts back to Bellingham. This was my perfect Semiquincentennial.

Arbitrary Lines and Pulling Threads

I have described Point Roberts as the “most arbitrary place”, but it also reminds us of how often the lines on a map that define our lives, even determine our fate - things like international boundaries - start out as arbitrary and often remain at least a little irrational. The 49th Parallel is one of those lines. This essentially invisible line, more than the wind and the coast and a generally lovely natural setting, defines much of life in Point Roberts.

You may recall the battle cry “54-Forty or Fight!”, the vocal demand of many leading figures in the 1840’s Democratic Party that the U.S. boundary be placed much further north - clear up at the southern boundary of Russian Alaska, excluding Britain entirely from the Pacific Coast of North America. If you grew up in Washington State in the 20th Century, it must surely ring a bell. The phrase came up quite a few times in my grade school social studies classes; we spent a full year on the geography and history of the Pacific Northwest (defined for our purposes as Washington, Oregon and Idaho, with British Columbia dealt with only briefly, as the “other”, the tangible legacy of Hudson Bay Company interlopers and British loyalists). “54-Forty or Fight!” would have erased British Columbia from the map. At Narrows View Elementary in University Place, we were encouraged to regard it as somewhat immoderate.

The 1846 Oregon Treaty set the boundary at the 49th Parallel and created the enclave of Point Roberts. There was a certain logic to the line - it had been discussed for decades and continued the boundary that had already been agreed to the east of the Oregon Country. Still, if the line had instead been drawn at the 48th Parallel, there would be no Point Roberts enclave, and I would now be living in British Columbia. Bellingham is located at 48.75 North, just 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of the border with Canada. (Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, is located at 48.25 North, roughly 40 miles or 64 kilometers further south than Bellingham.)

If Bellingham were in British Columbia, I probably wouldn’t be living here anyway. It is my wife Natalie’s hometown; I was born and raised near Tacoma, down at 47.25 North. Natalie and I moved here after I retired from the Foreign Service. And not just that: If the boundary had been drawn at the 48th Parallel, I would never have met Natalie at the University of Washington back in 1980, and my life would have been unimaginably different and almost certainly less happy.

Pulling a bit further on this thread, the history of the Oregon Problem in the early 19th Century shows that the boundary could quite easily have been drawn along the Columbia River, in which case there would be no Washington State as we know it. It was the influx of settlers from the Eastern and Central U.S. more than the balance of power between the U.S. and Britain that pushed the boundary up to where it is today. (Given my long personal engagement with the Cyprus Problem, discussing the Oregon Problem, which involved drawing lines and settlers, and even an enclave, is a through-the-looking-glass experience.) The feisty Americans who started the Pig War on San Juan Island also messed up any hopes that Britain could consolidate control between its settlements on the Columbia River and Vancouver Island. A line was drawn at the 49th Parallel, and history has since created two distinct states, Oregon and Washington, on the American side of the border, united in many aspects of culture and outlook but deeply divided over collegiate sports (with the Huskies and Cougars having an abiding advantage as mascots, at least, over the Ducks and Beavers).

An Enclave Opens the Mind

Let’s go ahead and pull the counterfactual thread all the way so the whole map unravels. If there had been no Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, no Revolutionary War (as we Americans call it), and potentially no separation from Britain in the 18th Century, what would Point Roberts be today? What about Bellingham, or even Vancouver, BC? Who knows what would have happened in the intervening centuries? It is hard to fathom. Presumably slavery would have been abolished sooner in North America and there would have been no American Civil War. As important as that would have been, it is just the first of countless imponderables. I imagine something very different would have arisen on this continent, a different set of boundaries in a different world.

These are the thoughts inspired by the little enclave of Point Roberts, WA, on the Fourth of July, 2026. On America’s troubled, nearly maddening Semiquincentennial. Thoughts of chance, and luck, and connection, along with a feeling more of thanks than celebration. Thanks that I was born in this wonderful state, that I met Natalie, and that we have such wonderful neighbors to the north of the longest unfortified border in the world, just twenty miles from our front door. Canadians, that is. So wonderful, in fact, that they still come to party with us on our birthday after what we have put them through over the past two years.

That’s how the heck Point Roberts can exist. COVID was very rough on this little enclave, causing real hardship and hard feelings among Point Roberts’ American community. Just as Point Roberts was getting back on its feet, the resentments caused by the Trump Regime and its policies have taken a toll. The insults and injury from Washington continue; just this week, Trump announced he would not renew the USMCA, the agreement that governs most trade between the U.S., Canada and Mexico, evidently preferring endless rounds of negotiation and extortion. This will cause real, needless harm from the Yukon to the Yucatan; it is hard to get past the combination of stupidity, cupidity and sheer malevolence. Yet, through it all, it is the human connections built on mutual respect as well as all the things we have in common that can ensure Point Roberts survives and even thrives. July 4, 2026, was very good in this regard.

Much the same can be said for all of us, across this wonderful continent of North America and our whole glorious planet - we all need each other. Especially now, amid Trump’s anti-Canadian bluster, Americans need to show respect for Canada and Canadians. “Good fences make good neighbors”, and the U.S.-Canada border can be understood in these terms. But I also believe Canadians and Americans can let our guards down if we just show each other respect. With time it can make a difference. Time can heal. For all the world, and for our fellow Americans, our Semiquincentennial should not and cannot be about drawing lines and exclusion. It is about extending hands and inclusion, about healing and looking to a shared future, just as Natalie and I saw today in Point Roberts.

I don’t want to go down some epistemological rathole, but there is something entirely unreal, superficial and basically useless about our present obsession with “the narrative” and “the vibe”.

I was trained in anthropology, so I have some grasp of the role of culture, including the centrality of myth and narrative. I am post-modernist enough to appreciate how narratives and other epiphenomena become structural so that they shape and filter our perceptions and motivation. This critical discussion started - and perhaps should have remained - as a rarified academic debate that informs but should not dominate our public discourse. Somehow it has gone feral in our popular culture, like pop psychology. In our present media and information environment, “narrative” and “vibe” are growing like ivy or kudzu, choking out the sun. Choking out reason. Choking out reality.

The Media Are Not The Message

This is far more than a media - and social media - phenomenon, but it is strongly amplified in those two interwoven domains. Every day I read or hear comments by mainstream pundits that focus on the vibe, on the importance of crafting an effective narrative, and how to score success or failure in that lively arena. On one justifiably hot topic - the illegal war of aggression that the United States and Israel launched against Iran in February - pundits even ponder whether the Trump Regime can reassert its preferred narrative of dominance and victory. The obstacles to success in this regard are duly noted, but the “narrative war” is often given equal footing to the real war, and sometimes even elevated above it. This is particularly the case when the war is connected to the approaching mid-term elections in November. Thus, the price of gasoline at the pump - an absolutely perfect epiphenomenon as far as the war is concerned - becomes the prevailing metric and focus of commentary, rather than any of the more pertinent and lasting real-world developments in the Middle East. This turns reality on its head. It is as though the domestic political dimension of this catastrophic war is not just one theater of conflict, but the most important one. That is just so insular, narrow and detached from reality. So infuriatingly American. As removed as Americans may feel from the ongoing violence and destruction of this war, actual developments beyond our borders - what we in foreign policy circles used to call “facts on the ground” - still matter.

The Vibe Economy

This vibe-focused discussion has been inspired and somehow driven by what is, in fact, a head-scratcher: the so-called “vibe economy”. In other words, the dour public mood about the economy that persists and deepens despite decent employment numbers, historically moderate inflation, and a buoyant stock market. This is legitimately a tough analytical puzzle. Yet we too often forget that economics traffics in numbers but is in fact a social science, with all the attendant caveats. The focus is on the behavior of humans - those willful, creative, rather unpredictable creatures - much more than widgets and gadgets. So reconciling widget and gadget numbers with measures of human perception is always a challenge. Right now it is a major challenge.

Paul Krugman, among others, has tried hard to analyze the vibe economy. I recommend reading his Substack. Krugman neither tries to explain away the vibe economy nor exaggerate it, but instead to understand it. To paraphrase his take (which I am only partially qualified to do) the problem is not exactly faulty data, even if it may be tilted and imprecise at times. Rather, we often measure the wrong things, or we don’t have a handy metric because data collection is tilted toward things that are more easily disaggregated and measured numerically. The data we have do not lie, but they are not adequate to tell the truth. The average American may just perceive things that the numbers do not reflect, that may well be more lasting and important than the data points collected and crunched by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. One thing that these grumpy Americans might understand far more clearly than the markets or the statisticians? Their personal interest, the absolute foundation of economics.

The distorting and even dysfunctional dominance of narrative and vibe divorced from reality extends across a broad range of matters of public interest. Another of my favorites, Phillips O’Brien, has worked tirelessly on his blog to cut through the prevailing narrative on the Ukraine and Iran wars and present not so much an alternative narrative as a set of clear, factual developments. As with Krugman, O’Brien demonstrates that this takes a lot of study and expertise.

The Omni-Vibe

Then there is the macro vibe discussion, often focused on American politics and popular culture. This, I fear, will come to occupy a lot of public discourse in the run-up to the mid-term elections in November. We are already seeing this happen in discussion of the “Mamdani effect”, the success of left-wing candidates in the New York primaries, and the coming contest between Graham Platner and Susan Collins in Maine. As July 4 approaches, it has also reared its head in commentary on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

With a nod to America’s Semiquincentennial, David Wallace-Wells took half a stab at analyzing the omni-vibe and its possible disconnect with reality in today’s New York Times:

NYT Wallace-Wells Trump Vibe Shift

Perhaps the effort was laudable, but the result was disappointing. I don’t dispute Wallace-Wells’ most basic conclusion: the pro-MAGA vibe shift of 2025 was always little more than a media narrative built on flimsy and ephemeral evidence like polls and Joe Rogan’s ratings. Very predictably, Wallace-Wells also concludes that the disconnect between narrative and reality comes down to intense partisan feeling - one of the media’s favorite narratives. Rather astonishingly, Wallace-Wells does not even hint that the media - indeed, the New York Times itself - plays a major part in elevating the vibe above reality. Instead, the thrust of the piece is that we should, perhaps, temper the conclusions we draw from polling and initial impressions, but that these things - the ephemera that carry such weight among media pundits and political consultants - are still extremely important. The ephemera, it would seem, decide elections, and elections, in fact, matter most in terms of a kind of “who’s up and who’s down” understanding of “the vibe.” It’s all a contest of narratives, in which facts - even policy - don’t matter much. This is a sort of corollary to the media’s favored “horse-race” approach to elections and overall “both-sides-ism”.

I can’t stand this. It suggests a prevailing marketing sensibility that derives more from the business interests of the New York Times and other media than from their vaunted social and political mission. It seems to say that facts don’t really matter, only the perception of facts, or even a vague and emotive sense of facts in line with a particular narrative proffered by some elite. If there is a divergence between reality and the perception of reality, the latter is the center of gravity, not the former. The disconnect can be resolved in the narrative marketplace, where emotions and affect are as important as hard realities. This is the world of influencers who induce their followers to switch sunscreen or health regimens based on - what, exactly? A kind of vibe.

To my mind, this is the ultimate self-indulgence of a complacent nation that is, in fact, too preoccupied or lazy to actually delve into facts. I wish I could give my fellow citizens more credit, but it’s way too late for that. In this era of abundant information, we complain about information overload and search widely - so we claim - for reliable sources. I don’t buy it; it is not hard to find reliable information that hews close to the data on all of the issues debated in the public arena. In many cases, it is exactly where it used to be, but we can access it more directly now. On other, more technical issues, there is no shortage of excellent sources that interpret the data and guide the layperson through what it means with a high level of objectivity and discipline. It takes, in fact, only a modicum of effort to find these sources. I know because I make such a small effort and find them, new ones every day, depending on my current priorities and interests.

There needs to be an appetite for that most maligned and neglected of pursuits, intellectual self-improvement. Most of us choose to be spectators and consumers, not citizens. Where does that leave us in the vibe-sphere, spinning among competing narratives? Are we even homo sapiens - “thinking” or “wise” man (sadly, it seems “homo” is gendered)?

American Exceptionalism

In my field - international affairs and security policy - the prevalence of narrative over reason has plagued my entire career. It found expression in American wars of choice and our campaigns of killing and crippling sanctions. How pathetic it was to observe the enthusiasm at each new iteration of counter-insurgency strategy, from Vietnam to Central America to Afghanistan and Iraq. Drawing initially on the one arguably successful 20th Century counter-insurgency campaign - the 1948-60 Malayan Emergency - American military planners and commanders like David Petraeus and Stanley McCrystal spun out detailed and heavily-resourced fantasies in which targeted violence wins over hearts and minds. The result was a tragically repetitive cycle of death, destruction and strategic failure. It was the same with the Global War on Terror, whether in its original GW Bush version, the more refined approach of the Obama Administration, or the current extrajudicial killing of guys on boats off the coast of South America in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The narrative always supports killing foreigners to make Americans feel safe. It seems to work in terms of affect; there is little opposition to killing foreigners in America’s civic discourse. But the real results are always negligible at best, and, most often, counterproductive.

The central narrative - the touchstone of it all - was American exceptionalism. No one has done more to disabuse us of the notion of American exceptionalism in military matters than Phillips O’Brien. That’s why I find his Substack both enlightening and refreshing. There are many others out there fighting against American exceptionalism. Van Jackson (Un-Diplmatic) and Daniel Larison (Eunomia) are among my favorites. Other writers whom I like - Timothy Snyder, Heather Cox Richardson, and Ivo Daalder - cling to American exceptionalism despite themselves. I think they will come around to recognize the premise is false - the U.S., for all its power and wealth, cannot and should not claim a special, privileged role in shaping the Middle East, Europe, East Asia or the Western Hemisphere. The era of noble intentions with disastrous consequences must end. America has squandered whatever credibility it had thirty years ago as the provider of global public goods.

The Vibe and the Semiquincentennial

There is no way to suppress or avoid a war of narratives in connection with the Semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence. Not in 2026. Fifty years ago, we felt no need to argue about celebrating the Bicentennial. We had just gone through Vietnam and Watergate, we were living with stagflation, Detroit had given us the Pinto and the Gremlin to compete with Toyotas and Datsuns. We were down but not out. We had high hopes. Now? Not so much.

As much as I fear the elevation of narrative above reality, I know that we can’t live without narrative. I think we all need to admit that, even agree on that. To live without narrative is to live without culture in the basic, anthropological sense. Narrative is just a diachronic form of the basic sorting function of culture, which organizes our perceptions, our behavior and our selves.

But our present focus on narratives as something distinct from - and in some ways more important than - underlying reality is dangerous. Our never-ending and exhausting “vibe” debate carries great risk in the real world. It subsumes our civic culture and discourse in a matrix of marketing and cultural manipulation. More importantly, it erects potentially disastrous barriers between our minds and the real world developments that condition human existence in America as elsewhere in the world. Things like climate change. Things like actual conflicting economic interests. Things like inequalities and inequities that are growing and grinding on a global scale. Things like the expected impact of AI and other disruptive technologies.

On a planet facing planet-level challenges - truly existential risks - our obsession with narrative and vibe is a soporific and a distraction. It is purely emotive, deepening our isolation from our surroundings, our environment, each other and the world around us. We may be entertained and agitated, but it makes us less than homo sapiens. In other words, less than truly human.

It is the kudzu cutting out the light and choking our thoughts.

Most of you are probably lucky enough that you don’t have to read Foreign Affairs. I will join you in a year, but for now I have to pay attention to this sad mouthpiece for The Blob.

The current offerings are a perfect picture of the utter confusion that prevails in our foreign policy establishment. The focus of many of the articles is on China, the Rorschach test for cheerleaders for American primacy.

Several of the big names are there, including Richard Haas. They are intelligent but their analysis is not useful. The prevailing tone is zero-sum, arguing that the path to America’s success - indeed the only way to defend American interests - is to thwart China in every way. Some of the articles lean toward warmongering. Others argue that China, while emerging as a leader, is just going to disappoint because it will not emulate the US as hegemon. Haas sees great danger that Trump will move toward an accommodation on Taiwan that enables Beijing to achieve its objectives peacefully - at least that is how I interpret his article.

The worst case, in other words, is not catastrophic war, but the peaceful end of American primacy along the “First Island Chain”. Numbskull realism wrapped in dubious nostalgia for the “rules-based order”.

I am including a link to the Haas article. A few years back Haas was arguing that confrontational, zero-sum approaches to Taiwan-China and US-China issues were counterproductive and that the US could not prevail in a war over Taiwan. Then he pivoted to advocating the abandonment of strategic ambiguity. Now he worries about Trump selling out his Taiwan shibboleths (whatever they might be). It’s a perfect picture of the Goldilocks idiocy of the American foreign and security policy elite.

When will these pundits recognize that the world is changing profoundly, and the most important factor in this shift is the fundamental weakness of the former hegemon, the United States? Trump is horrible, but it is not just Trump. In fact, The Blob - as it never fails to remind us every day - deserves a large part of the blame.

China Could Win Taiwan Without Fighting

I think Iran deserves some credit right now - as hard as it is for Americans to give it - for an intelligent and agile military, diplomatic and strategic response to illegal US/Israeli aggression. This is not to say that the Islamic Republic should be admired for an approach that imposes tremendous pain on the Iranian people, both before and after February 28. That, in a way, is tragic. It is to say, instead, that if Tehran decided that regime survival was its number one priority - which is a very normal decision for a state to make - it has done a good job.

Phillips O’Brien has written an excellent piece on Substack outlining three initial lessons from the US/Israeli war on Iran. (You may recall that I consider O’Brien the most insightful military and strategic analyst writing these days, at least in English.) He describes the conflict so far as more a battle than a war, interesting for what it reveals about the capacity of the adversaries. Here is a link - it is very much worth reading, and ventures a bit beyond military analysis to wider strategic considerations.

Phillips Obrien Early Lessons

O’Brien does an excellent job at dissecting the fundamental errors and shortcomings of the American side in this conflict. I think the Iranian side deserves more credit, however, for playing a relatively weak hand with intelligence, flexibility, and strategic foresight.

A lot of attention has been paid to Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. This was very predictable, of course, though evidently not foreseen by Trump and - for all practical purposes - the Pentagon. Retaliatory strikes against Iran’s neighbors with friendly ties to the US and Israel, and against American facilities in those countries, were also no surprise, even if we were not adequately prepared for them. Both of these expected moves have been executed quite effectively, and have increased the cost of the conflict to others, focused pressure on Washington, and cast doubt on the strategic orientation of Iran’s Gulf neighbors.

It’s the “inclusion” of Lebanon and Israel’s military operations in that country in the ceasefire and potential peace process that were a sort of master stroke on Tehran’s part. If, as seems pretty evident, Trump and the US are far more eager - even desperate - than the Islamic Republic for an end to the war, then this linkage is a potent mechanism to advance Iran’s objectives. It is putting heavy strain on US-Israeli relations when these were already on a steep downhill slide. It is creating additional complications for Arab states in their orientation toward Israel, the US, and the so-called “Arab street”. And it is further hammering home the basic weakness of the US, and Trump as the American leader, despite his insistence that Israel “has no choice” but to obey his directives, and that he is always “the boss.”

American hardline critics of the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement with Iran ranted endlessly that it did not include enough issues, such as Iran’s missile program and its regional “proxies” (Hezbollah, Hamas, and later the Houthis). This - in addition to Trump’s personal envy of and animus toward Obama - helped convince Trump to cancel the JCPOA in 2018 and impose “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran in pursuit of a broader deal, an approach that was stupidly continued under Biden. Netanyahu and Israel played a major role in pushing Trump, Washington hardliners and the Biden administration in this foolish direction. It is therefore interesting and ironic that Tehran - in this moment of tactical and perhaps even strategic advantage - has managed to include its favorite regional issue - Israel - in negotiations to end the conflict. The US has gone along with Iran’s demand so far, even if Israel has resisted. Since separating the US from Israel is a longstanding Iranian goal, that’s pretty masterful, if you ask me.

It is hard to say where the Islamabad MOU stands at this point. But it reflects not only America’s strategic incompetence and weakness, or Trump’s utter foolishness. It has also shown that, in this more multipolar world in which power is distributed more broadly, so-called middle powers can, through their own wits and determination, gain advantage over - and potentially prevail over - apparently stronger adversaries. With a clearer understanding of its priorities, a stronger commitment to achieving its goals, and more agility in conducting military operations as well as traditional and pubic diplomacy, Iran has bested the United States. We have seen Ukraine do the same over the past year or two in its conflict with Russia. It is not just cheap drones. It is the result of a general diffusion of education, expertise, talent and resources to new centers of power, often middle or regional powers. Local initiative and innovation play a huge role. Ignoring or downplaying these factors has been a huge mistake.

All in all, the course of this war and the Islamabad MOU are a reminder of something that has never changed but has become more obvious in recent years - that human intelligence is distributed evenly across our planet, that good ideas can arise anywhere, that legitimacy and loyalty count, and that talent does not always chase money and move to the US.

So kudos to Iran - I don’t like the Islamic Republic regime, but in this case, it’s a matter or credit where credit is due.

Terrorism.

This morning, looking at the current state of the illegal US/Israeli aggression against Iran (and Lebanon), I finally realized something simple:

It is state terrorism. It is obvious and has been so for many weeks now.

What is terrorism? The illegitimate, illegal use of violence and the threat of violence to inspire terror in the pursuit of political objectives.

The US/Israeli war on Iran meets those criteria. It has been illegal and illegitimate from the very beginning. It uses violence and the threat of violence - in many ways indiscriminate and against civilian targets - to inspire terror in pursuit of America’s and Israel’s political objectives.

And as so often with terrorism, this illegal war has hardened the regime that is under attack, inspired a popular rally against the terrorists while justifying repression, and failed to attain any of its political objectives. It has caused pointless damage and pain.

This is terrorism on the grandest scale, the most morally depraved, the most inhuman. But it is strikingly similar to the US military’s illegal attacks on boats off the coast of South America and extrajudicial killing of those on board.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, President Bush declared: “Every nation, and every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you’re with the terrorists.” That was foolish then, but appears all the more foolish now.

We ARE the terrorists.

The current, tentative ceasefire is like the agreements that terrorist organizations reach to save themselves and regroup. Just a pause in fighting, while retaining the threat of further illegitimate and illegal strikes as a kind of lever, increasingly weak.

The terrorists will try not to accept peace. They will continue their struggle until they are truly stopped. It is only a matter of time. This Friday is just a stage along the path to America’s more thorough defeat. Israel’s defeat in Lebanon may take longer - it is a separate, subsidiary terrorist war with its own logic.

Iran is winning. Not because they are especially strong or virtuous. But because they are facing terrorists - Trump and Netanyahu.

I don’t know what to think about the Semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps it’s just me; I find it hard right now to celebrate this country that I love. Too much is going wrong in our government, economy, society and culture. On top of it all there is Trump, who keeps debasing everything with his name, guise and toxic spirit. Tomorrow is Trump’s White House cage fight extravaganza, which somehow rolls the President’s 80th birthday and signature grift into our national anniversary events. That is only the beginning. It is encouraging that Trump’s name has been removed from the Kennedy Center; that’s one down. Still, we’re losing ground. The coming month(s) will be rough.

I vividly remember the Bicentennial back in 1976, and even though it fell at a time of national troubles - the oil shock, the end of the Vietnam War, the Watergate Scandal and Richard Nixon’s resignation - it carried a sense of national renewal, of finding strength in our roots and moving forward on a healthy and more human basis toward a positive future. I love travel literature, and to me, two wonderful travel books captured the Bicentennial zeitgeist: Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins (1979) and Blue Highways by William Least-Heat Moon (1982). Blue Highways, in particular, remains a true classic of the genre.

50 years ago, back in 1976, there were complaints that America’s birthday celebration was overly commercialized. In retrospect, I’ve just gotta laugh at how innocent we were. It was really so wholesome, so rosy-cheeked and wide-eyed. If we had only known …

It is not easy to find such a sense of renewal and optimism in 2026. I still look for books, especially travel books, to capture the moment and help me focus my thinking. This time, I had to look backward well beyond the Bicentennial to find what I was looking for: The American Guides Series. As Trump does his best to distort our history, degrade our memorials, commercialize our natural treasures and cheapen our national life in countless ways, The American Guides are a monument from the 1930s and 1940s that he cannot touch, a kind of light to shine through our present disillusionment.

I first encountered The American Guides as a graduate student in Washington, DC, in the early 1980s. Roaming used bookstores (as I still love to do), I picked up a copy of Washington, D.C.: A Guide to the Nation’s Capital. Published in 1942, it was a minor revision of the second volume in the Guides Series - Washington: City and Capital, which appeared in 1937. It was already long out of date in some ways when I first cracked it open, but I was enchanted all the same. The book was exhaustive and detailed, like the famous Blue Guides in Europe, or even the old Baedekers. As in Baedeker, the pages were packed with all sorts of practical information - stores, post offices and their hours, bus routes, train timetables - along with a good deal of well considered commentary. Reading the book involved time-travel, not just sightseeing and practical advice. Still, four decades and more after publication, Washington, D.C.: A Guide to the Nation’s Capital was the best guide to Washington back then. It probably remains so today, almost 50 years after I encountered it, and almost 90 years after it first appeared.

Another volume in the Guide Series has captured my imagination since I retired from the Foreign Service and returned home in 2015 - Washington: A Guide to the Evergreen State. Published in 1941, it includes amazing descriptions of the major cities, towns and sights of Washington State along with numerous Tours, i.e., itineraries along roads that sometimes no longer exist. It fires lots of synapses in my memory and family history and conjures places, events, terms and customs that I half-way knew. The book is an illuminating and nostalgic guide to exploring my home state, whether from an armchair or behind the wheel.

I will have a lot to say about this book over the coming months (and maybe years). Let’s begin, though, with the thing about it that charms me the most: it’s proud embrace of the egalitarian spirit. Or, more properly, the worker’s spirit and elan.

It is worth noting that the authors of Washington: A Guide to the Evergreen State are anonymous. As with most of the books in The American Guide Series, the authors’ names were omitted and are in fact very hard to find - anywhere. Some famous authors contributed to other books in the Series, writers like John Steinbeck, Richard Wright and Saul Bellow. Their role was later uncovered and recognized. All were members of the Federal Writers Project, part of the Work Projects Administration (originally the Works Progress Administration) and FDR’s New Deal. But none of the writers who compiled the 687 pages of the Guide to the Evergreen State are recognized or even, to my knowledge, known. They are credited collectively, on the Guide’s title page: “Compiled by workers of the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Washington.” I like that phraseology: “workers of the Writers’ Program”. It speaks to me of the dignity of labor - all labor. (I plan to search the archives from the Guide project, stored in Tacoma at the Washington State Historical Society, for more about the authors. They were paid; there must at least be receipts, with names and possibly other clues.)

Curiously, the photographs in A Guide to the Evergreen State are duly credited, including to individual photographers. The Writers Program and the Federal Writers Project ran in parallel to the Dust Bowl-era Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration (FSA), which employed the photographers who produced what is sometimes called New Deal Photography. They created many of the most evocative and haunting images of America ever made; some of their works are famous and truly iconic. Among the FSA photographers were several big names, including Dorothea Lange, who worked in Washington State. It is odd to think that individual attribution was given to the relatively small group of photographers but not to the far more numerous writers; one has to wonder why. (The photographic archives of the Washington Guide project are also stored in Tacoma.)

The egalitarian spirit of Washington: A Guide is most evident in the 150 introductory pages, which review the history of the Evergreen State and key aspects of its economic, social, and cultural life. Perhaps the most characteristic chapter in the story is the one on “Industry, Commerce and Labor”, a total of 27 pages. First and foremost, seen from our present perspective, it is startling that “Labor” is included in this chapter, or in the introductory section at all. But it is very much included, eight lively pages about the struggles of working people to organize and advance their interests in the face of serious and sometimes deadly pushback from business interests, the conservative press, and local and state authorities. The text covers grassroots organizers, the Wobblies, strikes, riots, massacres, maneuvers between the AFL and CIO. It showcases workers’ demands, resolve and achievements. It is an uplifting, expansive story. Indeed, belief in worker rights bleeds over into the sections on “Industry” and “Commerce”, as well, and pops up intermittently throughout the entire book.

Thus, in important ways, A Guide to the Evergreen State shows how much ground we have lost on critical issues over the past eighty years. It demonstrates how we have grown desensitized to core economic dimensions of political and social life, how truncated and unbalanced our national discourse has become. It lays bare the cynicism which clouds and obstructs open and constructive discussion of contesting economic interests in today’s America and Washington State.

Missing from Washington: A Guide to the Evergreen State, however, is an appreciation of racial and other forms of discrimination and the struggle for civil rights and equality. There is a patronizing and sometimes disrespectful treatment of minorities and, to a degree, women. It is an everyman sensibility that marginalizes the marginalized. In that sense, the book is backward - blind or at least insensitive to principles and issues that are very important today. That, too, is illuminating.

In other words, reading the Guide to the Evergreen State is a good way to understand what we have lost and what we have gained - in Washington and America - over the course of my lifetime. It gives cause for hope and for faith in the possibility of renewal. In the depths of the Great Depression, our system changed and centered the perspectives and interests of working people - or at least came close. It brought them out of the shadows, even while others remained in darkness. If we did it then, however imperfectly, we can do it again, and perhaps rather better this time. The arc of history is long indeed; who knows where it leads. Perhaps, through consciousness and struggle, we can nudge it in the right direction.

There is an American Guide Series guide to every state in the United States. Even Alaska and Hawaii were added on at the end, before statehood. You can probably find the Guide to your state in the local library, in a used bookstore, or online. Give it a look. Most follow a similar pattern, but for me, there is nothing like Washington. I was born here and now I am back; I feel a profound allegiance to this state. I truly love it. For me, exploring the 85-year-old Guide to the Evergreen State is not a bad way at all to mark the Semiquincentennial in the beautiful place where I live - Bellingham, The City of Subdued Excitement. Our unofficial mascot is the sloth, but people work hard here. We are a city where working people deserve more. They deserve to be centered.

Bellingham is a fine American place in 2026. It wants to be so much better. It tries. I like to think that is true of all American places at the Semiquincentennial. In this difficult present, there is hope to be found in looking backward as well as forward.

The Blob - the American foreign and security policy establishment - is generating ever more slop. Writing the same article over and over again, from the same worn-out perspective of “great power competition” and “American exceptionalism”. Tweaking a phrase here and a sentence there, throwing in a new metaphor. And managing to do it all without much help from AI!

Peter Beinart has written an excellent piece in today’s New York Times that calls out America’s foreign policy hawks for failure to learn any lessons from our disastrous wars over the past 25 years. Beinart also highlights the failure of our system (such as it is) to hold the hawks and jingoists to account. Here is a link:

Beinart NYT Foreign Policy Failure

Beinart could have gone further. He does not explore the reasons for the astonishing and persistent impunity of our most aggressive foreign policy blowhards - people like Lindsay Graham in the Senate, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, Bret Stephens at the New York Times, and, more recently, Matthew Kroenig at the Atlantic Council. One gets the sense, to be honest, that the “system” is designed to deliver impunity for warmongering. Much has to do with our oligarchic neoliberal economic system, as I see it, and the pervasive delusion of American exceptionalism, on which generations of American children have been raised. Aggressive foreign wars are integral to our economic and political system.

I fault The Blob for fostering and serving this system, but it is in the nature of the foreign and security policy establishment to serve power. Beinart’s op-ed notwithstanding, the New York Times and other major publications are a big part of the problem. It was only today, for example, that the NYT pointed out that Trump’s claim to have achieved a great breakthrough by securing Tehran’s promise not to develop a nuclear weapon - a claim Trump has been boasting about for two months already - is total bullshit. Iran has made the promise repeatedly in the past, and experts do not believe it matters very much. (One might ask, in light of Trump’s cancellation of the JCPOA and U.S. behavior more generally, why these “experts” lend more credence to American promises than to those made by Iran.)

The corruption of think tanks, in particular, is just like the profound and all-pervasive corruption of our political system in general. It is inseparable from the concentration of money and power among an increasingly oligarchic elite. The Blob repays its patrons through what it says and what it doesn’t say; what it highlights and what it ignores.

But there is a deeper problem for The Blob and especially for the Washington think tank world. It is out of ideas, and the endless repetition of the same nonsense and misdirection is ever less persuasive and more off-putting. I used the Groundhog Day metaphor in the title, but The Blob is also more and more like a hamster wheel. Running in place, meaninglessly, generating content for itself and a narrow audience inside the Beltway (and in Brussels and other capitals).

There are still some excellent analysts out there. I have to say that Phillips O’Brien has impressed me greatly over the past year, and I am still a big fan of Van Jackson and a few others with a broader or adjacent field of analysis, including Paul Krugman and Adam Tooze. There are still credible think tanks, though they generally have a lower profile than the Council on Foreign Relations or Brookings, and are more “niche”. But they are the exceptions.

Foreign Affairs (affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations) and Foreign Policy, the flagship journals and websites of The Blob, are drowning in slop. They regurgitate the same essential articles day after day, week after week, with very little analytical variation or innovative perspective. The bylines change but the content remains the same. The same themes and conclusions repeat themselves in an endless loop. It is always Groundhog Day. China does not seek to replace the U.S. as global hegemon, exactly, but it is still both very dangerous and much weaker than most of us think. Europe needs to build out its strategic autonomy but remains dependent on the United States for now and for some years into the future. An Iranian nuclear weapon would be a colossal problem for the Middle East and the globe. International law is irrelevant, a gauzy anachronism that serious countries ignore. We all need to devote more and more of our resources to defense.

Guns over butter is the flavor of the day/week/year/decade.

It reminds me of what NATO Secretary General George Robertson used to say of the North Atlantic Council when I worked at NATO Headquarters in Brussels: “Everything has already been said, but not everyone has said it.” I don’t know whether Robertson coined the phrase, but it was totally on target. Amid the sea of words, it was hard to discern much that had any real meaning or significance. It was all performative. What stood in for deliberation when all the direction was coming from Washington.

Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy are models for the degrading effect of our current information environment, characterized by senseless immediacy and sensory overload. They are both - but especially Foreign Policy - invested in their online presence. Their monthly or quarterly print editions have faded into the background as the so-called “journals” are busy chasing exactly the same audience as the New York Times or CNN or BBC. But they are not good at it (al Jazeera and the BBC are much, much better). They generate slop. I scroll through their menus and tune into their webinars and find nothing - NOTHING - of any marginal value. It’s a dreary slog through repetitive junk.

I know that FP and FA still get clicks and that a few folks follow their online conversations, but the whole endeavor is such a waste. A waste of the audience’s time and a waste of whatever the contributors might produce if they took a moment - maybe a week or two - to reflect. To ask themselves what the hell they are doing. If they took a break from generating content to think more deeply and apply their expertise - which is often real - to generating, now and then, a useful insight, novel perspective, or helpful recommendation.

There is opportunity cost to running on the hamster wheel, to feeding Groundhog Day. I want to call it Ground Blob Day.

For now, however, they are “flooding the zone”, to use Steve Bannon’s famous phrase. Creating fog and distraction. Feeding AI training day after day with the same bad ideas and superficial analysis - probably climbing up the ladder of search results. All in all, just wasting our time. Wasting my time. And wasting my money - I eagerly look forward to the day when I have taught my last class and can cancel my subscriptions to Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. When I won’t need to know what appears there in order to seem au courant with what’s happening in The Blob.

In their small and wonky way, the think tanks and “journals” and foreign and security policy establishment are propping up the oligarchic system based on defending American primacy and elite impunity which they are disposed to serve. I have better things to do than watch them bow and scrape and consume their slop.

Jamelle Bouie’s column this morning in the New York Times lays out the ongoing transformation of the United States into a new Regime under Trump, one guided by Project 2025 in both vision and execution. Bouie highlights the Democrats’ lack of any such unifying program of action or even thought. Indeed, in Bouie’s analysis, the thought must precede the action. It must be based on a clear ideology (even if Bouie does not use that word, which has come to be regarded as a pejorative in American political discourse). Bouie suggests a set of goals that would entail major adjustments to our governing laws and constitution, driven by a clear concept of the relationship between the individual and the state and of the social and economic underpinnings of government. Without such an ideology (my term), Democrats’ drives for national renewal will inevitably come up short. They will be about restoration rather than “reconstruction”.

Bouie takes down current Democratic thinking about a possible Project 2029, a proposed response to Project 2025. In Bouie’s words: “A Project 2029 cannot be a collection of Democratic Party agenda items. It must articulate a broad new conception of the nation’s political order — one that will guide the way a future Democratic-led government might wield power. Above all, Democrats must have a plan for reconstruction — for building something new on the wreckage of what President Trump, MAGA and the Republican Party have wrought — not restoration of what was.”

Here is a gift link to Bouie’s article. Give it a read:

NYT Bouie America Broke Something

I fully agree with Bouie’s column, but I would go further and deeper. To my mind, even “reconstruction” is a dangerous, backward looking term. It is the wrong frame of mind. We should be talking about a revolution. A “political revolution” as Bernie Sanders has called it. I would also apply Bouie’s ideas at the personal level and suggest that they help to define the conditions for effective political engagement by individuals.

National Security Technocrats Are Not the Answer

Here is where I part ways with many of my former colleagues in The Blob.

I am a member - though an inactive one - in a couple of networks of former national security officials which engage very actively in public debates and even partisan political contests. There are a few other, similar networks out there that I am aware of. To their credit, they frame their political engagement very much in terms of reconstruction and renewal. The networks wear their (purportedly) non-partisan character on their sleeves, proudly, asserting that their record of public service under both Democrats and Republicans bolsters their claim to a special role in saving and restoring our Republic.

I think this is admirable in a way. These are networks of good citizens, with a strong sense of civic responsibility. These people show up. But their appeals and their claims have always made me uncomfortable. They do not embrace an ideology, they have no unifying vision of the fundamental shortcomings of the American state and what is needed to overcome them. They are united, instead, by devotion to the constitution and its governing institutions. To restoration (even though they protest otherwise). They take a managerial approach to politics and government.

This is one reason I don’t really engage with these groups (the other being that I doubt their effectiveness). Don’t get me wrong - I value experience and expertise and believe they should inform our politics and policy. And I share with these non-partisan crusaders their outrage at the behavior of the Trump Regime. Many of them are my former colleagues and friends (in some cases former friends). But I am much more inclined than they are to trace our present crisis to long-term, systemic rot under both parties. And also to our economic system; especially to our neoliberal system, which is increasingly characterized by primitive accumulation. I am inclined to regard the whole paradigm for ex-Blob public engagement - as exemplary former non-partisan civil servants and guardians of our republic - as a delusion, as a kind of technocratic gambit.

The groups of foreign and security affairs veterans that I know would deny that they believe in technocratic rule. But they - we - can’t really escape our own past, and they don’t even want to do so. They embrace it. It is the foundation of their claim to an enlarged role in our national debate. At a time of blatant corruption and mind-boggling incompetence, technocratic rule undeniably has a certain appeal, potentially broader than it ordinarily would. And - if we’re being honest with ourselves - I think American national security officials have always been attracted to the notion that technocrats should be in charge in the United States and other countries. In other words, that “people like us” should have more authority to manage affairs.

I don’t think “new management” is what America needs. Technocrats are not the answer. America needs a new system. Our current system is not just morally bankrupt and facing insolvency; it is terribly destructive both at home and abroad. The constitution is part of the problem, but the roots of our grinding self-destruction go much deeper.

Ideology and the Two-Party System

To be honest, the majority of these self-proclaimed non-partisan national security veterans side openly with the Democrats these days, and for obvious reasons. What choice do they have? Trump and his Regime-in-Becoming are a mess, an outrage. A large swath of Democrats, including the core Democratic Party establishment, are institutionalists. They value the form of government as much as the substance, and believe playing by the rules is the essence of good governance. They have a managerial approach to politics, and this appeals to folks like us. Folks from the foreign and security policy establishment. In other words, The Blob.

I also vote for Democrats. In the American two-party system, there is really little alternative for anyone who cares about policy and our national life. I am happy to see national security alums get elected on the Democratic ticket. (I have real problems, though, with the security state alums who are being elected with the GOP. More on this in an upcoming article.) Still, I am not sure I have more in common with these foreign and security policy engagement networks than that - my voting pattern.

The thing is, I have an ideology - I am a leftist. Even though I was scrupulous in serving faithfully both Democratic and Republican administrations as an American diplomat, I never stopped being a leftist. Not a communist, for heaven’s sake - that is a political identity that became too closely associated with Leninist parties and authoritarian regimes over the course of the 20th Century for me to support. I lived in East Germany; how could I possibly be a communist? For Americans, communism - 35 years after the end of the Cold War - is still the “great satan.” But I am a kind of socialist, a person whose views on socio-political and economic developments have been shaped by Karl Marx and the rich tradition of philosophy, historical analysis, and policy ideas that grew up around Marxist thought. In other words, I embrace the “small satan” in American political parlance: socialism. I am particularly attracted by world systems theory and, as I have lately come to realize, Antonio Gramsci.

Some of my former colleagues have expressed surprise bordering on astonishment that I have such an ideology, and that I held it while serving in the Foreign Service. They could not detect it in my work. That is a good thing. And they suspect - correctly - that my ideological viewpoint has sharpened since I retired in 2015. My circumstances have changed, the world has changed, and I have changed.

Even though I did not flaunt my ideology as a diplomat, it has never stood in contradiction to my loyalty as an American, either during my Foreign Service career or today. I think the American system is profoundly flawed, and that fundamental change is needed to better protect and advance the interests of the American people. The Trump Regime is trying to silence alternative ideologies and impose individual political and ideological “fidelity” on the Foreign Service and other groups. This is an ideological assault from the right. I believe we all should resist it, and our prospects in this struggle will be much better if we have - as groups and individuals - a clear ideological basis.

I do not regret that I served both Democratic and Republican administrations loyally and to the best of my ability. It was a condition for my employment, not something to boast about or be particularly proud of. During my time as a diplomat, it was sometimes complicated or awkward but never all that difficult. I always had in mind a set of tripwires that would cause me to resign from the Foreign Service if sprung. When colleagues went off to work at our diplomatic posts in Iraq during the U.S. occupation of that country, either out of a sense of duty or curiosity or ambition or simply succumbing to the pressure of our HR system, I just scratched my head. Iraq was a tripwire for me. I would not go, even if ordered to do so. I managed to avoid it, and when it loomed large at one point, I temporarily left the Foreign Service.

Those tripwires were tied to my personal integrity and ethics - which in turn are tied to my ideology more than the words of the U.S. constitution. I always upheld the constitution, but what does that even mean? Constitutional issues rarely landed in my inbox. The constitution is a flawed document, and hardly a guide to personal ethics and behavior. Ideology is both broader and deeper. For some that ideology is religion. For me, it is leftist social and political thought. It is there that I find my sense of right and wrong, my sense of ethics. My sense of justice. The rules tell us to serve. My ideology tells me to think.

The Managerial Class

It is the devotion to the constitution and non-partisan service that, to me, renders the networks of former national foreign and security policy officers so ineffectual. They can claim some electoral success, though their distinct contribution - apart from the usual mechanisms of writing checks and knocking on doors - is debatable. Governor Spanberger in Virginia is their most prominent success story and their hero. But they are, as a group, unfit for the role of rebuilding America. They are devoted to form. If they have an ideology, it is liberalism, a relic of the past that has, in recent decades, provided an ideational framework for neoliberal economics. Rather than deal with the messiness of that ideology, they prefer to speak of patriotism. I believe their intentions are noble in that regard, but patriotism is a shape-shifting chimera. It defines nothing.

What unites them is experience in the national security state that the United States built over the past 30 years. The individual participants bring their own distinct experience, point of view and even ideology to the mix. But the foundation of their engagement is what they have in common. And what they have in common is the national security state. Uniting under this banner, they do not eschew the national security outlook or label; they embrace it. They are mainly managers, institutionalists. They market themselves as exemplary national security officials, unswerving in their patriotism and loyalty to the constitution.

This bothers me. It is a point of failure for foreign and security policy veterans as a sort of vanguard of national renewal. We all share - myself included - the imprint of, and even some responsibility for, America’s disastrous foreign policy over the past three decades and the metastasis of our national security state. The definition of national security that we imbibed over many years is an albatross around our necks.

Patriotism is the Last Refuge of a Scoundrel

As Samuel Johnson said, “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” He was inveighing against imperialism and slavery, not just the cynical manipulation of nationalist feeling to evade responsibility for misdeeds and corruption. Like Samuel Johnson, my concerns about the centering of patriotism as an organizing principle are moral. They focus on imperialism and oppression - American imperialism and oppression.

It is crucial, in my view, that those entrusted with authority have a firm, personal ideological or moral foundation - especially those in the national security field, including the American security state. But that ideology is exactly what we DO NOT have in common. It does not exist in the constitution and cannot be reduced to patriotism. They surely do not need to hold my leftist ideology, but they should have core principles in some form that underpin and focus a perspective on social and economic relations and “values.” It should be systemic and conscious. It should be an ideology.

The very concept of the managerial approach, non-partisan loyalty to the constitution and unwavering patriotism and faithful obedience to legitimate leaders, is the negation of all that. It stands in great tension to ideology and individual conscience. It is the wrong banner for effective and meaningful engagement toward a different future. It is the very embodiment of restoration.

Oliver Kornetzke, in his outstanding Substack, has written an incisive takedown of the Democratic Party elite based on class allegiance and dependence on donors. I highly recommend it and share most of Kornetzke’s judgments (though I lack some of his impressive blue-collar credentials):

Kornetzke All Performance

I believe that most of what Kornetzke says about the Democratic Party elite applies to the networks of ex-Blob types who have organized to support, by and large, the Democratic Party in opposition to the Trump Regime. But foreign and security policy veterans have a special responsibility, a kind of collective guilt in my opinion. We were part of the problem. We had roles - large or small, central or peripheral - in the unfolding of a colossal, long-term national failure. And unless we change our outlook, we will remain part of the problem, not part of the solution.

One can argue, of course, that we were just taking direction. We were just following orders - legitimate, legal orders. And that it wasn’t about ideology, really, just the law and the constitution. But were we really so powerless? The disavowal or compartmentalization of ideology and partisanship does not actually mean the absence of ideology or partisanship. It means the instrumentalization of the individual in the service of some ideological or partisan purpose. Are we really ok with that?

Loyalty is a limited and very conditional virtue. It depends crucially on the object of ones devotion, of the program in which ones loyalty is engaged. Morality should never be “above my pay grade”. I will write more about that in another article in the next week or two. For now, each of us should be responsible not only for obeying lawful orders and rejecting illegal ones, but for understanding and even foreseeing the moral consequences of the actions we take. We should not elevate loyalty - to an individual, an institution, or the constitution - to a more exalted place than it deserves.

Foreign and security policy alums have as much right as anyone to a voice in our national debate and a role in our national life. This is (still) a free country. But ask yourselves: Having followed orders with discipline, fired by a sense of patriotism and national purpose, have we really demonstrated a capacity for leadership? Especially now, as our country is in crisis. Is our shared experience a source of ideas for a new era in American life? Have we shown that we have what it takes to guide America on a new path - or even see where it might lead? Are we and our former colleagues really the best candidates, the ones who deserve support for elective office?

They are like us; isn’t that a problem?