Okay, only by a generous stretch of the imagination (mine) is the Washington Post “on the right”, but in fact the Post’s editorial page has been aggressively “neocon”, bordering on Likudist at times, what with George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Cohen, Jennifer Rubin, Anne Applebaum and Fred Hiatt ramping up the room in favor of “firmness” on all fronts when it comes to getting Uncle Sam in hot water abroad. Not that they want a shooting war, mind you. But the constant threat of one, well, it helps keep people on their toes!
But recently the Washington Post lockstep has fallen into complete disarray, thanks, very largely to the massively distorting effect of Donald Trump’s ego on the Beltway Equilibrium. George Will, though he loved looking down his nose at Barack Obama’s “flaccid” foreign policy, was never all that enamored with that “firmness” thing, which rather took George away from his favorite occupation, looking in the mirror and admiring the sweep and charm of his own intellect. Georgie, having had the courage to officially leave the Republican Party, now finds himself forming a party of one.
But the real split has occurred between Charles Krauthammer on the one side and Fred Hiatt and Jennifer Rubin on the other. Charlie has been hatin’ on the Democrats for so long that, even though he can’t stand Donald, he can’t stand Hillary either. Fred Hiatt, on the other hand, is an unabashed Hillary fancier, while Jennie at this point could best be described as “anti-Republican” for the way she seems set on whacking just about any GOPer who dares to show his head.
It’s (very) hard to imagine what form the Republican Party will take post-election. But it’s (very) easy to believe that, whatever shape it does take, it will be less able to pressure Hillary to be “firm” abroad. Now, if that will only lessen her own appetite for “firmness” by one percent, well, that’s a plus.
Afterwords
In the course of disagreeing with Adam Walinsky over who was worse, Donald or Hillary, I had this to say:
What follows in Mr. Walinsky’s article is a depressingly accurate account of Hillary Clinton’s Putin-phobia, her school-girl earnest conviction that Mr. Putin “needs to be taught a lesson.” Mrs. Clinton, with all her vaunted knowledge of foreign affairs—and she surely knows literally a hundred times as much as Donald Trump does—is entirely incapable of looking in the mirror and realizing that Mr. Putin is equally convinced that she needs to be taught a lesson. Hillary, like the rest of the foreign policy establishment in DC, clings to what can be labeled “bourgeois rationalism”—the notion that if you credibly threaten someone with death they will give in, because life itself is the greatest good. But dictators like power more than they like life, as both Saddam Hussein and Muammar Mohammed Abu Minyar Gaddafi recently demonstrated, not that Mrs. Clinton bothered to notice. And I suspect that Mr. Putin feels the same way. If they can’t be feared, they’d rather be dead.
