Argentina’s authoritarian hyper-“libertarian” President Javier Milei has a crpytocurrency scandal swirling around his head:
Javier Milei’s aura has lost its shine. A post on X, the platform where the Argentine president wages his “cultural battle” and feels most comfortable, was enough to spark a political crisis, the worst in 14 months of the populist’s far-right government. Last Friday, Milei recommended investing in $Libra, a new cryptocurrency that he presented as part of a project to finance small entrepreneurs. $Libra shot up in minutes to reach a global value of $4 billion. While everything appeared like great business, the scam was consummated. Those few who had bought seconds before Milei’s post at a bargain price fled with their profits and left a trail of victims. Milei then deleted his message, arguing that he had not “informed” himself enough about the matter. Pandora’s box was then opened.
The $Libra scandal is growing and its political consequences are difficult to predict. The impeachment motion has little chance of success, because the Kirchnerist opposition will hardly get the two-thirds of the votes it needs to push it through. But the crisis has opened deep fissures in the heart of the government and the heterogeneous block that its political allies make up. (1)
The BBC has a brief video report on the scandal: (2)
Yanis Varoufalkis also has a comment on the scandal and an economically literate description of cryptocurrency (English with Spanish subtitles), whose “embed” function doesn’t seem to work on Substack. (3)
Cryptocurrency has proven its practical uses for black-market transactions and for pump-and-dump investment scams. Maybe someday someone will come up with some other practical, non-criminal use for it. (4)
But US President Musk is a fan of Milei. In fact, they just appeared on stage together:
Billionaire Elon Musk began his appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference brandishing a chainsaw that was gifted to him by Argentine President Javier Milei. The chainsaw was used by the Argentine leader during campaign to symbolize his proposals to shred the bloated state. Milei came on stage to pass the power tool on to Musk. (5)
And, yes, there is a Texas Chainsaw Massacre vibe this whole thing with Milei and Musk. Milei’s nickname is El Loco.
According the Argentine government statistics, Milei’s libertarian miracle economics succeeded in raising Argentina’s poverty rate to 53% at one point last year. (6)
(3) Daily Motion/Página/12 (2025): Una estafa, un crimen político": Varoufakis explicó el caso $LIBRA y apuntó a Milei 19.02.2025. "<https://dai.ly/x9epcl6> (Accessed: 2024-21-02).
We could be making a quantum leap into a new stage of Using Analogies Badly To Create Disastrous Foreign Policy Decisions.
Step 1: Take an airhead version of the Munich Analogy: Any concession whatsoever to any potentially aggressive country inevitably leads to world war!
Step 2: Remember “Yalta” (1) in the McCarthyist chronic-warmonger version: Commie-loving Democrat liberals are giving away Europe to the Rooskies!
Step 3: Pick some country and start bombing it: Canada, Panama, Denmark, wherever.
See how easy that is?
Of course, it will require some finessing to make the Yalta one work because the hardcore warmongers are currently split between Trumpista isolationist America Firsters and neocons who think Trump is the Chamberlain-appeaser of the moment.
Of course, when Trump’s (apparent) attempt to make some Grand Bargain with Russia to oppose China falls apart due to his Administration’s own diplomatic and negotiating incompetence, then the Yalta one will have to be dropped or repurposed.
Shrub Bush gave us a neocon version of the Munich-Yalta-Hitler Analogy in 2005: "The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable." (2)
Here’s a more reality-based discussion of the shift in US-Russia relations that has analogies falling sloppily all over the place: (3)
Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who generally takes a hardnosed look at what is happening in the world, recently described his current view this way:
When Donald Trump won the US presidential election last November, European elites apparently thought that the United States would become a little more isolationist, a bit more nationalist. But otherwise, continuity would prevail. Trump would demand that Europe pay more for its defense, but NATO – and the all-important US security guarantee for Europe – would survive.
Today, following senior US officials’ flurry of appearances at major European summits, we know that this was a grand error. Trump wants nothing less than a complete rupture with the rules and alliances that generations of US policymakers painstakingly and successfully built in the decades after World War II. From now on, Russia, not the European Union, will be America’s close partner. It is no longer the solidarity of democracies that counts in Washington, but the agreement of autocratic rulers of global powers; might once again prevails over law. …
[T]his is what Trump’s vision of international order looks like: back to spheres of influence, with great powers dictating the fates of smaller countries. It is a vision that delights Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, because it aligns perfectly with their authoritarianism and neoimperial ambitions. [my emphasis] (4)
It’s always worth being cautious about equating internal regime types with foreign policy behavior. Russia and China are big powers momentarily closely aligned with each other. But the nature of their internal regimes are different. And as important as internal influences may be on foreign policy, the nature of the regime (democratic, electoral autocracy, dictatorship, etc.) does not dictate that similar regimes will follow near-identical approaches to foreign policy.
We’re already seeing some substantive responses to Trump’s negotiations with Russia over Ukraine. The reports below give some perspective on the various challenges that a peace deal will face. Whether Trump is capable of delivering anything more substantive than a chance for him to brag for a few days after an agreement about what a Peace President he is, remains to be seen.
One of the participants in the following discussion is the Director of Chatham House, Brownen Maddox. (1) Matt Frei of Channel 4 News says in the segment:
"I think what we know what Trump wants at the end of this, which is the Nobel Peace Prize. I think he does actually want that. And he wants to be able to go down in history as the guy who forged some kind of peace. But we also know from the way that he conducted talks with Kim Jong-un of North Korea the first time he was in power, he's great at the photo op. And then the follow-up, not so much."
To which Maddox adds, "I think that's right. The best joke in this Munich Security Conference at the weekend - not full of jokes - was from Radik Sikorski, the Polish [Foreign] Minister [and Anne Applebaum's husband] saying, 'We Europeans do control the Nobel Peace Prize'."
This Deutsche Welle segment has various panelists discussing some of practical questions for a settlement, particularly the idea of European peacekeeping troops. (2) In theory, anything is possible. But if Russia insists on keeping Ukraine out of NATO, why would they agree to peacekeepers from NATO countries where they would be closely cooperating militarily with Ukrainian forces on the ground in Ukraine?
Trigger warning!! Includes a positive discussion about the need for Germany to rapidly build up its military capacity. (If that doesn’t make your stomach a bit queasy, maybe you should read up a bit on 20th century European history.)
Nicole Frölich in this Deutsche Welle report discusses Trump’s recently expressed notion of how Ukraine started the war. (3) It includes a Ukrainian advocate who provides a reminder that Ukraine does have a role to play that neither Trump nor Putin controls:
Timothy Snyder seems to think there is no reasonable alternative for the Western powers other than backing Ukraine to continue the current war indefinitely. (4) But he’s very knowledgeable on Ukraine and he’s followed the events of the war closely, so he’s definitely worth hearing.
This one was nails on the blackboard to me. (Is that metaphor still comprehensive these days?) It’s Morning Joe in neocon/resistance-liberal Russia-Russia-Russia mode. (5) Joe does a riff on the theme that every treaty the US has ever made with the Soviet Union or Russia was a mistake and how the moment we make a peace agreement over Ukraine Russia will seize Poland. He’s been sniffing the Munich Analogy glue again, I’m afraid.
(3) 'You should've never started it' Trump lashes out at Zelenskyy in Ukraine remarks. DW News YouTube channel 02/19/2025. <https://youtu.be/iBFDAQ9zTPU?si=j9h8157KgPgJDP1N> (Accessed: 2025-19-02).
(4) 'It's morally disgusting': Trump torched for saying Ukraine 'should have never started' Putin's war. MSNBC YouTube channel 02/19/2025. <https://youtu.be/oB8wLbXfHNo?si=9X7E_yk-EP5jHpnP> (Accessed: 2025-19-02).
(5) 'Factually wrong and insulting': David Ignatius slams Trump's remarks about Ukraine. MSNBC YouTube channel 02/19/2025. <https://youtu.be/quWP_G2y5TI?si=MFqZppCwTZKOFbxk> (Accessed: 2025-19-02).
Trying to make sense of the current reset in US-European relations, I’m struck with the need to remember that a substantive peace-oriented foreign policy requires keeping several sometimes-contradictory considerations in mind at once, with the Russia-Ukraine War being the most prominent example at the moment.
Russia’s seizure of Ukraine’s territory beginning in 2014 and entering a drastic new phase in 2022 was and is a violation of international law and of Ukraine’s sovereignty – and realize at the same time that Russia has legitimate security concerns around Ukraine’s alignment with NATO.
Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan Revolution was a legitimate popular protest and a reflection of democratic impulses, while still recognizing that both the US and Russia had external concerns and both powers tried to influence the outcome of that event in Ukrainian internal politics – and still wonder whether it was a good idea for US government to display their sympathy for the regime change in the way the Obama Administration did. (1)
We can think that US efforts to encourage the development of civil society in other countries are legitimate and still think that Victoria Nuland is an incorrigible neocon who should be kept as far away from US foreign policy functions as possible. (2)
We can regard Vladimir Putin as a rightwing authoritarian (which he is) and his regime as an oligarchical autocracy (which it is) while recognizing it is also a militarily powerful country that has definite ideas about Russia’s national security, some of which are pretty much like those of every other major country.
European countries can see rational power-political reasons to keep the war in Ukraine going while also calculating that their own quickly-shifting security considerations mean that they can’t afford anything like the level of support they and the US together have been providing Ukraine since 2022. (Whether those reasons are legitimate or advisable is another question.)
European nations can have legitimate, practical defensive grounds to build up their military strength but can also nevertheless use larger militaries to do very dubious things, like backing questionable French military operations in Africa.
We can recognize that the Trump-Musk Administration may be talking (or momentarily talking) a more pragmatic view of Ukraine’s military prospects than we saw with Biden’s forever-war approach, and still expect that Trump’s chaotic decision-making may produce a gigantic mess in the process of negotiating with Russia.
Russia has a long record of taking a hard-headed approach to negotiations. Trump has a reputation for seeing negotiations as a zero-sum game, where one side wins and the other loses. When we look at things like his scatter-brained approach to the Gaza/Middle East situation or he and his hard-drinking Secretary of Defense giving the huge concession to Russia that they can keep conquered territory right up front and making a show of kicking the European allies to the curb in the process – well, the big thing is not how we look at it but whether Putin and his government will see this as a strong and serious approach to negotiations.
CNN’s Stephen Collinson puts it this way:
[M]ixed messages from the administration will fuel concerns that Trump will agree to a deal with Putin that validates the illegal invasion and will then impose it on Ukraine. While most foreign policy realists accept that Ukraine will not get back all the land seized by Russia, Trump was criticized for throwing away leverage with his call with the Russian leader. As was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who said that a peace deal would not include a path to NATO membership for Ukraine and that no US peacekeeping troops would be involved. Some of those statements were later watered down by Hegseth and other administration officials.
Concerns were exacerbated by Trump’s warp-speed attempt last week to fully rehabilitate Putin, an accused war criminal, when he promoted Russia’s foreign policy positions rather than the West’s. The president, for instance, seemed to sympathize with Putin’s rationales for the invasion and called for his return to the G8 grouping of industrialized nations after Russia was kicked out over the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Trump’s rejection of the previous administration’s lockstep coordination with Europe over Ukraine and the absence of Kyiv’s negotiators from the Saudi talks also appeared to seriously weaken the Western negotiating position. European officials are likely to be far more sympathetic to Ukraine’s views than Trump — and so if they are absent from any full-scale negotiations, Zelensky’s position could be severely diminished.
A searing attack on European democracy by Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security conference — and his decision to meet the leader of the far-right anti-immigrant AfD party just days before the German election — meanwhile shook European leaders. The speech was a clear sign the Trump administration intends to promote many of the populist movements that are evoking dark echoes on a continent twice destroyed by war in the 20th century. [Several of which are admirers of Orbán’s and Putin’s authoritarian styles of governance] And Hegseth’s blunt warning in Brussels last week that Europeans needed to “take ownership of conventional security on the continent” was widely seen as a sign of Trump’s antipathy for NATO and its security umbrella.
All of this is music to Putin’s ears, since it suggests that his status as an international pariah is over, and that he has a deal within reach over Ukraine that would cement his territorial gains. The divisions Trump has opened inside NATO is delivering on one of Russia’s most important foreign policy goals. [my emphasis] (3)
Deutsche Welle English has this current report: (4)
A commentator at the end of that segment mentions that Russia would be willing to accept Ukraine into the European Union but not into NATO. (5) And it’s true that a Russian government spokesperson has stated that publicly, without any time-frame attached. But this is probably just blowing diplomatic smoke. The EU does not have nearly the kind of military capability that NATO as an alliance has. But the EU Treaty does include a mutual-defense clause, one that on its face is more binding than that of the NATO Treaty. So, accepting Ukraine into the EU while the war is still going on, or even if there were a genuinely stable ceasefire, as long as Russia occupies territory that Ukraine officially regards as its own, EU membership seems a highly unlikely prospect.
The four most powerful European players in the arrangements and ones to watch especially on this process going forward are Britain, France, Germany and Poland.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk seems to be treading carefully in the diplomatic situation of the moment, promoting increases in European defense capabilities, being cautious about sounding playing in to Trump’s provocative rhetoric on NATO defense, and taking a noncommittal stand on the idea of European peacekeepers in Ukraine. (The latter can’t be seriously decided upon before the major contours of the Ukrainian and Russian commitment are clear.)
"We do not plan to send Polish soldiers to the territory of Ukraine. We will ... give logistical and political support to the countries that will possibly want to provide such guarantees in the future, such physical guarantees."
Tusk warned against questioning Europe's alliance with the United States, after a tumultuous week that has left many countries fearing they cannot count on support from Washington and that President Donald Trump will do a Ukraine peace deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin that undermines Kyiv and broader European security.
"Poland will support Ukraine as it has done so far: organisationally, in accordance with our financial capabilities, in terms of humanitarian and military aid," Tusk told reporters before boarding a plane to Paris. (6) [my emphasis]
I hope, someday – probably decades in the future – we can have a major international negotiation over potential war flashpoints without endless and uninformed invocation of “Munich.”
The current round of “Munich” warnings is sprouting around the Trump Administration’s bungling and incompetent approach to negotiations over the Russia-Ukraine War. This summary from the left-leaning British columnist Owen Jones has a worthwhile discussion of this week’s diplomatic development on the Russia-Ukraine War: (1)
That segment was done before the news of the last few days about Trump’s Ukraine negotiations and J.D. Vance’s Opus Dei speech at the Munich Security Conference that was mainly a campaign pitch for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the upcoming German Bundestag election and also for other Orbán-type authoritarian parties in the EU. This week may be remembered as a major marker of a new security environment for western and central Europe.
But Owen makes a good point that Trump with his demand for Ukraine’s “rare earth” minerals is essentially demanding reparations from Ukraine. Although “tribute” would probably be more accurate.
Historian Timothy Snyder in a recent presentation in Vienna noted that wars typically do not end with elaborate peace agreements that restructure conditions to make a more secure world. They more typically end like the Korean War did, with a ceasefire. As he notes, that war is technically still going on, there was never a formal peace settlement. (2)
The gets to the reason that I find it unlikely in the extreme that a scattered character like Donald Trump will ever be able to negotiate complicated agreements – not in Ukraine and not in the Middle East – that set up a lasting structure for a new and less risky future, like the post-1989 negotiations over the end of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union or (arguably) the Yalta and Potsdam Agreements from the Second World War. Anyone expecting that would be well-advised to adopt a version of one of Jerry Brown’s quirky slogans from the 1970s: “Lower your expectations.”
At first glance, the new Trump position on Ukraine seems to be that Russia gets to keep as much of Ukrainian territory as it wants and that there will be no substantive security guarantee by the US or Europe for rump-Ukraine. This new turn is already being hashed over by the foreign policy wonks. But in retrospect, failing some agreement to diffuse the situation before the Russians’ February 2022 invasion, the best moment to negotiate a substantive peace arrangement or ceasefire would have been late 2022, after the Ukrainians had successfully pushed back the initial Russian advance.
But that’s water under the bridge, now.
The Munich Analogy
Unfortunately, Snyder in his comment also gave in to the chronic temptation to invoke the “Munich” analogy to try to clarify the current situation of the Russia- Ukraine War. “The symmetry between Germany-Czechoslovakia in 1938 and Russia-Ukraine in 2022 is uncanny, and pausing for a moment on the resemblances might help us to take a broader view of today.” (3)
We can’t seem to have any major international negotiation or military crisis without being bombarded with often-functionally-illiterate references to “Munich,” i.e., the Munich Agreement of 1938. The Munich Analogy has almost certainly done more damage to the world than any other foreign policy truism.
Snyder explains that while Hitler was preparing for war on Czechoslovakia in 1938, “Britain and France, together with Germany and Italy, decided in Munich on September 30th that Czechoslovakia should cede crucial border territories to Germany.” He then spins a fantasy about how if Britain and France had gone to war then, the Americans would have cheerfully jumped in and together the Western powers would have walloped Hitler without even having to get any help from those nasty Soviets.
But he does add a qualifier: “To be sure, we cannot say in detail what might have been.” This after imaginative alt-history suggestion about how the Western powers could obviously have whupped Germany right then and there.
I wish every who works or aspires to work on anything related to foreign policy, from the diplomatic corps to the press corps and everything in between, would read these two books by longtime Air War College professor Jeffrey Record (4):
Record does not argue that policymakers should ignore historical precedents. On the contrary, his argument is that policymakers need to look carefully and realistically at relevant precedents. But stereotyping can be distorting, and no two similar events are ever entirely comparable. As he put it in a 1998 paper:
Two historical events in particular have influenced US use-of-force decisions since 1945: the infamous Munich Conference of 1938, and the lost American war in Vietnam. The power of these two analogies has been such as to merit the definition “syndrome,” or the political analog to a set of signs and symptoms that together indicate the presence of a disease or abnormal conditions. Decision-makers have regarded Munich and Vietnam as disastrous events whose repetition on any scale is to be avoided at any cost. Indeed, it was the perceived lessons of Munich and its corollary domino theory that perhaps more than any other non-domestic political factor propelled the United States into Vietnam. And it was America’s calamitous experience in Vietnam that in turn continues to exert a no less profound hold on the present generation of American decision-makers. Munich promoted a propensity to use force against what was held to be insatiable aggression by totalitarian states. In contrast, Vietnam has served, within the Congress and Pentagon if not the White House, to discourage and constrain, if not prohibit, non-mandatory uses of force1 in all but the most exceptionally favorable political and operational circumstances. Indeed, some observers have bemoaned what they believe is Vietnam’s endowment of geopolitical timidity. “The legacy of Munich,” wrote [leading neoconservative] Norman Podhoretz in 1982, “had been a disposition, even a great readiness, to resist, by force if necessary, the expansion of totalitarianism; the legacy of Vietnam would obversely be a reluctance, even a refusal, to resist, especially if resistance required the use of force.” [my emphasis] (5)
He summarizes in that paper why the policy of “appeasement” (compromise) by Britain and France in 1938 worked out badly:
Clearly, appeasement of Germany at Munich encouraged Hitler to believe that he could grab even more territory in Europe with little risk of provoking war, just as the Rhineland and Anschluss had encouraged him to believe that he could get away with the Sudetenland. Appeasement also made the terms of war with Germany, when war finally came, much less favorable to the democracies. The military price of stopping Hitler in 1938 was much cheaper than it was even just a year later, when a Nazi Germany now aligned with Stalin’s Russia gobbled up a Poland that neither Britain nor France was in any position to assist militarily, notwithstanding pledges to do so. The price was dwarfed by the cost of the much wider war that followed. By the end of 1940, Hitler had crushed France and had marginalized British military power in Europe. Britain could not even hope to overturn Nazi control of Europe absent the entrance into the war of both the United States and the Soviet Union, a condition fulfilled in 1941 by Hitler’s invasion of Russia in June and utterly gratuitous declaration of war on the United States in December. [my emphasis]
Record argues that a basic problem with the Anglo-British approach to Hitler at that time was that Hitler was committed to war. That was his intention, and the Nazi ideology was fully militarist and imperialist. War was Hitler’s policy, particularly a war of conquest in the east. Record argues that Hitler was not appeasable through substantive compromise, nor was he deterrable.
But the hawkish stereotype of “Munich” is that Hitler and Chamberlain had a testosterone contest at Munich and Chamberlain lost. To borrow a notorious metaphor from a later crisis, they were eyeball to eyeball and Chamberlain blinked. He wimped out. So that convinced Hitler he should go to war.
Far more important was the fact that France had a mutual defense treaty with Czechoslovakia and Britain had one with France. And Chamberlain’s government was committed to going to war together with France if they went to war under the defensive treaty with Czechoslovakia. But their military strategy did not match their political strategy. They were not militarily prepared to wage a defensive war in Czechoslovakia against Germany. Their military strategy concentrated on preparing to stop a German attack in the west.
Implementing a defensive strategy with Czechoslovakia would also have meant cooperating with the Soviet Union in a British-French military action against a German invasion, if they were able to arrange such a deal. But that could have resulted in Soviet control of Czechoslovakia, and Britain and France didn’t want to facilitate anything like that, either.
Because of later polemics between the USSR and Western powers, it has become a bit touchy to mention that Britain and France were very mindful of the possibility that Germany and the Soviet Union would go to war with each other and that both would massively weaken themselves in the process. Everyone involved knew they were playing for high stakes and weren’t inclined to have sentimental scruples against acting on cold-blooded calculations. As was dramatically shown in 1939 with the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact.
There was also a very non-testosterone factor in play. Taking the portion of Czechoslovakia that Hitler did mean the Germans were in control of the massive Skoda arms works there. And it gave a spectacular boost to Germany armaments effort during the following year. This was a huge advantage for Germany, and probably should have been a much stronger consideration in their decision-making.
Threat inflation
A huge problem with over-reliance on the Munich analogy in particular is that it can easily lead to threat inflation. Because not every enemy is Hitler. But from the rhetoric from government officials and commentators, it often seems like the US never fights anyone but “Hitler”. After the Second World War, Stalin was “Hitler”, Ho Chi Minh was “Hitler”, Saddam Hussein was “Hitler”, Osama bin Laden was “Hitler” - to use a short list. And – of course! – Vladimir Putin is the current “Hitler”. Oh, and Hamas, too.
That can and does lead to over-reaction to real or perceived threats. As Record puts it:
Two analogies have dominated the foreign policy discourse over the past half century: Munich, shorthand for the consequences of the democracies' appeasement of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan in the 1930s; and Vietnam, shorthand for the dangers of intervening in a foreign civil war. The Munich analogy teaches that the only way to deal with aggressor states is through early and decisive use of force either to deter them from future aggression or to destroy them altogether. Appeasement simply whets an aggressor state's appetite for more and postpones inevitable war while raising its ultimate cost. (6)
And he notes, “The Munich analogy permeates the entire neoconservative critique of post- Cold War U.S. foreign policy.” (p. 79) But that view blithely ignores the radical difference between Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden with the actual Hitler:
Hitler presided over the most powerful industrial state in Europe, and he re-created a German army that was operationally superior to that of any of his enemies, including the United States. In the end, it took the combined might of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British Empire to bring him down, and even then only after four years of bloody military operations on a scale not witnessed before or since. (p. 81)
Timothy Snyder in his essay takes the Munich Analogy to speculate that Ukraine is the only thing standing between NATO and World War 3. And that’s the problem with trying to squeeze contemporary foreign policy situations into the narrow frame of the “Munich” testosterone contest. Doing that turns them into imminent world war, for which immediate escalation by the US and its allies is the only possible solution.
If the Munich Analogy actually predicts reality in the current situation, we should expect that a year from now the Russians will have doubled their available armaments and will be invading Poland before mid-2026. Taking that as the most likely scenario would require gigantic crash armaments program for the EU nations.
As Record writes, “War is the province of miscalculation.” (7) The point is that countries need to evaluate threats as realistically as possible. Exaggerating a threat can lead to disastrous decisions just as underestimating or ignoring real threat can.
The Guardian has offered up a whole set of articles on this week’s public diplomacy over the Russia-Ukraine War, including:
My first big impression of Peter Beinart was that he was a liberal apologist for the Iraq War. Which he was for a while.
He’s improved a lot since then. (1)
In the interview, he explains a portion of his latest book (Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza) in which he talks about how the larger Jewish community has conceived of Israel. And how the State of Israel has worked hard to identify the well-being of the secular entity that the State of Israel is with the Jewish tradition as a whole. It’s an important element in the public dialogue around Israel.
He also talks about Trump strange declaration that the US would assume control of Gaza.
Beinart in another interview talks about the colonial nature of Israel’s and Trump’s policy for Gaza (to the extent Trump has a coherent one at all) really is a 19th-century style colonial project:
[W]hat we are seeing really is — at a macro level, is the question of whether you can do in the 21st century what you could do in the 19th century, which is to basically destroy entire populations of people because you view them as subhuman. Donald Trump views Palestinians as subhuman, and therefore wants to oversee a mass ethnic cleansing, which would be one of the greatest crimes of the century.
And all across Washington, you hear people essentially shrug, where people say, “Maybe it’s impractical.” I don’t care. The question is not whether it’s impractical. The question is whether we should be thinking about how we get Donald Trump in front of the International Criminal Court as a war criminal. This is one of the most monstrous things an American president has said in our time. And the fact that he can be assimilated like this is just testament to the profound dehumanization of Palestinians that suffuses American public discourse. [my enphasis] (2)
Beinart is a current “editor-at-large” of Jewish Currents, a good-quality source that was once closely aligned with the US Communist Party. And, no, I’m not saying Beinart’s a Commie now. (Or maybe he is, I don’t actually know and don’t actually care.) In any case, the main diplomatic support for Israel in its War of Independence were the US and the Soviet Union, and its main source of military supplies was newly-communized Czechoslovakia acting under the direction of the USSR.
Alon Pinkas calls attention to a fitting description from Über-Realist Stephen Walt’s for many of Donald Trump’s foreign policy pronouncement:
Dismiss Trump's bluster and one-line foreign policy statements all you want. But it becomes important when "the foreign policy of the world's most powerful country … makes a sudden and far-reaching lurch into the bizarre," as Stephen M. Walt wrote in Foreign Policy last week. [my emphasis] (1)
This is an interesting point about the “realist” foreign policy approach Walt uses. It assumes that great powers typically act to protect their own power-political interests and are especially sensitive to particular threats in their immediate geographic vicinity. In the case of the US and its two-centuries-old Monroe Doctrine, the US view of its immediate vicinity includes all of North, Central and South America. And in that context, the realists argue that leaders should make rational calculations about how to pursue their security interests.
For realists like Walt and his sometime collaborator John Mearsheimer, achieving security goals without actually going to war is preferable to looking for countries to invade and/or annex. They also take account of international law and morality as important and meaningful factors in international politics, for all their obvious limitations in practice. And, very importantly, they recognize the foreign policy is run by human beings, not by blind determinism. That means that countries can and do make bad calculations on how to pursue their interests. Both of them have argued for a long time that the US policy of giving more-or-less unconditional support to Israel has been more damaging than helpful to US security interests, a case where political dynamics and have often overridden pragmatic considerations.
Neither of them is a fan of colonialism or genocide. But both are very aware of the kind of diplomatic signaling used in the real world.
Mearsheimer has been giving interviews more-or-less weekly since February 2022, when the current Russia-Ukraine War started (or escalated, if one prefers). The following is a current one, with the conservative British news service, The Spectator. Mearsheimer has made extensive use of a set of more-or-less conservative podcasts who are receptive to hearing a foreign policy analysis that advocates a general policy of restraint in military affairs. This one deals with both Gaza and Ukraine. (2)
Reminder: A number of these podcasts on YouTube now include a voice-recognition transcript that can easily be double-checked with the video.
Daniel Davis (another of those prickly conservatives with “restrainer” leanings) argues that the Biden Administration’s approach to the Russia-Ukraine War relied on overly-optimistic assumptions and let glib optimism about the outcome detract them from a more hard-headed calculation of potential benefits and expected costs.
Last September, after sending Ukraine thousands of American combat vehicles, millions of rounds of ammunition, and over $100 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars, U.S. Air Force General James Heckler admitted that despite such extraordinary expenditures, the Russian military had become bigger, stronger, and more capable than it was in 2022. That is an astounding confession. It is also unsurprising.
It is not merely important, but a paramount obligation for any American president to soberly assess any situation from the framework of “ends and means.” It is not enough to merely state a preferred outcome – “weakening Russia” in this case – but to make certain we have the means to bring that end to successful fruition.
Clearly, the Biden Administration never conducted such an assessment, choosing instead to lead with emotion, anchoring American interests to the unsubstantiated hope that something good would result. It should have been obvious to senior Administration officials from the outset that Russia had an overwhelming advantage over Ukraine in the key metrics that determines a nation’s war-making capacity.
Russia had millions more men from which to mobilize or recruit into its Armed Forces than Ukraine. It had enormous quantities of natural resources within its borders, and perhaps most crucially, a defense industrial base to indefinitely maintain production of all war material necessary to sustain a war of attrition. Ukraine has comparative deficiencies in all such categories.
Further, when Biden first committed the United States to open-ended support to Ukraine, Russia had a lukewarm relationship with China and was at arm’s length from North Korea and Iran. Today, China and Russia have a stronger military relationship than before, as well as an advanced economic interdependency. [my emphasis] (3)
Now negotiations of some kind are (apparently) under way. Trump and Putin appear to be negotiating with each other over the head of the Ukrainian leadership. Politico Europe reports:
In a readout issued Wednesday, the Kremlin said Trump and Putin had spoken for 90 minutes. Meanwhile, the American president posted on Truth Social that the two leaders have “agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately.”
“We will begin by calling President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, of Ukraine, to inform him of the conversation, something which I will be doing right now,” Trump added. (4)
Problem: Trump is symbolically thumbing his nose at Zelenskyy and Ukraine by not formally insisting that Ukraine has to be an equal partner at the negotiations. It’s true that the attitude of the US will have an enormous impact on the outcome. But Ukraine is the country that was invaded. The war is a war between Ukraine and Russia. Without some arrangement acceptable to the Ukrainian government, it’s hard to see how any negotiation can produce a stable peace.
Our strange new Secretary of Defense stepped onto the stage of history for what will hopefully be a short visit on the Ukraine issue:
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said earlier on Wednesday that Ukraine will not join NATO, and that Europe must be responsible for its own defense. In a fiery rebuke, Zelenskyy said later the same day that “Putin does not want to end the war,” and called on Trump to provide “real security guarantees.”
I won’t rehash the sad history of Ukraine and NATO membership here. But the principle – and to Russia a practical defense priority – of Ukraine someday joining NATO has been a central issue in the process that morphed into the current war. On the face of it, the hard-drinking Defense Secretary just conceded one of the most important and tricky major points in the negotiation. And there is no mention there of any reciprocal concessions on the Russian side for that.
Is anybody driving this car? Or is it a metaphorical version of one of President Musk’s self-driving Teslas? Because it looks like whatever AI negotiating program they’re using needs some tweaking. This whole war could very possibly have been avoided had the Cheney-Bush Administration not insisted on the 2008 NATO declaration that someday Ukraine and Georgia would become members.
But now it’s 2025, nearly three full years into this phase of the war (for which there’s some argument that it began in 2014 with Russia’s seizure of Crimea). And the Administration of those two master negotiators and very stable geniuses Musk and Trump is giving away one of the key bargaining points in the negotiations to terminate the conflict while getting nothing in return?
It sounds like SecDef Hegseth even agreed in advance to permanently conceding Ukrainian territory to Russia:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday insisted a return to Ukraine’s old borders is an “illusory goal,” and called for a European military force to back any peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow. …
“We will only end this devastating war and establish a durable peace by coupling allied strength with a realistic assessment of the battlefield,” he said, adding that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective.” (5)
It looks very much like the Musk-Trump Administration is fumbling around for a way to shut down US aid to Ukraine without looking like they are just giving up and giving Russia a green light. If they have any coherent negotiating strategy, it’s not immediately evident.
The most parsimonious assumption would seem to be that the Musk-Trump team has no clear political strategy for the Russia-Ukraine War. Certainly, that promise Trump made during the 2024 campaign that he would end the war within 24 hours doesn’t seem to have panned out.
Anatol Lieven gives us a reality-check:
[W]hile Hegseth restated the U.S. commitment to the defense of NATO within its existing borders, he is also expected to repeat Trump’s demand that European countries raise their own defense spending to five percent of GDP. On the one hand, this is a strong indication of the Trump administration’s belief that in the future, Europeans themselves must be chiefly responsible for Europe’s defense.
On the other hand, it isn’t going to happen. Given the combination of economic stagnation, budgetary pressures and the erosion of support for establishment parties, such an increase is out of the question — especially if this means spending the money not on European but on U.S. weaponry. In consequence, while the Trump administration will remain in NATO, friction between Washington and Europe can be expected to increase, and U.S. support for European agendas to diminish.
The truth of the matter is that European establishments find themselves in the position of a cartoon character who has run out over the edge of a cliff, and continues running on air for several seconds before realizing that there is no ground underneath him, at which point he falls with a shriek. For years now, European policies towards Russia and Ukraine, and hopes of expanding the EU eastwards, have not just been predicated on support and encouragement from the United States, they have tagged along behind the U.S. Under EU President Ursula von der Leyen and foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, the EU’s central bureaucracy virtually transformed itself into the political and economic wing of NATO. The wing is still flapping, but where’s the bird? [my emphasis] (6)
Mearsheimer isn’t one to obsessively promote sweetness and light. So here’s what he says in the interview above about Ukraine. He says he sees “no evidence” that the Administration has a meaningful plan for negotiating an end to the war.
Trump told us that he was going to settle the Ukrainian conflict in one day. And there is no evidence that we are even close to settling the Ukraine conflict. And, if anything, we're heading in the other direction. So, he has failed so far.
Now, of course, he's only been in office for three weeks. But there is no evidence that he has a plan for shutting this war down. And it looks like the war is going to go on, and it looks like he is doing everything he can to dump this war into the lap of the Europeans.
And it looks like the Europeans are coming to recognize that they don't have any choice but to accept much more of the burden of dealing with this war. So, this is just all, this is bad news all around; bad news for the Ukrainian people; bad news for the Russians; bad news for the United States; bad news for the West, because we're not gonna shut this one down anytime soon. …
There’s no evidence they have a plan. There’s no evidence there are any meaningful contacts between the Russians and the Americans for purposes of shutting this war down. ... The question is, what is the deal? What does Trump think he can do to shut this war down? And, there’s no evidence [chuckle] the Administration has the foggiest idea how they can shut this war down. (42:00ff)
Meanwhile, Trump the Peace President is preparing for – or at least publicly hinting about - a US occupation of Gaza and a bloody counterinsurgency war there. That is, if the statements coming from his mouth have any policy meaning and aren’t just hot-air phrases he thinks sound good to the Trumpista base at the moment.
(2) Rebuilding Gaza & a deal with Putin–Professor John Mearsheimer on Trump. The Spectator YouTube channel 02/12/2025. <https://youtu.be/-yfNdkeStoo?si=fjr9FxlsROXQo6Y8> (Accessed: 2025-12-02).
David Lurie has a helpful post about Trump’s and Musk’s approach to governing, i.e., unconstrained by law. He looks back to some key moments like Nixon’s “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal” and the notion of the Unilateral Executive championed by Dick Cheney, the Elon Musk of the early 2000s (but not as wealthy). (1)
It’s a good analysis. But there is one comment that deserves closer scrutiny: “Nixon’s [when-the-President-does-it] declaration that the president is the arbiter of legality flew in the face of the longstanding principle of judicial review providing that the judiciary has exclusive power to decide disputes over the nation’s Constitution and laws.”
In the concept of liberal democracy as the world recognizes it today, the idea of democratic governance and the rule of law are intricately connected. Connected as in, you can’t have one without the other. If the laws are not produced by a democratic system, they have no democratic legitimacy. That whole John Locke/Thomas Jefferson/right-to-revolution thing in the Declaration of Independence is an expression of that idea.
And maintaining the rule of law also means having an independent court system. The European Union operates on this definition of judicial independence:
[The concept of independence presupposes, in particular, that the body concerned exercises its judicial functions wholly autonomously, without being subject to any hierarchical constraint or subordinated to any other body and without taking orders or instructions from any source whatsoever, and that it is thus protected against external interventions or pressure liable to impair the independent judgment of its members and to influence their decisions. (2)
The EU has had disputes for years over the independence of the judiciary in Hungary and Poland. The current Polish government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk that was elected in December 2023, has been actively cooperating with the EU to re-establish judicial independence after it was suppressed by previous government under the (so-called) Law and Justice (PiS) Party. The dispute with Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian government in Hungary continues.
In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has been actively working to breach the independence of the judiciary, not least because Netanyahu himself is looking to avoid going to prison on corruption charges. When we hear references in the news to emphasis to abridge democratic institutions in the State of Israel, the attempt to eliminate judicial independence is at the center of the disputes.
Other countries like Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela have had serious problems in the last two decades related to judicial independence or the lack thereof. And the fact that in the United States, Supreme Court Justices are allowed in practice to take large bribes from wealthy sponsors, including ones who have cases before the Court, has made many Americans aware of how drastically the Republicans using technically non-partisan institutions like the Federalist Society to give a very strong partisan twist to the nation’s highest Court. Rhode Island’s Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has taken the lead in pointing repeatedly to the urgency of this problem.
For people who actually support democracy and the rule of law, the Dred Scott decision (1857) would be a near-unanimous choice for the most damaging Supreme Court decision ever. As Melvin Urofsky describes it:
Not surprisingly, the North exploded in denunciations of Taney’s opinion. Several sober appraisals in the Northern press decimated the chief justice’s tortured legal reasoning. The Republican editor Horace Greeley published Justice Curtis’s dissent as a pamphlet to be used in the elections of 1858 and 1860. The press and pulpit echoed with attacks on the decision that were as heated as Southern defenses of it. Taney’s hopes of settling the issue lay smashed. If anything, Scott v. Sandford inflamed passions and brought the Union even closer to dissolving.
For all practical purposes, Northern courts and politicians rejected Scott v. Sandford as binding. In an advisory opinion, Maine’s high court declared that African Americans could vote in both state and federal elections. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled that any slave coming into the state with his master’s consent, even as a sojourner, became free and could not be reenslaved upon returning to a slave state; the New York Court of Appeals handed down a similar ruling in Lemmon v. The People (1860). In several states, legislatures resolved to prohibit slavery in any form from crossing onto their soil and enacted legislation freeing slaves passing within their borders.
Taney is remembered now almost solely for the blatantly pro-slavery decision he wrote and for his demeaning comments about African Americans. When he died in 1864, he was roundly denounced and vilified in the North. Republican Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts predicted that “the name of Taney is to be hooted down the page of history.” [my emphasis]
(There is more than a little sad irony here. Taney - whose name btw was pronounced like “Toney” -) as a young Baltimore lawyer had handled pro bono cases defending escaped slaves from being sent back to their owners. He was also the Attorney General for Andrew Jackson and played a key role in doing away with the Bank of the United States, aka, the Money Power – which in the context of the time was genuinely progressive policy and at least a prototype of left populism.)
This was a disastrous, crassly political decision that was a blatant intervention to protect slavery and the expansion of slavery no matter what the law or legal precedents were. It was a clear danger to the democracy and freedom that did exist, not just a restraint on expanding and enhancing democracy by eliminating slavery.
And it was a genuinely radical decision. And everyone who wasn’t a fan of Calhoun’s conviction that freedom and democracy were only for white male slaveowners could see that the decision was a basic challenge to freedom and democracy for everybody else.
So, no, Lurie’s idea that “the judiciary has exclusive power to decide disputes over the nation’s Constitution and laws” has never actually been the assumption in the US, even while people understood and supported the concept of judicial review and independence of the judiciary. Neither of those concepts have ever meant “whatever the courts do is okay and we can’t question any of it.”
Judicial review is not specified in the Constitution itself. Thomas Jefferson had favored explicitly including it. Ironically, the principle and practice of judicial review in the US was established with the majority opinion of Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison (1803), when he was taking a position opposed to that of then-President Thomas Jefferson. It was a clever decision that established the judicial-review principle while side-stepping a direct conflict with the Jefferson Administration. I recall a reference that I have been unable to track down just now comparing the confrontation to two competing male baboons who howl horrifically in each other’s faces but don’t actually come to a physical fight.
In his decision, Marshall declared a portion of a law unconstitutional, thus establishing the practice of judicial review for consistency with the Constitution. But his decision did not include any direction to the Administration to actually do anything specific, so Jefferson was not faced with any choice to defy the order.
But even with general acceptance since 1803 of the federal courts’ power of judicial review, that is not the same thing as the judiciary having “exclusive power to decide disputes over the nation’s Constitution and laws.” No, the Congress and the President also have power to decide such disputes. And both those Branches play huge roles by their actions in shaping the Constitutional tradition.
And the corrupt, authoritarian-dominated Supreme Court in their 2024 Trump v. United States decision leaped right into Roger Toney/Dred Scott territory. As the historian Shawn Wilentz puts it:
The Roberts Court has not just protected Donald Trump so that he might advance his own agenda or appoint young replacements for Alito and Thomas and perhaps one of the liberal justices, consolidating a hard-right majority for a generation at least. It has not just ignored the central principle of stare decisis to overturn long-settled law, as it did in the Dobbs [anti-abortion-rights] decision. It has radically changed the very structure of American government, paving the way for MAGA authoritarianism just as the Taney Court tried to pave the way for enshrining the Slave Power. [my emphasis] (4)
Yes, Congress can do something called jurisdiction stripping
In fact, the original Constitution itself gives Congress the power to restrict the appellate jurisdiction of the federal courts, specifically Article III, Section 2, Clause 2:
In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make. (5)
There are a limited number of types of cases described in the Constitution which can be taken directly to the Supreme Court. But Congress actually has an extensive power to define the types of cases federal appeals courts are empowered to hear. (6) This authority is also called “jurisdiction stripping.”
Unlike the lower federal courts, the Supreme Court's existence is mandated by article III of the Constitution. However, it is only the Court's relatively limited original jurisdiction that is unequivocally insulated from congressional regulation. The Court's appellate jurisdiction-by far its greater source of authority-is given, "with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make." A common sense interpretation of the constitutional language would seem to lead to the conclusion that Congress possesses fairly broad authority to curb Supreme Court appellate jurisdiction. (7)
So, outside of narrow exceptions, Congress can designate that the federal appeals courts have no authority to review the constitutionality of a particular measure:
The Exceptions Clause in Article III grants Congress the power to make “exceptions” and “regulations” to the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction. And more generally, with the power to create lower federal courts, Congress possesses the power to eliminate the jurisdiction of the lower courts. Congress sometimes exercises this power by “stripping” federal courts of jurisdiction to hear a class of cases. Indeed, Congress has even eliminated a court’s jurisdiction to review a particular case in the midst of litigation.
That wound you hear in the background is that of “resistance liberals” gnashing their teeth and rending their garments and gasping, “But if the Democrats do that, the Republicans will do it, too!” When it comes to finding excuses to not fight for their own side, such Dems have practiced becoming instantly oblivious to the Republican Party from Joe McCarthy to Newt Gingrich to Mitch McConnell and President Elon Musk and the fact that they don’t ask permission to use powers explicitly given to them, or even powers explicitly prohibited!
The current Wikipedia page on jurisdiction stripping cites several current examples in which Congress has restricted the jurisdiction of federal appellate courts. (8) (As of this writing, Wikipedia has not yet been acquired by any TechBro billionaire disciples of some dystopian authoritarian political theory.)
A key court precedent on jurisdiction stripping is Ex Parte McCardle (1869). It involved an un-Reconstructed Mississippi newspaper editor, William H. McCardle, who was arrested for violating Reconstruction law and charged with sedition. He applied for habeas corpus under another federal Reconstruction law. His appeal was rejected by a federal circuit court, so he appealed further:
The Supreme Court agreed to hear McCardle’s appeal, and the Radical Republicans envisioned a repetition of Ex Parte Milligan, in which the court limited the jurisdiction of military tribunals. Fearing that the court might declare the Reconstruction Acts (which mandated military occupation of the South) unconstitutional, the Radicals passed a law stripping the court of its power of judicial review with regard to Reconstruction measures. President Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill, but Congress overrode the veto.
In 1869 the court dismissed McCardle’s appeal on the grounds that it now lacked jurisdiction over such matters. Congress had thus established its supremacy over both the federal executive and judicial branches [on this issue]. (9)
So, timid Dems, take a deep breath and buck up on this one. The Republicans have already done it! The Radical Republicans, even! (Okay, Radical Republicans meant something very different and very pro-democracy and pro-rule-of-law in those days. But, still ...)
Dems: Plan for the future
If the Democrats are able to retake the White House and both Houses of Congress in the 2028 elections, they should take several steps to undo the Orbanist trend the Republicans have established by drastically reducing judicial independence, including:
Do high-profile investigation of Supreme Court corruption and pass strict laws against such corruption.
Impeach and remove federal judges with
serious ethical or corruption problems or who acted in ways seriously
inconsistent with independent courts.
Establish effective limits on federal
campaign donations and campaign spending, i.e., overturning the Citizens
United decision that created the current situation where a South African,
apartheid-loving billionaire can buy his way into being the acting President of
the United State. And remove federal appeals jurisdiction over its
constitutionality.
Pass the Voting Rights Act blocked by the two
notorious latter-day Democratic racists Kyrsten Sinema and coal baron Joe
Manchin blocked from passing during the Biden Administration. And remove
federal appeals jurisdiction over its constitutionality.
Pass a federal law establishing full equality
for women. And remove federal appeals jurisdiction over its
constitutionality.
Codify at least the basic Roe v. Wade
protections for abortion rights on a national basis. And remove federal
appeals jurisdiction over its constitutionality.
Ban racial segregation in public
accommodations and public schools. And remove federal appeals jurisdiction
over its constitutionality.
Abolish the [blankety-blank] filibuster rule
that lets a conservative Senate minority block darn near any legislation so that
all these things can actually get done!
This is a six-minute explanation of the Dred Scott decision: (10)
(4) Wilentz, Sean (2024): The ‘Dred Scott’ of Our Time. New York Review of Books 08/15/2024, 35.
(5) ArtIII.S2.C2.4 Supreme Court Appellate Jurisdiction. Constitution Annotated. <https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIII-S2-C2-4/ALDE_00001221/> (Accessed: 2025-11-02). Given the type of purging of federal websites that the Musk-Trump Administration is doing as of this writing, such references may soon become more challenging to access.
(7) Redish, Martin H. (1982): Congressional Power to Regulate Supreme Court Appellate Jurisdiction under the Exceptions Clause: An Internal and External Jurisdiction under the Exceptions Clause: An Internal and External Examination. Villanova Law Review 27:5, p. 901. <https://digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/vlr/vol27/iss5/3> (Accessed: 2025-11-02).
The Musk-Trump Administration has made a re-evaluation of the European countries’ (EU plus Britain) an urgent issue. This is a good background report. Including a reminder of why “Germany is rearming itself” will always be a bit of an ominous concept to much of the world. (1)
It also provides a reminder of what a tremendous opportunity the US and Europe (including Russia) missed after 1989 to establish a much more secure and long-lasting peace.
Haaretz columnist Alon Pinkas lists the kinds of questions many countries are asking themselves right now:
A) Conclude that the United States is no longer a dependable ally.
B) Realize that the United States is no longer a model democracy and no longer has any pretense of being "the leader of the free world."
C) Gather that the United States no longer cares about alliances and its allies.
D) Think that it would be wise to hedge [your] national strategy and be willing to get closer to China.
E) Consider that perhaps your country should develop a military nuclear capability, just as an insurance policy.
F) All of the above.
If you haven't already chosen answer "F," don't worry – you will in a few months. (2)
He puts it into the larger trend which the so-called unipolar moment in which the US was the single, dominant, hegemonic world power. That situation began with 1989 and lasted for two-to-three decades, ending around 2011, if we count the Obama Administration “pivot to Asia” (3) which made containment of China the prime US foreign policy strategy goal. Or 2019, if one prefers to the symbolism of the first Trump Administration and its spastic, disjointed foreign policy approach.
Pinkas deserves a Pulitzer Prize for coming up with the memorable description of Vice President Donald Trump as “anarchy in human form." (4) He put the phrase in quotes, but I assume it’s his own concoction.
Between President Musk’s TechBro apartheid dystopian vision and VP Trump’s scramble to cash in on the Presidency as much as he possibly can, we can expect a very disjointed US approach to foreign policy for the next four years.
Israel and Ukraine are two major concerns that will tell us a lot about just how much of a mess the Musk-Trump wrecking crew and its twentysomething brownshirt crew of computer hackers will make in foreign policy.
The European Council on Foreign Relations recently published a paper on the international impressions the new Musk-Trump Administration is creating. (5)
Notes:
(1) Why Germany isn’t leading Europe’s defense, and who’s going to do it instead? DW News YouTube channel 02/08/2025. <https://youtu.be/NRNNtyMKa7Y?si=H6OBIZ3LulFgDrb7> (Accessed: 2025-08-02).
Eric Edelman and Eliot Cohen interview H.W. Brands, author of America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindberg in the Shadow of War (2024) in this podcast from The Bulwark, a conservative but anti-Trump website. This gives some background on the original America Firsters, most though not all of them hardcore rightwingers, most famous of them the aviator Charles Lindbergh. After the Second World War, they formed the core of what was then called the Old Right. (1)
Lindbergh was a fan of eugenic ideas and was quite impressed with Nazi Germany:
In addition to being an innovator in the field of medicine, [Lindbergh’s associate, the French surgeon and 1912 Nobel Prize winner for his medical research Alexis] Carrel held some quite controversial views on the nature of man. A 1935 interview quoted him as saying, "There is no escaping the fact that men were definitely not created equal..." Carrel was in favor of eliminating from society criminals, the insane, and any others who, in his view, weakened civilization's foundation. Lindbergh was taken with Carrel's ideas and thought he had "the most stimulating mind I have ever met." Such notions concerning the superiority of one race over another, and the metering out of society's "weaker" members sounded to some too closely related to the ideas being promoted by Adolf Hitler's Nazi party in Germany.
The Lindberghs had seen the effect of Nazism on a revitalized Germany in 1936. That year, Charles was asked by the American military attaché in Berlin to report on the state of Germany's military aviation program. While in Germany, Charles and Anne attended the Summer Olympic games as the special guests of Field Marshal Hermann Goering, the head of the German military air force, the Luftwaffe. Lindbergh toured German factories, took the controls of state-of-the-art bombers, and noted the multiplying airfields. He visited Germany twice during the next two years. With each visit, he became more impressed with the German military and the German people. He was soon convinced that no other power in Europe could stand up to Germany in the event of war. "The organized vitality of Germany was what most impressed me: the unceasing activity of the people, and the convinced dictatorial direction to create the new factories, airfields, and research laboratories ...," Lindbergh recalled in "Autobiography of Values." His wife drew similar conclusions. "... I have never in my life been so conscious of such a directed force. It is thrilling when seen manifested in the energy, pride, and morale of the people--especially the young people," she wrote in "The Flower and the Nettle." By 1938, the Lindberghs were making plans to move to Berlin.
In October 1938, Lindbergh was presented by Goering, on behalf of the Fuehrer, the Service Cross of the German Eagle for his contributions to aviation. News of Nazi persecution of Jews had been filtering out of Germany for some time, and many people were repulsed by the sight of an American hero wearing a Nazi decoration. Lindbergh, by all appearances, considered the medal to be just another commendation. No different than all the others. Many considered this attitude to be naive, at best. Others saw it as an outright acceptance of Nazi policies. Less than a month after the presenting of the medal, the Nazis orchestrated a brutal assault on Jews that came to be known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. Nazis and their sympathizers smashed the windows of Jewish businesses, burned homes and synagogues, and left scores dead. Between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. The Lindberghs decided to cancel their plans to move to Germany. [my emphasis] (2)
Woody Guthrie told his own version of the story of Lindbergh and America First this way: (3)
“Wheeler, Clark, and Nye” in the lyrics referred to Senators Burton K. Wheeler (Montana), Gerald Nye (North Dakota) and D. Worth Clark (Idaho).
Those three heartland Senators were very upset that Hollywood was making movies that seemed critical of those nice Nazis in Germany:
[T]he 1939 Warner Bros. production of Confessions of a Nazi Spy was the first major film to bust the door open on the Nazis, but Warner Bros. had been making anti-fascist films for years. Black Legion (1937) and They Won’t Forget (1937) are both staunchly anti-Nazi allegories. By 1939, making a film about a nationally covered FBI investigation into Nazi espionage and the subsequent trial was impossible to ignore.
Other studios quickly followed suit. MGM’s The Mortal Storm (1940) and Escape (1940), 20th Century Fox’s The Man I Married (1940) and Man Hunt (1941), as well as UA’s The Great Dictator (1940) were among many passionately produced anti-Nazi movies prior to the U.S. joining the war. After Warner Bros. broke the dam, Hollywood realized they could (and should) break the industry’s self-regulating rule about attacking other nations. This influx of anti-Nazi movies, a small fraction of Hollywood’s output, raised the ire of the isolationist movement, became evidence for xenophobes that Lindbergh was right about Hollywood, and propelled the U.S. Senate to approve an investigation into Hollywood propaganda.
Sanctioned by Sen. Burton K. Wheeler’s (D-Mont.) Interstate Commerce Commission and led by senators Nye and Clark, the investigation gaveled in on Sept. 9, 1941. While much of the national press criticized the efforts of the isolationist senators, many letters of support were received during the days leading up to the hearings. Wheeler’s files at the National Archives contain missives from Jew haters around the country, praising him for finally doing something about America’s “Jewish problem.” One letter from Helen Connell in Chicago cited a made-up prophecy circulated by the Silver Shirts claiming that Benjamín Franklin wanted the “vampire Jews” written out of the constitution. Dozens of like-minded letters are saved in Wheeler’s files, a reminder that such anti-Hollywood sentiment was partly fueled by antisemitism. [my emphasis] (4)
