The New Neo

Jonathan Schanzer writes on ending Iran’s fictions:

Soleimani’s killing was, without question, the most consequential act of Trump’s presidency. It didn’t just punish Iran for the action of its proxies. After decades of the U.S. letting the Islamic Republic get away with murder, the Trump administration made it clear that America would no longer allow the regime to hide behind its militias…

As an author of [a US Army] study later summarized: “When evidence was becoming clearer that Iran was behind a deliberate and systematic series of attacks on Americans, the U.S. reviewed possible responses. The U.S. decided against a more aggressive response primarily out of fear of Iranian escalation.” In fact, when the Israelis actually had Soleimani in their crosshairs in 2008, the Bush administration asked them to stand down. All in all, the Pentagon assesses that at least 603 U.S. deaths in Iraq “were the result of Iran-backed militants.”

Upon ascending to office in 2009, Barack Obama almost immediately set into motion his plans for withdrawing a majority of U.S. forces from Iraq by 2011. Since the U.S. failed to solve the Iran-backed militia problem before leaving, our withdrawal precipitated a violent sectarian backlash against Iran’s Shiite proxies from Iraq’s Sunnis in the form of a new and brutal jihadist group: the Islamic State.

By 2014, the Obama administration quietly came to view Iran’s proxy groups as partners in the newly formed coalition to fight the Islamic State…

U.S. policy [under Obama] was also calibrated to accommodate the Iranians as we pushed for a nuclear deal from 2013 to 2015. After the deal was reached, there was no debating the role of these militias or the danger they posed to Iraqi sovereignty. There was even a veiled attempt to identify these groups as independent, not subservient to Iran. This was fiction…To add insult to injury, the militias were now funded, to one extent or another, by the $150 billion of frozen funds released by the Obama administration to Iran through the deal.

Under Soleimani’s guidance, Iran’s militias also operated well beyond Iraq…

…[W]ith his targeted strike on Qassim Soleimani, Trump upended this dynamic. In holding the terror master responsible for attacks carried out by his Iraqi proxies, the U.S. president torched the thin firewall that long hindered American decisionmakers from holding Iran accountable. And in so doing, he appears to have pushed Iran’s proxies to dispense with the fiction as well.

Unlike the presidents before him, Trump was unafraid of pulling back the Iranian wizards’ curtain and risking whatever Iran would do. That may be because of his faith in America and his faith in his own decisions, but it also sounds like to me like a realistic evaluation of Iran’s power or lack thereof, and its competence or lack thereof. Time will tell and the situation could change, but so far Iran appears to be reeling from the shock – not only of Trump’s audacity in undoing forty years of American policy in one fell swoop, but of their own military’s inability to know a passenger plane from a missile.

(That’s assuming the strike on Flight 352 really was a case of mistaken identity.)

People who don’t understand Trump’s military policy, or who say he’s a bumbling stumbling moron who happens to get lucky with surprising regularity, don’t seem to know what a Jacksonian is. But the Jacksonian approach seems to be the key to Trump, as this article by Walter Russell Mead – written right around the time of Trump’s inauguration – makes clear:

Since World War II, U.S. grand strategy has been shaped by two major schools of thought, both focused on achieving a stable international system with the United States at the center. Hamiltonians believed that it was in the American interest for the United States to replace the United Kingdom as “the gyroscope of world order,”…something that would both contain the Soviet Union and advance U.S. interests. When the Soviet Union fell, Hamiltonians responded by doubling down on the creation of a global liberal order, understood primarily in economic terms.

Wilsonians, meanwhile, also believed that the creation of a global liberal order was a vital U.S. interest, but they conceived of it in terms of values rather than economics. Seeing corrupt and authoritarian regimes abroad as a leading cause of conflict and violence, Wilsonians sought peace through the promotion of human rights, democratic governance, and the rule of law…

The disputes between and among these factions were intense and consequential, but they took place within a common commitment to a common project of global order. As that project came under increasing strain in recent decades, however, the unquestioned grip of the globalists on U.S. foreign policy thinking began to loosen. More nationalist, less globally minded voices began to be heard, and a public increasingly disenchanted with what it saw as the costly failures the global order-building project began to challenge what the foreign policy establishment was preaching. The Jeffersonian and Jacksonian schools of thought, prominent before World War II but out of favor during the heyday of the liberal order, have come back with a vengeance…

For Jacksonians—who formed the core of Trump’s passionately supportive base—the United States is not a political entity created and defined by a set of intellectual propositions rooted in the Enlightenment and oriented toward the fulfillment of a universal mission. Rather, it is the nation-state of the American people, and its chief business lies at home. Jacksonians see American exceptionalism not as a function of the universal appeal of American ideas, or even as a function of a unique American vocation to transform the world, but rather as rooted in the country’s singular commitment to the equality and dignity of individual American citizens. The role of the U.S. government, Jacksonians believe, is to fulfill the country’s destiny by looking after the physical security and economic well-being of the American people in their national home—and to do that while interfering as little as possible with the individual freedom that makes the country unique.

For Jacksonian America, certain events galvanize intense interest and political engagement, however brief. One of these is war; when an enemy attacks, Jacksonians spring to the country’s defense. The most powerful driver of Jacksonian political engagement in domestic politics, similarly, is the perception that Jacksonians are being attacked by internal enemies, such as an elite cabal or immigrants from different backgrounds. Jacksonians worry about the U.S. government being taken over by malevolent forces bent on transforming the United States’ essential character. They are not obsessed with corruption, seeing it as an ineradicable part of politics. But they care deeply about what they see as perversion—when politicians try to use the government to oppress the people rather than protect them. And that is what many Jacksonians came to feel was happening in recent years, with powerful forces in the American elite, including the political establishments of both major parties, in cahoots against them.

Many Jacksonians came to believe that the American establishment was no longer reliably patriotic, with “patriotism” defined as an instinctive loyalty to the well-being and values of Jacksonian America. And they were not wholly wrong…

Although I disagree with some of what Mead writes – for example, I do see Jacksonians as believing that the US is “a political entity created and defined by a set of intellectual propositions rooted in the Enlightenment.” But my quibbles with him are relatively minor compared with my general agreements with his description of the worldview of the Jacksoninans.

Since Mead wrote the words I quoted above, events have only solidified the perception that there are “malevolent forces bent on transforming the United States’ essential character” who already have a great deal of power and who would like to obtain much more. And it seems to me that Mead was particularly good at describing the method in what to so many other people may seem like Trump’s madness, both in foreign policy and elsewhere.

About a year after that essay was written, Mead gave this interview, in which he said:

For “a scholar of foreign policy,” says Mead, who is today a distinguished fellow at the conservative-leaning Hudson Institute, watching Trump’s rise was sort of an out-of-body experience, a once-in-a-career moment “where these abstract typologies that you write about suddenly seems to be happening in front of you.”

Mead was also courted by Steve Bannon – for the short time Bannon was a Trump advisor. But Bannon made the error of thinking that because Mead could describe Jacksonians so well (and for the most part, although not entirely, without condescension or error), that he must be a Jacksonian. But Mead corrected him:

As he told Bannon, “Well, you know, Steve, I write about Jacksonianism. That doesn’t mean I am a Jacksonian,” Mead remembers telling the Trump strategist. Not only that, but “actually, I voted for Clinton in the election.”

Bannon, he said, was a “little bit shocked.”

That puts Mead squarely in the camp of people such as Alan Dershowitz, whom I respect because – although I disagree strongly with them politically – they seem to retain a sense of objectivity when they write about politics, and they try to be (and usually succeed in being) fair even to those with whom they differ. This should be standard operating procedure, but these days it is vanishingly rare.