The Land of Flickering Lights

by Michael Bennet

  In his inaugural address, President Trump promised to “eradicate completely” extremist Islamic terrorism “from the face of the earth.” The next day, he visited the CIA and explained:

  We don’t win anymore. The old expression, “to the victor belong the spoils”—you remember. I always used to say, keep the oil. I wasn’t a fan of Iraq. I didn’t want to go into Iraq. But I will tell you, when we were in, we got out wrong. And I always said, in addition to that, keep the oil … So we should have kept the oil. But okay. Maybe you’ll have another chance. But the fact is, should have kept the oil.

  Never in our history has “winning” meant the plunder of another country’s natural resources and certainly never in a case where our invasion of another country was wrong. President Trump’s view is egregiously at odds with international law and with Harry Truman’s instinct to rebuild Japan and Germany. It is a recipe for endless conflict. And, like so many of his foreign policy pronouncements, it threatens to unhinge or rearrange traditional alliances. As David Hendrickson, a foreign-affairs specialist and historian at Colorado College, points out, Trump’s proposed oil grab in Iraq is the only policy that would ensure unification of Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish interests in that region.

  President Trump’s foreign policy efforts also represent a significant departure from our highest aspirations: the rule of law, democratic freedoms, and human rights.20 Trump has praised President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, whose official drug policies include the execution of suspected offenders without a trial; applauded China’s President Xi Jinping for constitutionally paving the way for an unlimited term as head of state; apparently taken advice from Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, hardly a human rights paragon, about our involvement in the Syrian civil war; and congratulated Russian president Vladimir Putin on winning his own rigged election. He has tried to ban immigrants from certain Islamic countries and looked for every excuse to avoid taking refugees during the worst global refugee crisis since World War II.

  He has withdrawn the United States from important multilateral diplomatic efforts. He has questioned the value of NATO in the wake of Russia’s attack on our elections and its invasion of Crimea. He has threatened to cut by almost half our funding for the United Nations and foreign aid (which already represents a minuscule portion of the federal budget). He has mindlessly enforced across-the-board hiring freezes at the State Department and threatened to cut its budget by a third. He has committed the United States to withdraw from a climate accord signed by every other country in the world, including North Korea.

  Through his second year in office, President Trump seemed committed to outdo each previous diplomatic misstep with one that earned even more disregard at home and abroad. In June, he turned the G7 meeting, an annual economic planning summit with our strongest allies, into a Trump-against-the-world showdown. Little less than a month later, at the conclusion of extraordinary head-to-head talks with Vladimir Putin, he gave the benefit of the doubt to President Putin’s claim that there was no Russian interference in the 2016 elections while disputing unambiguous American intelligence findings to the contrary. In September 2018, when he appeared before the United Nations General Assembly, he boasted that his administration “has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” The delegates laughed at him.

  And then, shortly afterward, Saudi Arabian agents with close ties to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman brutally assassinated the Washington Post opinion writer Jamal Khashoggi. President Trump went on a spree of diplomatic botch work that captures his approach to diplomacy. First he said nothing, hoping the crime against press freedom, one of America’s founding principles, would blow over. When the news storm persisted, he turned to tough talk. “We’re going to find out what happened.” When pressed on American consequences for Saudi Arabia, he said, “Well, it’ll have to be very severe. I mean, it’s bad, bad stuff.”

  Journalists found holes in one Saudi alibi after another. American intelligence, like that of other countries, produced nothing to let the Saudis off the hook. Nevertheless, as the evidence mounted, Trump backpedaled in order to show continued support for the kingdom and its rulers. When the Washington Post reported that the CIA had high confidence that the killing was ordered by the crown prince, the president said, “I hope that the king and the crown prince didn’t know about it.” He then staked out his position with a statement that American intelligence would continue assessing the situation and that we “may never know all the facts surrounding the murder.” In this statement, which was littered with exclamation points, he went on to note about the crown prince, “Maybe he did or maybe he didn’t!” (This elliptical observation about the crown prince presaged Trump’s subsequent exoneration of Kim Jong-un for the murder in North Korea of an American college student, Otto Warmbier.) The next day, when reporters asked him about possible sanctions in response to the murder, the president invoked national economic interests: “They have been a great ally … the United States intends to remain a steadfast partner.” He cited sales of arms and military technology to the Saudis worth $110 billion, a number inflated by promised future sales, not reflecting committed contracts. Washington had been whispering since the spring that the Trump administration was looking to tie up a nuclear deal with the Saudis. Heading to Mar-a-Lago for the Thanksgiving holiday, he said to reporters, “I’m not going to destroy our economy by being foolish with Saudi Arabia,” as if jeopardizing an arms deal with an autocratic regime in the Middle East would put our nation’s economic future at risk.21

  If these events were not so cruel and tragic, we might mistake them for farce. Every gesture the president of the United States makes sends signals to the world. Secretary Mattis, in his letter of resignation at the end of 2018, made it clear that he believed the president’s values and outlook stood in utter contradiction to America’s values, its honor, its tradition, and its historic approach to alliances and to international affairs. Any citizens witnessing our current president in action would be right to wonder what he is up to. They might be right if they concluded that he wasn’t always sure himself.

  President Trump’s disdain for diplomacy extends to trade. He has adopted the most protectionist trade policies in a century. Instead of doing the tough work of building coalitions to set the rules of the road and counter unfair practices, he has attacked not only China, but our closest allies and trading partners.22 Taken together, his actions risk provoking a trade war with the entire world at once. The president’s claim that “trade wars are good and easy to win” echoes the Bush administration’s false claim that a war with Iraq would be over quickly and pay for itself.

  The twenty-first century’s international order is still forming, struggling to align a post–Cold War reality with the emergence of stateless terrorism. President Trump may want to erect a wall around the United States, but we cannot wish away the global nature of the threats we face. Terrorism, nuclear and conventional weapons proliferation, cybercrime, predatory trade practices by the Chinese, the potential for attacks in space, pandemics, and environmental degradation demand solutions that transcend national borders and ideologies. To respond to these challenges and to the crises that will come, we will need the support of other nations—particularly our allies. President Trump’s disdain for international cooperation puts that future support at risk. The United States has the greatest capacity for self-defense in human history. We must maintain it. But we also require a foreign policy that recognizes, even embraces, the shared interests of other nations and peoples.

  And we would do well to reacquaint ourselves with our founding republican values. Russia, China, Iran, and terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS have no use for pluralism, the rule of law, and respect for individual freedoms and rights. If we, along with our closest allies, fail to reject that dim view of humanity, no one else in the world will. The world has never had greater need for an example of a pluralist society committed to the rule of law. The founders, cl
ose readers of Montesquieu and other Enlightenment writers, knew that republics were rare and that other nations needed instructive examples if their citizens were to enjoy the liberty of self-government. Jefferson, perhaps the most internationally minded of the founders, stressed this very point in his first inaugural address, when he called the United States “the world’s best hope.” Although he was often disillusioned by our partisan politics, he held on to his optimism on this point to the end. In his last letter, he wrote this of the American example:

  May it be to the world what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the Signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.

  We cannot rely solely on the imperfect examples set by our forefathers. We have to use our principles to set a course of action that suits our time, just as their actions attempted to suit their own time. When President Trump calls a free press “the enemy of the people,” when he calls for his political opponents to be imprisoned, when his words and actions corrode our standards of truth and honor and decency, he not only weakens American democracy but also muzzles the hope of people around the world struggling to win freedom, democracy, and equality.

  Most people on this planet live in societies ungoverned by the rule of law and without the benefits of democracy. Corruption, lawlessness, violence, and sectarian strife strip the future from billions of human beings. Across the world, more people are refugees than at any time since the end of World War II. South of our border, families pay a year’s wages to send their young daughters on dangerous journeys northward. They weigh the very real risk of abuse and rape alongside the near certainty that their daughters’ lives will be cut short by gangs in Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

  In 1965, my grandparents sent me a note on the occasion of my first birthday. It was fifteen years after they and my mother arrived in this country after surviving the horrors of the Holocaust. They wrote:

  The ancient Greeks gave the world the high ideals of democracy, in search of which your dear mother and we came to the hospitable shores of beautiful America in 1950. We have been happy here ever since, beyond our greatest dreams and expectations, with democracy, freedom, and love, and humanity’s greatest treasure. We hope that when you grow up, you will help to develop in other parts of the world a greater understanding of these American values.

  Aware as we must be of our own failings, my grandparents’ experience has always underscored to me how important the American example has been. If we falter at this critical moment, America’s ability to secure our future and defend our values will be set back, and humanity will suffer.

  1 “P5+1,” meaning the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany. Germany, China, and Russia were among the nations that had significant trade relationships with Iran.

  2 Iran’s crude oil exports fell from 2.5 million barrels per day in 2011 to about 1.1 million barrels per day by mid-2013, starving the Iranian government of roughly $9 billion in revenue every quarter. The country’s GDP shrank by as much as a fifth. Many Iranians lost their jobs or were working but unpaid or underpaid.

  3 It was the first discussion between the heads of state of the United States and Iran since Jimmy Carter was president and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi ruled as the shah—in other words, since before the Iranian revolution.

  4 A CNN report, citing producer Mohammed Tawfeeq, explained the significance of throwing shoes: “The act of throwing a shoe at someone or showing them your sole is ‘incredibly offensive’ in the Middle East, he said. ‘The bottom line is, a shoe is dirt,’ he said. ‘Throwing a shoe on someone means throwing dirt on that person.’”

  5 These seven were Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Susan Collins, Lamar Alexander, Lisa Murkowski, Dan Coats, and Thad Cochran.

  6 Tom Cotton didn’t stop there. He challenged Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Twitter to a debate about the US Constitution. On a single day, Cotton tweeted in four separate posts: “Hey @JZarif, I hear you called me out today. If you’re so confident, let’s debate the Constitution.” “Here’s offer: meet in DC, @JZarif, time of your choosing to debate Iran’s record of tyranny, treachery, & terror.” “I understand if you decline @JZarif after all, in your 20s, you hid in US during Iran-Iraq war while peasants & kids were marched to die.” “Not badge of courage @JZarif, to hide in US while your country fought war to survive—but shows cowardly character still on display today.” Zarif responded the next day: “Serious diplomacy, not macho personal smear, is what we need. Congrats on Ur new born. May U and Ur family enjoy him in peace. @SenTomCotton.”

  7 President Obama wasn’t the only person who remarked on this irony. In “An Open Letter to 47 Republican Senators of the United States of America from Iran’s Hard-Liners,” the Slate writer William Saletan gets to the same point. Taking on the persona of the grateful hard-liners, he offers ironic praise: “We also very much admire the principal author of your letter, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas. Sen. Cotton, like many of our young militiamen, served in combat in Iraq and believes that he is an instrument of God.”

  8 During the debate prior to the bill, Obama threatened to use his veto power to stop it, but the bill passed by such overwhelming bipartisan majorities in both chambers (98 to 1 in the Senate and 400 to 25 in the House) that it took that option away from him.

  9 To any of us, this is an astounding sum. To Adelson, it is a trifling amount, given his net worth at the time: $34 billion. In 2012, I gave a floor speech comparing Adelson’s campaign contributions with the average annual household income in Colorado—roughly $77,000. It was July when I made my remarks. Adelson had already given $35 million. If that typical household was to spend the same percentage of its annual income as this one casino owner in Las Vegas had by then spent of his, the sum would come to about $78. Many American families might skip one night at the movies if they knew that spending the amount they saved would have an impact like Adelson’s.

  10 Consider the gulf between Adelson’s attitude and that of George Kennan, the architect of America’s containment strategy in the Cold War. In 1951, Kennan said, “I think there is no more dangerous delusion, none that has done us a greater disservice in the past or that threatens to do us a greater disservice in the future, than the concept of total victory.”

  11 By the end of the 2014 election cycle, it almost seemed as though talk radio was claiming that ISIS fighters were infecting themselves with Ebola and then disguising themselves as unaccompanied minors from Central America making their way north to cross our border with Mexico.

  12 President Obama crafted his remarks in order to reach multiple audiences: Congress, our international partners and allies, the press, and the American public. In June 2018, Donald Trump, on Twitter, demonstrated his own approach. (E.g., “Obama, Schumer and Pelosi did NOTHING about North Korea, and now weak on Crime, High Tax Schumer is telling me what to do at the Summit the Dems could never set up. Schumer failed with North Korea and Iran, we don’t need his advice!” Or, “I am heading for Canada and the G-7 for talks that will mostly center on the long time unfair trade practiced against the United States. From there I go to Singapore and talks with North Korea on Denuclearization. Won’t be talking about the Russian Witch Hunt Hoax for a while!”)

  13 More than two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville captured the difficulty of conducting foreign policy in our democracy: “External policy requires almost none of the qualities that are proper to democracy, and demands, on the contrary, the development of almost all those it lacks … Only with difficulty can democracy coordinate the details of a great undertaking, fix on a design, and afterwards follow it with determination through obstacles. It is hardly capable of combining measures in secret and of patiently awaiting their result.”

  14 As a nation, we have long struggled to strike the right balance. In “Federalist No. 75,�
�� Alexander Hamilton writes: “The power of making treaties is, plainly, neither the one [passing laws] nor the other [executing laws once they are passed]. It relates neither to the execution of the subsisting laws, nor to the enaction of new ones.” The framers ultimately landed on a novel compromise, granting the president the power to negotiate treaties and the Senate the role of offering advice and consent.

  15 It went on to provide ample melodrama. The ad opened with a narrator highlighting Keyser’s role as a military intelligence officer in Iraq, where he “conducted capture and kill missions to remove high-value targets in urban areas.” A glaring Keyser continued: “For us, Baghdad was the roughest. We weren’t fighting amateurs; we were fighting a vicious enemy armed by Iran. Now Obama wants to give these guys nuclear weapons and Michael Bennet, he was all for it. For me it’s personal. You don’t trust Iran and you can’t trust Michael Bennet.”

  16 When his ignorance on these matters was pointed out, he took refuge in ancestry, citing family heritage in the form of an uncle: “Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes … Nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was thirty-five years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought?” It might be worth pondering why someone who puts so much faith in the science of genetics remains skeptical about the science of climate change.