How A Bumbling Fool Marches From Triumph To Triumph
/I’m old enough to remember the press coverage of Ronald Reagan as President. It was not as uniformly and aggressively hostile as the current coverage of President Trump, but close. The gist was that this guy was a bumbling fool who didn’t understand anything about either foreign or domestic policy. He had gone to a nothing college that no one had ever heard of. All the smart people knew that the right foreign policy was to reach accommodations with the Soviet Union, but instead he put us at risk of World War III by calling it an “Evil Empire” and vowing to out-compete it. The smart people also knew that the right domestic policy was massively increasing government spending, but instead he fought to restrain the government’s domestic footprint.
The Soviet Union collapsed, and the economy soared.
I thought that Reagan was quite intelligent; but another possibility is that you don’t need to be all that intelligent to do a good job as President. All you need to do is to replace the progressive program of utopian fantasies and wishful thinking with a small dose of reality and common sense.
The alternative view is that the success of any action by Trump that deviates from the consensus of the smart people can only be due to dumb luck. For an exposition of that view, check out this piece by Tom McTague in the Atlantic on January 17, titled “Donald Trump Stumbles Into a Foreign-Policy Triumph.” The gist is that the killing of Soleimani did not succeed for any well-thought-out strategic reasons, but rather by the dumb luck stemming mostly from Trump’s frightening and erratic behavior:
The president’s erratic behavior might be doing something else as well, something even more fundamental. Through a combination of instinct, temperament, and capriciousness, Trump may be reminding the world of the reality of international relations. . . . Although Trump’s foreign-policy strategy (if one even accepts that there is such a thing) has many limits, his unpredictability and, most crucially, his willingness to escalate a crisis using the United States’ military and economic strength have turned the tables on Iran in a way few thought possible.
And definitely, we will not admit even the hint of a possibility that Trump’s actions may be guided by some actual underlying strategy:
[A British diplomate I spoke with] said that Trump appears to understand American strength more instinctively than Obama but, unlike his predecessor, doesn’t seem to have anything close to a strategy to go alongside this insight.
In other matters obviously having nothing to do with any grand strategy relating to Iran or any other international bad actor:
The price of WTI crude oil closed today at $56.05/barrel, down from well over $100/barrel 6 years ago. The price decline by about half is uniformly attributed to the fracking revolution in the United States. President Obama resisted that revolution with every policy device he could muster, and most of the Democratic candidates for President have promised to ban fracking entirely. Trump has encouraged fracking.
And then there are the new and harsh sanctions imposed by Trump on Iran in June 2019. Discussing Iran’s new government budget on December 8, 2019, the Guardian reported: “Preliminary reports by local news agencies said the budget appeared to be based on oil sales of 500,000 to 1m barrels per day (bpd). Under US sanctions, analysts estimate Iran’s oil exports have tumbled to about 400,000 bpd or even lower, from more than 2.5m bpd.”
So, between the fracking-induce price declines and the sanctions, how are things looking overall for Iran’s budget? From the Guardian:
[T]he International Monetary Fund has indicated Iran would need oil prices to be triple current levels to balance its budget as its crude exports have plunged.
Thankfully, we have a very lucky president.