Pay No Attention to the War Behind the Curtain
This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but with a wimp.
Feels like you can’t turn around these days without tripping over some brand new story of staggering, jaw-dropping White House corruption. The New York Times reports on a meeting last September between Donald Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and the president of Kazakhstan—a meeting that resulted in an exclusive deal for the American company Kaz Resources to mine tungsten in the country. Both the Trump and Lutnick families soon announced highly lucrative business connections to the deal.
“The arrangement is hardly an outlier,” the Times reports. “One or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project.” Total federal funding to these companies, per the Times, exceeds $8.9 billion. Happy Monday.
The Humbug Harrumphs about Hormuz
by William Kristol
What is one to make of the last few days’ military and diplomatic developments in and around the Strait of Hormuz?
On Thursday and then again on Saturday, Iran attacked commercial ships that were transiting the strait in a manner that was not to their liking. The United States responded with military strikes against Iran. Iran retaliated against U.S. military assets in the region.
This military tit-for-tatting happened amidst a cacophony of competing understandings of the much-heralded memorandum of understanding signed two weeks ago. It turns out that an agreement that Iran would “make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels” is subject to very different interpretations of “arrangements” and “best efforts.” The United States thinks “safe passage” should mean free passage. Iran thinks that if Iran can “make arrangements” it’s allowed to . . . make arrangements. Who could have known there would be disagreement on this point?
But the bottom line is that this is what a messy but unacknowledged surrender by the United States of America to the Islamic Republic of Iran looks like. And this is probably what the New Normal will look like. It will consist of on-and-off military tit-for-tats; endless diplomatic squabbling and propagandizing; a Strait of Hormuz that is quasi-open but not reliably so, and is mostly so at Iranian sufferance; no resolution with regard to Iran’s nuclear program; and at the end of the day an Iranian regime that is emboldened, American allies that are uncertain and dispirited, and a United States that is unable to exert its power or will decisively.
It’s not good. But it’s where we are.
You can go big-think in interpreting all of this. You can point out that this state of confusion and embarrassment is a logical conclusion to America’s misbegotten and failed war in Iran, which in turn is a culmination of a reckless new foreign policy that has precipitated the end of the American-led world we’ve benefited from for some eighty years. You can then speculate gloomily on the dangers and disorders that are likely to follow.
This might lead you to go high-brow and poetic, and quote the conclusion of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
Or, you could focus not on the global big picture but on the foolish acts of one individual, President Donald J. Trump. You could emphasize his personal role in bringing about this sad state of affairs. In this case you might rather want to go middlebrow and cinematic, and quote from the climactic scene of the 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz:
“Do not arouse the wrath of the great and powerful Oz! . . .
Do you presume to criticize the great Oz? . . .
The great Oz has spoken!”
[Toto pulls back the curtain]
“Oh, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain . . .
Yes, I’m a humbug.”
And to illustrate the extent that we are now governed by a blustering humbug, you might want to go on to cite Saturday evening’s Truth Social proclamation from the great and powerful Donald J. Trump:
United States aircraft just struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations, and coastal radar sites, for violating the Cease Fire Agreement, AGAIN! It is very possible that they will never learn! There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable, and will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist! President DJT
You could then note that having to strike Iranian missile and drone sites “AGAIN!” shows how false were the administration’s early claims of decisive and overwhelming victory. You could point out how unlikely it is that Trump can “militarily complete” the job he started. You could suggest that this latest instance of Trumpian bluster does more to highlight than to cover up his weakness in this moment. And you could emphasize how foolish and reckless was his choice to start this war.
So citing T.S. Eliot is apt: We are at an important, even world-historical moment.
And citing L. Frank Baum (as re-worked by Metro-Goldwin-Mayer) is also apt: We are being led by a humbug.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Mega-Prison Politics… A new generation of right-wing outsiders is triumphing across Latin America, writes MICHAEL ALBERTUS.
The Questions That Could Sink Todd Blanche… On The Bulwark on Sunday, Former Pardon Attorney LIZ OYER joins BILL KRISTOL to discuss Todd Blanche, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Yes, the Cuts to USAID Have Killed… Elon Musk dismisses the human toll of the Trump administration’s gutting of U.S. foreign aid—but it’s real and it’s measurable, argues LAUREN DOBSON-HUGHES.
This Reporter Calls Trump—And He Answers! On the Mona Charen Show, ED LUCE joins MONA CHAREN to dig into Giorgia Meloni’s public dressing down of Trump, the UK’s political chaos, and the fallout from Trump’s Iran war.
Quick Hits
THE SCORPION AND THE FROG: While opinions of Israel have been souring on both the left and the right for years, Israel’s government thought it had a solid thing in its relationship with the Trump administration. But the war in Iran has shaken that confidence, Politico reports:
The vice president of the United States set the stage last week, telling Israel it has almost no friends left in the world, and that it should think hard before turning on the one it has.
But the problem for Israel is much bigger than JD Vance, according to seven people, including U.S. and Israeli officials and others familiar with the relationship. Instead, they say, Vance is only the face of the new normal, in which Israel’s status as an American ally doesn’t stand above all others.
Israel had expected when President Donald Trump came into office that his America First foreign policy would include “an exception” for Israel, said an Israeli political adviser.
“That was never going to hold. We were never going to be able to stay for four years as an exception to everything else America does in its foreign policy,” the adviser said. “When the clash came, Israel was naive to think that we would be able to be exempt from those expectations.”
SHAFTING THE PARKS: We’ve been rolling our eyes at Donald Trump’s vanity construction projects, at the White House and across D.C., for more than a year. But a new report in the Atlantic reminds us these projects are more than an embarrassment and an eyesore. They’re also sucking up funds for the National Parks—including more than $100 million in visitor fees collected at the country’s national parks—while forcing those same parks to go without:
Park Service employees I spoke with describe a quiet crisis unfolding as the Interior Department’s regular budget shrinks and political appointees redirect the dwindling funds. More than 900 Park Service projects that were expected to be funded this year never received the money, according to internal records. They include a $1.5 million roof-replacement project at the Yellowstone Center for Resources to halt pest invasions and water leaks, more than $3 million to continue operating the free-bus system in Acadia National Park, and a roughly $424,000 guardrail replacement on the cliff edge of Black Canyon in Colorado’s Gunnison National Park, a project needed to rectify a “significant safety hazard for visitors.”
“The president is prioritizing D.C. at the expense of parks throughout the country,” Emily Douce, a lobbyist for the National Parks Conservation Association, told me. “There is $24 billion of maintenance needs throughout the National Park Service system, and adding these new vanity projects just adds to the need.”
That’s on top of the fact that Trump originally claimed he’d be paying for some of these renovations, like a project to repave the pathway between his West Wing residence and the Oval Office with polished African granite, out of his own pocket. “Paid for by me,” Trump said of the $689,000 renovation, ultimately funded by taxpayers. Populism!
GAVIN HEARTS ANTHROPIC: Frontier AI company Anthropic is still squabbling with the federal government. But Politico reports they’re making up ground in other government work: California just struck a deal with Anthropic to expand the chatbot’s use throughout the state government. Here’s Politico:
Newsom’s deal seeks to drive broader adoption of Claude by cutting the AI chatbot’s price in half for state government agencies, as well as Californian cities and counties that decide to take advantage. The terms also include free workforce training and technical support from Anthropic staff.
This March, Newsom signed an executive order meant to raise standards for AI companies seeking state contracts and allow California to separate its procurement process from the Trump administration.
While that order could directly challenge the federal government, Newsom’s administration says the new Anthropic deal was not intended as a rebuke or response to Washington.
Given Newsom’s obvious presidential ambitions, his decision to lean in on AI is particularly interesting: Odds are he’ll be among the most bullish on the technology in an environment where voters are shaping up to be pretty hostile to it. Read the whole thing.
Cheap Shots
The corruption is so blatant it’s astounding. The Democrats need to hit on this corruption daily. Trump and his cronies are using the Presidency to line their pockets with billions of dollars while the average American is struggling with living costs. The advertisements write themselves and this is corruption that can be explained and exploited if Democrats would get their act together. Pound Republicans on the corruption. Bring it up every single day in every forum.
Reading The Bulwark essay about people who have died because of cuts to USAID, I realized that none of these stories is going to convince Musk and his supporters of anything - other than make them feel superior because the stories mostly involved dead brown and black people.
As with Covid, every death is going to be dismissed - if acknowledged at all - as being caused by something else: co-morbidities, bad choices, other circumstances. Ranging from gun deaths to drought, we are all blameless because, gosh darn it, things are just so complicated.
Who can say if food would have saved that starving child when there could have been bad germs in the bowl or - who knows? - maybe the food itself could have choked her as she ate. There's just no way of knowing what's the best thing to do, so better to do nothing!