Yeah, I got Daniel Drezner—“Obfuscatin’ Dan”, I like to call him—on my mind, on my mind. I got Daniel Drezner on my mind. Again! I just got finished praising ole Obfuscatin’ Dan to the skies in a recent post for his recent post at Reason, “There Is No China Crisis”, calling it “absolute gold”. As Dan’s full head put it “There is no China crisis Unless we cause one by overreacting to Asia's changing political and economic landscape”. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor and do so.
But that was so last month. Now Dan has new column up, at his more frequent, and higher end, stamping ground, the Washington Post, to wit: “The Blob Abides—When a term obfuscates more than it enlightens”—“the Blob” being former Obama advisor Ben “Look How Smart I Am” Rhodes’ smirky coinage for the foreign policy establishment. Dan’s new piece has more ricochets than a three-carom billiard shot, bouncing off a piece in Foreign Affairs, “In Defense of the Blob”, by Hal Brands, Peter Feaver, and William Inboden, Blobbers all, who intoned, in Its Amorphousness’s1 defense,
In reality, the United States actually has a healthy marketplace of foreign policy ideas. Discussion over American foreign policy is loud, contentious, diverse, and generally pragmatic — and as a result, the nation gets the opportunity to learn from its mistakes, build on its successes, and improve its performance over time.
Well, that didn’t sit well with the American Conservative’s Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, who snaps back with “The Blob Attacks: Gaslighting or Just Gasbagging?”, a post that bears the snarky subhead “After a 75-year-run of failure, the foreign policy elite is on the wane, with some clearly taking it harder than others.”
Vlahos takes vociferous objection to the notion that the U.S. has a “healthy marketplace of foreign policy ideas,” arguing in particular that the U.S. most definitely hasn’t had the “opportunity to learn from its mistakes, build on its successes, and improve its performance over time, due to “the Blob”. And she’s even more irritated by Hal, Pete, and Bill’s suggestion that non-Blobbers are all “amateurs”. There are some new experts in town, says Kelley, who deserve to have a place at the table, a big place, but they’re being excluded because they don’t walk the walk and talk the talk: “Andrew Bacevich, Stephen Walt, Doug Macgregor, Chris Preble, Mike Desch, are hardly lightweights, but to the Borg,2 they are antibodies, therefore amateurs.”
Uh-oh, sniggers Dan in retort. Sorry, girl, but you blew it. All those dudes “are part of the Blob as it is currently defined. None of these thinkers are on the margins of foreign policy discourse, except perhaps in their own mental construct. Indeed, some of them run the very conference panels and academic journals that Vlahos claims are a restricted shop.”
Furthermore, Dan continues—dusting off one his favorite tropes, to which I’ve loudly objected in the past—the “real” problem with these non-Blobbers is that they’ve got their man in the White House—Cap’n Two Scoops—and he’s not giving them every little thing their hearts desire. ’Twas ever thus, sighs Dan, more in schadenfreude than empathy:
One problem that Blob opponents have is that for the first time since the days of Calvin Coolidge, the man occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue articulates ideas that reject the liberal internationalism they dislike. He does so in such a ham-handed, immature, destructive manner, however, that he’s moved the American people to feel more empathetic toward those ideas.
If that is intellectually frustrating to arch-realists, I suggest that they grow the hell up. I am old enough to remember that no president perfectly encapsulates a particular foreign policy philosophy. Neoconservatives grew exasperated with both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush; liberal internationalists became frustrated with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. This is how life in the big city works.
I was thrice ticked by what Dan wrote, first by the suggestion that anyone opposed to the amoral, bloody incompetence of American foreign policy over the past thirty years (aka “American Exceptionalism”) must be a Trump supporter (Vlahos is; I’m not),3 secondly by the notion that once any claque or clique gets “their guy” in the White House they are precluded from offering any complaints, and thirdly by the idea that “real” realists (like me), rather than blood and soil types like Kelley, who object, well, intelligently to the tapestry of disasters woven by the ruling military intellectual complex over the past few decades have any significant voice in the current marketplace of ideas here in the U.S.A.
Well, while these and other febrile thoughts on the matter were percolatin’ n’ fulminatin’ in my fevered skull, the Blob was acting. The quintessentially Blobby New York Times published a timely piece, “Can the Democrats Avoid Trump’s China Trap?”, by Rachel Esplin Odell and Stephen Wertheim, neither named in Kelley’s list of straight-shooters, but both employed by the newly minted anti-Blob think tank, the “Quincy Institute”, which has some promising papers up for view. The piece itself was excellent, in fact making many of oh so sound points that Dan made in his China piece for Reason.
But these are, sadly, exceptions. The range of “respectable opinion” in both the “liberal” Times and Post, or “centrist” Bloomberg, not to mention the, well, “insane” Wall Street Journal, remains pathetically thin. Where, for example, is a regular voice in any of these venues4 arguing that the U. S. should spend significantly less on defense than it currently does? As I (again) have frequently complained, our defense spending was grotesquely bloated before Trump took office. In my most recent lament, I highlighted such disasters as the “Zumwalt-class” destroyer fiasco—which promised 32 super destroyers for $46 billion and ended up delivering 3 floating pork barrels for $22 billion that serve no military purpose whatsoever—along with the “flawed” F-35 super fighter, with a total budget of $1.5 trillion, which, after almost 20 years, has nothing to show for it other than a handful of seriously buggy aircraft.
I relied largely on the “conservative” National Review for the information for both stories. (The American Conservative has a lot more on the F-35.) Neither the Post nor the Times has ever run a story on the Zumwalt disaster. Back in 2014, the Times warned that the $400 billion F-35 program really needed to improve. Since then, obviously, the Times just hasn’t been keeping up with the times. The Post, for its part, has extensive coverage of cost issues, but doesn’t touch the argument made by the experts cited in my article, that the F-35 is a bad plane, so weighed with “advanced technology” that doesn’t work that it is easily outperformed by planes 20 years its senior.5
Outrageous as the neglect of any “realist” discussion of defense issues is, there are even greater omissions. To my mind, the biggest and most self-serving myth of all embedded in the conventional wisdom by the Blob is American Exceptionalism, the notion that we are both more powerful and wiser than any other nation, and thus have a moral duty to share that wisdom with others, even if we have to kill them to do so. This leads immediately to the stunningly convenient assumption/conclusion that the U.S. always acts out of altruism. We may fail to achieve our goals, but those goals are always unselfish and laudatory.
In fact, the opposite is true. To the contrary, the U.S. often has acted in a brutal, selfish, and, yes, “Machiavellian” manner, harassing and even invading countries for economic profit and even for sheer, and mere, domestic political gain.
When George H. W. Bush died, the establishment media joined in an outpouring of establishment kitsch over “the last patrician”. Few remembered how Bush invaded Panama to “arrest” Manuel Noriega, killing hundreds of civilians in the process. Sure, Noriega was a “bad guy”, but his body count was well below that of many of the useful thugs the U. S. has kept in power for decades. Bush did it to “prove” to Americans that kicking ass can be fun, and to remind them that the Republican Party is the party with balls.
Bush’s invasion of Iraq, aka “Gulf I”, which really put the U. S. in the invasion business, was even more grossly flawed, if you care about, you know, “morality”, not to mention unintended consequences, like the waste of trillions of dollars and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. I, at least, wrote about this episode in my “obituary” for Bush, and I’ll quote liberally from it:
Bush’s biggest crime, of course, was “Operation Desert Storm”. Bush deliberately introduced foreign military intervention as a device for creating public support for a triumphalist, flag-waving “American” (read “Republican”) foreign policy that in fact ran directly counter to America’s real foreign policy interests. Before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Bush had practiced a ruthlessly “realpolitik” approach to advancing U.S. interests in the Middle East. On March 16, 1988, Saddam launched the worst chemical weapons attack in modern history, slaughtering up to 5,000 helpless Kurdish citizens of his own country in the town of Halabja in a five-hour assault involving a dozen bombers. Shortly thereafter, April Glaspie, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, met with Saddam, assuring him that the U.S. desired a “deeper, broader” relationship with Iraq and deliberately assured him that the U.S. would not object if Iraq sought a “revision” (my word) of its boundaries with Kuwait, as long as at least a remnant of Kuwait remained. It’s only when Saddam made clear his intention to consume the whole that Bush acted.
When Bush did act, he acted with consummate hypocrisy, denouncing Saddam as “the worst since Hitler” and urging oppressed minorities within Iraq to rebel against him, even while planning to keep Saddam in power after he was forced to retreat from Kuwait. In the aftermath, U.S. forces “stood down” while Saddam massacred thousands of brave men and women who made the mistake of taking the word of the president of the United States.6
Bush and his lieutenants lied endlessly to cover up this ugly record, pretending that they “really” intended to drive Saddam from power, and, once the tonic of our glorious victory wore off, invented the myth of “weapons of mass destruction” to justify the reinvention of a battered, beaten, impotent Saddam Hussein as an existential threat to world peace against which the U.S. (aka the Republican Party) provided the only possible defense. The dominant interventionist wing of the Democratic Party bought into this myth and largely based U.S. policy upon it, keeping the myth alive for eight long years before 9-11 gave George W. Bush the excuse to revisit Iraq, resulting in the massive disaster from which we have yet to recover. The unwillingness of the U.S. establishment to admit how utterly groundless and self-serving our obsession with Saddam Hussein has been, and how disastrous, is a major cause of the worldwide malaise that continues to consume both the United States and a great portion of the rest of the world.
You won’t read this kind of argument in the establishment press. You won't read that chemical and biological weapons, though cruel and repulsive in the extreme, aren't "weapons of mass destruction." With or without them, Saddam was no threat to the U.S. And today, North Korea, with nuclear weapons, real weapons of mass destruction, is no threat to the U.S., a "danger" that no one seems to worry about unless there's nothing else to worry about.
And you won’t read investigations of the most “shocking” suggestion of all, that 9/11 was “blow back” from the massive U.S. presence in the Middle East following the first U.S. invasion of Iraq, daringly voiced by Ron Paul in the 2008 Republican primary and never heard since, even though, as Christian Alfonsi clearly established in his essential study, Circle in the Sand (2006), the American embassy in Saudi Arabia repeatedly warned both Bush administrations and the Clinton administration that the presence of “infidel” (U.S.) troops in Saudi territory was regarded as intolerable by a variety of extremist groups. By insisting on taking sides in the Middle East—casting America’s lot as the military arm of the House of Saud, in effect—we were setting ourselves up for disaster. And when disaster came, both the American Right and the American Center insisted on doubling down on disaster, and then doubling down again.
For however much Ben Rhodes enjoys presenting himself and his man Obama as opponents of the Blob, Obama was 90 percent its prisoner, stupidly signing off in particular on the disastrous invasion of Libya, whose disastrous outcome was the greatest single factor in the defeat of the unimpressive Hillary Clinton and the rise of the repulsive Donald Trump. Obama came into office talking about eliminating nuclear weapons. He left approving a trillion-dollar update of our gigantic nuclear arsenal.
One can believe in the liberal international order, now on double life support these days, and believe that regime change, pursued by Democrats and Republicans alike and being pursued today by President Trump in both Iran and Venezuela,7 is its very opposite, and that the brutal sanctions employed against Iraq and Iran and other nations ever since the end of the Cold War inflict grievous suffering on millions of innocent people merely for partisan political advantage—“look how tough we are!” And I wonder why Dan Drezner insists on sneering at people who feel this way, when, at least when it comes to China, he seems to feel this way himself.
Afterwords
The most articulate critic of “the Blob” is the American Conservative’s Daniel Larison. If and when Dan Drezner decides it’s time to trade obfuscation for clarity, he should read Dan Larison.
1. “Amorphousness” is a word, says Word! Did not see that coming!
2. Aka “the Blob”; Kelley was so pumped she mixed up her pop culture references in mid-peroration. Good-bye Steve McQueen, hello Patrick Stewart!
3. Kelley’s rethinking her devotion to the Big Guy in this piece, thanks to an article in the, yes, New York Times demonstrating how the Trump Administration frustrated Congress’s desire to end sales of U.S. weapons to Saudi Arabia to use in its continuing bloody oppression of Yemen. Says a sadder but wiser Kelley, “you cannot “end wars” if your chief constituency is a war making machine.” Well said!
4. Since I can’t stand TV “journalism”, which I regard as largely an adjunct to show business, I can’t say what is available on the tube, but I doubt if CNN goes much beyond the Times and the Post.
5. Not only is the F-35 slow, bulky, and unmaneuverable, its long-distance target detection technology allows other planes to detect it. And another problem has just revealed itself: at high speeds, the plane’s tail catches fire. The Air Force’s “solution”? Slow down!
6. For more on Bush's hypocrisy in justifying his "crusade" in Iraq, see my review of Jon Meacham's biography of Aitch Dubya.
7. It is to Trump’s “credit” that he only believes in “easy” regime change. So far, he has limited himself to huffing and puffing—huffing and puffing and brutal sanctions that have caused untold human suffering—rather than military invasion.
