The World Doesn’t Care About Groupthink
Conventional wisdom may change in a flash (remember ‘peak oil’?), but elites remain elites, united by common interests.
“All things are in flux.” — Heraclitus
The adage “nothing lasts forever” is an understatement. Far more accurate is something like “nothing lasts until next week.”
Saint-to-Sinner Silicon Valley
A decade ago, even most Republicans admired the rugged entrepreneurialism of the high-tech Masters of the Universe who had built a multitrillion-dollar, world-dominating Internet, and the computer, mobile-phone, online-sales, and social-media industries, defined by marquee companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo.
In turn, Democrats gave up their suspicions of big money, as they canonized liberal Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. Their wealth was okay, since the creators of it were progressives and dressed like Woodstock hipsters as they spread their billions freely among progressive think tanks, foundations, and political campaigns.
In a near blink of an eye, Republicans finally caught on, and they now see the new billionaires as rank partisans who rig Internet searches, censor social media, manipulate data to help warp elections, push far-left causes, bully their own nonconformist employees, and demonize their conservative critics.
Equally abruptly, Democrats see the new billionaires as our new robber barons, who set up monopolies, destroyed competition, snooped and surveilled their own consumers, and trumped the shenanigans of the old 19th-century Jay Goulds and James Fisks. In other words, unlimited and unaudited power and wealth are a timeless prescription for abuse, whether in ancient Rome or 2019 America — a forever law that not even Mark Zuckerberg in T-shirts and jeans could escape.
From Too Little to Too Much Oil
Less than 15 years ago, the conventional wisdom was that we’d reached “peak oil,” or that the U.S., and indeed the world at large, had already extracted more petroleum than what remained beneath the ground.
Then, in unheralded fashion and quite silently, American frackers and horizontal drillers made such a term entirely obsolete. The U.S. went from a superpower hobbled by an insatiable need for imported oil to the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world and, soon, the likely largest exporter of fossil fuels. In the same vein, the Middle East and especially the Persian Gulf transmogrified from being the nexus of American foreign policy to nearly irrelevant in U.S. strategic thinking.
If Saudi Arabia was once accused of virtually running American foreign policy, it is now seen at the other extreme as a minor medieval bother. A few thousand people in obscurity in the fracking industry, without government grants and without the media fawning over them as they had green legends such as Al Gore, literally changed the lives of millions of Americans at home and their country’s status abroad.
China: No Longer the Wave of the Future
Not too long ago the West was breezily talking of China as if the 1989 Tiananmen Square debacle and its aftermath that saw the Chinese government kill some 10,000 protesters and dissidents was a mere speed bump on the fated way to Chinese democracy and an open society. Beltway wisdom was that any year China could experience a moment akin to the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Then status quo elite thinking in Washington was that even if the Chinese ran up huge deficits, treated their trading partners in ruthless fashion, jailed critics in a vast gulag archipelago, and mimicked the colonialism and imperialism of the former Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of the late 1930s and 1940s, Beijing, nonetheless, would inevitably translate its new affluence and self-confidence into free elections and eventual liberal society — or at least become a benign world hegemon. After all, its high-speed rail, its solar-panel factories, and modern airports wowed American pundits — as if China offered a model of green modern authoritarianism that could supersede Neanderthal resistance to green central planners. A Chinese Carmel or Upper West Side was always proverbially right around the corner.
Just as it had been awed by Western money and technology, surely China would be even more wowed by Western magnanimity and so reciprocate by mimicking Western political and cultural institutions.
That fantasy has dissipated as Donald Trump shattered its glass veneer. The vision of China as always on the cusp of consensual government was always about as accurate as the old American dreams that the more powerful imperial Japan became in the early 20th century, the more apt Tokyo would be to assume a role as a sober and judicious Westernized protector of global norms. Again, ahistorical groupthink, fueled by globalist nonsense, simply ignored Chinese history and culture.
Between 2006 and 2008, George W. Bush was reduced by the anti-war Left left to a veritable Nazi. Op-eds, documentaries, plays, and novels fantasized without apology about his assassination.
Mainstream politicians including Senators Robert Byrd, John Glenn, and Al Gore compared the Bush administration to Brownshirts, Fascists, and Nazis. Indeed, so hated was Bush by his critics that that they stooped to accuse him of plotting near genocide during the government’s often incompetent response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster of 2005 that virtually destroyed large swaths of New Orleans.
No slur or smear was too low to throw against the president.
Now this world of Nazi boilerplate has been turned upside down. In the age of Trump, Bush has been rehabilitated as a sober and judicious centrist by even his left-wing critics, in part to use him as an establishment club to batter the sometimes crass Donald Trump.
Bush supporters who were once slurred as Nazi neocons, such as Bill Kristol for his prior role as co-founder of the Project for a New American Century and frequent embrace of unapologetic “national greatness,” now themselves often accuse Donald Trump and his supporters of Nazi-like behavior for their “Make America Great Again” values.
Kristol, once the target of unfair vituperation, now suggests that Trump adviser Michael Anton (who sometimes wrote in Kristol’s Weekly Standard), by working for Trump, replayed the roll of Nazi puppet lawyer Carl Schmitt, as in Kristol’s tweet “Carl Schmitt to Mike Anton: First time tragedy, second time farce.”).This is among other frequent allusions Kristol and his circle have made to Trump and his supporters as having Nazi-like affinities.
George W. Bush’s former CIA director Michael Hayden — himself often slurred and smeared as a veritable Nazi for green-lighting enhanced interrogation of terrorists — became a purveyor of Nazi slurs, when he posted a picture of the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in order to libel Trump’s border policies. In 2007, who would have believed that those who were likened to Nazis for supporting or working for George W. Bush would a decade later adopt the very smears of the Left — but in libeling their fellow Republicans who supported a Republican president?
What causes these radical changes in lifestyle, material conditions, perceptions, and politics? Or rather why do we fixate on the fleeting present without help from the past to fathom the future?
Most obviously, technology has no limits, either on its ability to transform utterly modern life or the speed at which it accomplishes such changes. Once fracking was mastered, it became ever cheaper and ever more efficient at a geometrical rate — and operated independently, as scientific breakthroughs do, from political consensus and convention.
Computer technology was just as unpredictable in its ability to alter the world as we know it. At first, the Internet and social media seemed simply to make life easier and more enjoyable. But soon such Frankenstein monsters devoured their idealistic creators and were recalibrated to contaminate almost everything they touched, as Twitter turned into an electronic lynch mob; Facebook, an instant tool of progressive intolerance; and Google, a Big Brother screen that snooped into its users’ living rooms for sport and profit. The tech revolution in communications simply accelerated and empowered the preexisting human desire of its creators to be all powerful and force others to believe as they do.
Groupthink explains radical transformations in conventional wisdom and received opinion. The status of China should always have been pretty clear: The Chinese government was a Communist autocracy with a long history of mass murder, racial and religious intolerance, and hatred of democracy — whether it lived hand to mouth in Maoist times or befooled naïve journalists and buccaneer corporatists who bragged about its shiny new infrastructure.
What changed was not the essence of China, but its superficial veneer, which tricked the gullible or conniving Westerners into assuming its fascist brand of capitalism led to riches and on to eventual freedom.
Political differences are not always so different, or they at least pale before cultural, class, and social affinities. Often for the Washington–New York elite political classes, left and right, Democratic and Republican, conservative and liberal are not so much fault lines as cultural commonalities among like-minded elites juxtaposed against their assumed hoi polloi social inferiors. Keep that distinction in mind, and it may not seem so strange that those who were unfairly smeared as veritable Nazis go on to themselves unfairly smear others as Nazis, as if stooping to Third Reich vituperation is an in-house parlor game.
In some sense, the old French adage of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose —the more things change, the more they stay the same — remains timeless. Communists are Communists are Communists, whether or not they develop solar-powered cities or invest in unoccupied homes in Beverly Hills.
Free-market constitutional societies depend not so much on natural resources as on their own system of free markets, meritocratic and enlightened government, and free inquiry. Americans usually are the most creative and resourceful when they are written off as has-beens and doomed — as we saw when they went from being a hobbled oil importer to OPEC’s greatest nightmare.
Among the political classes, both being slurred or slurring others of like kind in disgusting fashion is no big deal. Apparently, it is just the usual foul water that such kindred fish always swim in.
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2)‘Spying Did Occur’
Barr wants to find out why the FBI eavesdropped on the Trump campaign in 2016.
The Editorial Board
William Barr knew he wasn’t accepting easy duty as Donald Trump’s Attorney General, and it’s no surprise that the Democratic-media complex attacked him in unison on Wednesday. His sin was disclosing that he wants to find out how the FBI came to eavesdrop on the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. Let’s hope he doesn’t flinch.
“I think spying did occur,” Mr. Barr told a Senate committee Wednesday, adding that this is “a big deal.” The government has “a lot of rules” in place to guard against abusive “political surveillance,” he said, adding that he has an obligation to examine what happened since “one of the principal roles of the attorney general” is to “make sure that government power is not abused.” Hear, hear.
Mr. Barr said he also wants to know why the Trump campaign wasn’t notified of the FBI’s concerns, as would “normally” happen. He praised the “outstanding” FBI rank and file, saying that “to the extent there were any issues” it was “probably a failure among a group of leaders there at the upper echelon.” His review will also include the actions of the “intelligence agencies more broadly.” See former CIA Director John Brennan.
Mr. Barr has access to documents that the Justice Department has kept from Congress. Ranking House Intelligence Republican Devin Nunes is also sending Mr. Barr eight criminal referrals from his own investigation into l’affaire Russe, including evidence of lying to Congress and manipulating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. By late spring Mr. Barr may also receive DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s review of FBI actions in 2016 and 2017.
All of this should be encouraging to Americans who want credibility restored to an FBI that lost its ethical bearings under James Comey.
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3) The U.S. must re-engage with Russia to ensure the ultimate weapon doesn’t spread and is never used.
The U.S., its allies and Russia are caught in a dangerous policy paralysis that could lead—most likely by mistake or miscalculation—to a military confrontation and potentially the use of nuclear weapons for the first time in nearly 74 years. A bold policy shift is needed to support a strategic re-engagement with Russia and walk back from this perilous precipice. Otherwise, our nations may soon be entrenched in a nuclear standoff more precarious, disorienting and economically costly than the Cold War. The most difficult task facing the U.S. is also the most important—to refocus on America’s most vital interests even as we respond firmly to Russia’s aggressions.
The three of us experienced the low points of U.S. relations with the Soviet Union, and the nuclear dangers that arose. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the 1981-83 confrontation over intermediate-range nuclear missiles were periods of increased tensions, reduced trust and rising nuclear risks. With Henry Kissinger, we wrote in 2007 that although the world escaped the nuclear knife’s edge of the Cold War through a combination of diligence, professionalism and good luck, reliance on nuclear weapons for deterrence is becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective as more states gain nukes of their own. The U.S. and other nuclear states have yet to take decisive steps toward the goal of a world without nuclear weapons, and the dangers continue to mount.
Deterrence cannot protect the world from a nuclear blunder or nuclear terrorism. Both become more likely when there is no sustained, meaningful dialogue between Washington and Moscow. The risks are compounded by the rising possibility that cyberattacks could target nuclear warning and command-and-control systems, as well as the continuing expansion of global terrorist networks. Since the crises broke out in Ukraine and Syria in the past few years, U.S. and Russian forces have again been operating in proximity, increasing the risk that an act of aggression, followed by an accident or miscalculation, will lead to catastrophe.
A new comprehensive approach is required to decrease the risks of conflict and increase cooperation, transparency, and security. This will require a united effort in Washington and with U.S. allies on a Russia policy that reduces the unnecessary nuclear danger we are currently courting, while maintaining our values and protecting our vital interests.
The U.S. must first address its own dysfunctional Russia policy, and Congress must lead the way. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should convene a new bipartisan liaison group of legislative leaders and committee chairmen to work with senior administration officials on strengthening the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and renewing dialogue with Russia. This model was used in the arms-control observer group led by Sens. Robert Byrd and Bob Dole in the 1980s. The group was able to build bipartisan consensus for a defense modernization program that strengthened America’s defenses and bolstered NATO’s deterrence, as well as a Russia policy that led to negotiations eliminating missiles in Europe. These policies helped end the Cold War.
Second, Presidents Trump and Vladimir Putin should announce a joint declaration reaffirming that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. This would renew the 1985 Reagan-Gorbachev statement that Americans and Russians received positively as the beginning of an effort to reduce risk and improve mutual security. A joint statement today would clearly communicate that despite current tensions, leaders of the two countries possessing more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons recognize their responsibility to work together to prevent catastrophe. This could also lead other nuclear states to take further steps to reduce nuclear risk. The timing of such a statement would also signal Washington and Moscow’s commitment to build on past progress toward disarmament, as next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Third, the U.S. and Russia must discuss a broad framework for strategic stability—including increasing decision time for leaders—in a period of global destabilization and emerging military technologies. In a positive step, Presidents Trump and Putin apparently agreed in Helsinki last summer to open a dialogue on strategic stability, focused on nuclear dangers that threaten both nations. Yet their inability to follow up by empowering their military and civilian professionals to follow through underlines how dangerously dysfunctional relations have become.
This effort must begin now. America’s leaders cannot call a “time out” to wait for the aftermath of the Robert Mueller investigation or other issues to play out in Congress or the courts. Nor is there time to await a new U.S. administration, a new leader in the Kremlin, or the gradual resolution of current international disputes. The risks are simply too grave to put America’s vital interests on hold.
The U.S. and Russia should work toward a mutual vision for a more stable security architecture in the next five to 10 years, and identify the tools and policy initiatives necessary to get there. Our nations have a shared responsibility to communicate about crisis management, including between our armed forces, and to maintain our agreements on arms control and transparency. Where treaties are not likely or feasible, understandings and red lines are imperative.
The U.S. and Russia, joined by other nuclear states, must decisively confront the problems that threaten global security. It is essential that we re-engage with Russia in areas of common fundamental interest to both nations, including reducing reliance on nuclear weapons, keeping them out of unstable hands, preventing their use and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world.
Mr. Shultz served as secretary of state, 1982-89. Mr. Perry served as defense secretary, 1994-97. Mr. Nunn, a Democrat, was a U.S. senator from Georgia, 1972-97, and was chairman of the Armed Services Committee.
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