It's Time to Play to Win

Pushing the advantage against Iran and a new poll that shows the new normal.

BUCKLE UP—Donald Trump’s first criminal trial starts today. The jury—when they manage to seat one—will consider whether Trump falsified business records to cover up hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, with whom he allegedly had an affair shortly after his wife Melania gave birth to their son Barron in 2006, to keep the story from breaking ahead of the 2016 election.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports on how Iran’s weekend attack on Israel proved an important testing ground for fresh and fragile alliances in the region: “Israeli and U.S. forces intercepted most of the Iranian drones and missiles. But they were able to do so in part because Arab countries quietly passed along intelligence about Tehran’s attack plans, opened their airspace to warplanes, shared radar tracking information, or, in some cases, supplied their own forces to help.”

Hope you’ve got your taxes in—Happy Monday.

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Iranian pro-government supporters gather at Palestine Square in Tehran, on April 14, 2024, in a celebration of the early morning Iran's IRGC attack on Israel. (Photo by HOSSEIN BERIS/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images.)

Does the White House Know What Time It Is?

As I scrolled through Twitter yesterday to catch up on what was happening in different war zones—Iran and Israel, Russia and Ukraine, and the U.S. House of Representatives—I noticed for some reason this off-topic tweet:

Now the European Policy Centre seems to be the very model of a cautious, responsible, establishment-oriented Brussels think tank. So it’s striking that this outfit says, as if it were obvious, that we are in a “deteriorating geopolitical environment.”

Which we are. It’s good to recognize that fact.

It would be even better to come to grips with it. Which the Biden administration—and much of the American foreign policy establishment—hasn’t.

A good start would be for them all, from President Biden on down, to read yesterday’s fine piece in the Atlantic by foreign policy scholar Eliot Cohen (who also co-hosts The Bulwark’s Shield of the Republic podcast).

Iran’s weekend attack on Israel, Cohen explains, “represents an inflection point in a semi-covert war that has been going on for years.”

He continues: 

Firing more than 300 guided weapons, and claiming responsibility for doing so, is an overt declaration that Iran is willing to wage war in the sunlight and not just the shadows.

This, in turn, is part of a larger pattern of Iranian belligerence: It includes the use of Iraqi militias to attack American bases, and the arming and assistance of Houthi militias in their attacks on civilian shipping in the Red Sea and beyond. It forces the question: Why has Iran begun to act more blatantly, less cautiously, and at greater ranges than ever before?

There are reasons specific to Iran’s situation—in particular “the seemingly irrevocable march of that country to the possession of nuclear weapons”—that help answer the question of why Iran has become emboldened. But, Cohen argues, broader forces are at work:

A second and deeper answer, however, is Iran’s entry into a coalition—not an alliance—with Russia, China, and North Korea . . .

It is this bigger geopolitical shift that makes the Iranian attack on Israel so significant. The major players in the Russia–China–Iran–North Korea coalition are increasingly willing to use open violence (against Ukraine, Israel, and the Philippines), and to threaten much worse, including the use of nuclear weapons. They are united by a growing belief that their moment is coming, when a divided and indecisive West, richer but flabbier, will not fight . . . The target of the Russia–China–Iran–North Korea coalition is the overthrow . . . of the American-led world order . . .

It is in this frame, then, that the United States and its allies have to consider next steps. The Iran versus Israel campaign is just one campaign in a much larger conflict . . .

That a coalition of the West and its partners were willing to act in countering the Iranian missile barrage is a promising sign. Still, until Iran pays a visible and heavy price for its behavior in attacking not only Israel directly but its Arab neighbors and global shipping through its proxies, the problem will only get worse.

And I would add that until we and our partners come to grips with the overall challenge we face, the fact that the challenge is a global one, the problem will only get worse.

Obviously, coming to grips with the challenge means arming Ukraine. The damaging effects to Ukraine of Congress’s six-month delay of arms, as well as the broader damage in the signal that’s been sent both to allies and adversaries, can’t be overestimated. The Republican House has done more harm to American foreign policy than any Congress in recent memory.

So Congress needs to provide the aid. But as is increasingly obvious, the Biden administration itself hasn’t done enough to help Ukraine.

Unlike leaders of the Republican party, the administration is opposed to Vladimir Putin. That’s no small thing! Still, the White House needs to stop self-deterring and self-constraining.

More broadly, it needs to try to reverse the forces and to confront the actors who’ve produced the “deteriorating security environment,” rather than merely seeking to check those forces and respond cautiously to those actors.

It needs to abandon the mindset that thinks the job has been done when the missiles have been shot down, and that now we can “take the win.” It needs to ask not just how can we check our adversaries but how can we weaken our adversaries.

You know who offers an implicit corrective to the Biden administration’s “take the win” mindset? U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM).

In a statement last night, CENTCOM remarked that “Iran’s continued unprecedented, malign, and reckless behavior endangers regional stability and the safety of U.S. and coalition forces.”

This is correct. But the Biden administration as a whole doesn’t seem to be adjusting to Iran’s “unprecedented, malign, and reckless behavior” by insisting, say, on full UN sanctions snapback, to say nothing of helping Israel—or even better, acting on its own—to make Iran pay a price for its behavior.

More broadly, the administration doesn’t seem to have internalized the fact that we have a coalition of Russia, Iran, and China together engaging, in CENTCOM’s formulation, in “unprecedented, malign, and reckless behavior.”

Internalizing that fact would mean all kinds of changes in our behavior, ranging from increases in defense spending to not automatically ruling out “boots on the ground” when a foreign conflict erupts.

We are in a global struggle. As the Brussels think tank has noted, the security environment is deteriorating. Which is a nice way of saying, we’re not yet winning that struggle.

—William Kristol

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Catching up . . .

• Biden keeps low profile after Iran’s Israel attack: Politico

• Biden counsels Netanyahu to ‘slow things down’: Washington Post

• How the U.S. forged a fragile Middle Eastern alliance to repel Iran’s Israel attack: Wall Street Journal

• Why better times (and big raises) haven’t cured the inflation hangover: New York Times

• How Trump’s hush money trial went from an afterthought to the main event: Vox

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Quick Hits

1. Poisoning the Groundwater

Another weekend, another NYT/Siena presidential poll: Biden 46 percent, Trump 45 percent. That’s decent news on its face for Biden, who trailed Trump by five points in the same poll in February, 48 percent to 43 percent.

But how’s this for a nugget, way down in the poll, to light up our politics like a flash of lightning. The Times asks: Has Donald Trump ever said anything that you found offensive? Answers: 41 percent said “yes, recently”; 32 percent said “yes, but not recently”; 26 percent said “no.”

Some of this, as with all polling, is pure partisan loyalty: There’s lots of Republicans out there who have been plenty offended by Trump but who stoutly refuse to give some NYT pencilneck who got them on the phone the satisfaction.

But what caught our eye is the yes, but not recently numbers. If you were an alien fresh off the spaceship and somebody pushed this poll into your hands, you might assume this Donald Trump character was a guy with a real checkered past who’d made a serious effort to clean up his act.

This effect is clearest among 18–29 year olds—young voters who have been in post-Trump America for their whole adult lives. This cohort narrowly leans Biden, 47 percent to 45 percent. But 48 percent of them answer the “has Trump ever said anything offensive” question with “yes, but not recently.” Only 29 percent say he has said something offensive recently—easily the smallest portion of any age cohort.

The central liberal rallying cry of the (first?) Trump presidential term was “This is not normal”: a plea for Americans not to lose sight of how deeply aberrant the MAGA phenomenon was in our politics. Maybe that was always a losing battle; people, it turns out, can get used to pretty much anything. But it seems clear that that particular battle, at any rate, is now lost. The bald fact is that it’s extremely difficult to maintain a posture of defiance for years—or even the memory of just what things were like before. Psychic wounds become psychic scars.

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2. The Trial, Explained

Want to brush up on the details of Donald Trump’s historic first criminal trial? Up on the site, Philip Rotner’s got you covered: 

Don’t let the yawn-inducing concept of a trial about business records fool you—this case will be packed with drama, some of it quite salacious. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. The trial could expose Trump to a much wider audience as a liar and a cheater utterly lacking in decency and moral character. It could cripple his presidential candidacy, and even land him in jail.

Compared to other high-profile white-collar crimes you may have heard of, the charges in this case are relatively uncomplicated . . . Everything will come down to proving four essential facts:

1. The Trump Organization falsely recorded payments made to reimburse Michael Cohen for hush-money payments he made on Trump’s behalf as fees paid for legal services;

2. Trump personally either made or caused those false entries to be made;

3. Trump acted with intent to defraud; and

4. Trump’s intent to defraud included an intent to commit, aid, or conceal the commission of another crime.

If Bragg can prove these four facts, Trump will be convicted. Let’s take a look at each of them.

Read the whole thing.

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3. Agony Again

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu is not having a fun time:

Chris Sununu hates Donald Trump. He worked very hard last year to try to stop the 2024 Trump Train from leaving the station, campaigning relentlessly for Nikki Haley in his key first-in-the-nation primary state. And yet he’s apparently consigned himself to yet another one-to-five year period of dissembling on Donald Trump’s behalf. “Nobody should be shocked that the Republican governor is supporting the Republican president,” Sununu said with a forced laugh.

The old trap for the “reasonable” Republican official is the same as ever. He’d do anything to oppose Trump except the two things he can never bring himself to do: cross the party, or turn down high-profile TV hits. 

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