Day: November 20, 2016
Will Romney or Mattis make a difference?
A friend brought this to my attention:
He noted that you don’t have to speak a word of Italian to understand the message: make Italy great again! We know how that turned out.
The similarity of rhetorical style to Donald Trump is in fact remarkable. A tweeter pointed out to me earlier this week that Trump’s technique involves “enthymeme,” an ancient Greek device in which the crowd is permitted to complete the thought of the speaker. While Mussolini doesn’t exactly do that, he uses pregnant pauses to allow the crowd to anticipate, if not quite to enunciate, what he will say next. Clearly the effect is similar: the crowd loves this man and is ready to do battle in support of him.
Another friend provided this to me, from Adolf Hitler:
The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.
I confess I find Trump an inarticulate speaker, one whose facial expressions are at least as silly as Mussolini’s. His hand gestures are worse. But of course I am not Trump’s audience. And though I speak good Italian, Mussolini leaves me cold too. But George Lakoff’s exegesis is pretty convincing (read it to the end): Trump is practiced and successful in knowing how to appeal to those he has rapport with.
What I don’t know is how well Trump’s popularity will hold up as he appoints obvious bigots, it becomes clear that he can’t deliver on many of his promises, those he can deliver on fail to produce the expected results, and he combines his private business interests with his public office. Mussolini ended up hanging upside down in a public square. Hitler committed suicide in his bunker.
Neither end is likely for Trump, who has the advantage of living in a society attached to a long tradition of allowing its former leaders to live out their natural lives in peace and prosperity. The bigger concern is what kind of America he will have created by the time he leaves office. So far he shows no sign of wanting to bridge the divide with his opponents: he has appointed only hard-line white males, signaling unequivocally his attachment to white nationalist goals and aspirations.
Will it make a difference if he appoints Romney Secretary of State or General Mattis as Defense Secretary? Not in my book. My admittedly minor contact with Mattis left me unimpressed. He is tough talking and intelligent, but hardly likely to reform the Pentagon in a meaningful way. He will welcome the flood of money the Republican Congress will throw his way and get on efficiently with the killing of extremists in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, but he is unlikely to rethink the merits and demerits of that policy, which is essentially identical to President Obama’s.
Romney, as everyone else has already commented, looks the part of chief diplomat and has the considerable virtue of recognizing President Putin as the menace he is. That will put him at odds with Trump, as will his advocacy of free trade and a more forward-leaning American posture in the world. That is much more akin to what Hillary Clinton was offering than what Trump has promised. So if Romney takes the job, he’ll need to knuckle under to a White House that definitely does not share his cosmopolitan views or his commitment to resolute American civilian as well as military leadership in the world.
Romney and Mattis would certainly raise the intellectual level of the Trump administration, which at the moment lies somewhere between the gutter of white nationalism and the cesspool of Benghazi lies. But it will take a lot more than their nominations to convince reasonable people that this new administration wants to govern with respect for us all.
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Peace picks, November 21-25
- The American Moment in the Middle East from Eisenhower to Trump |Monday, November 21 | 11:45am – 1:30pm | Hudson Institute | Click HERE to RegisterWith the election of a new president and significant foreign policy decisions on the line, one of the best ways to understand the stakes involved is to revisit the past. With the Middle East, there is no better place to start than with Dwight Eisenhower, the incisive leader who helped win World War II and formulated America’s Cold War policy. But according to Hudson Senior Fellow Michael Doran in his critically acclaimed new book, Ike’s Gamble, Eisenhower stumbled repeatedly in the Middle East before he got it right.
Eisenhower, in Doran’s account, initially made the same kinds of mistakes that President Barack Obama has made. Both believed America had tilted too closely to Israel and sought to readjust the balance—Obama by realigning with Iran, and Eisenhower by allying with Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. The difference, argues Doran, is that Eisenhower came to realize he was wrong to turn against America’s traditional Middle East allies and he eventually restored the status quo. Obama, however, leaves the White House with America’s position in the Middle East still unsettled. Will Donald Trump be able to repair Middle Eastern relations, or will he indulge isolationist tendencies and further cede America’s status in the region? Given the extent of Eisenhower’s engagement in the region, what other lessons can the next administration draw from his experience?
Join us at Hudson Institute on November 21 as panelists Michael Doran, Hudson Distinguished Fellow Walter Russell Mead, and Council on Foreign Relations Fellow Ray Takeyh discuss Eisenhower’s strategy and the incoming administration’s policy options in the Middle East. This lunchtime panel will be moderated by Hudson Senior Fellow Lee Smith. - Real Security: Governance and Stability in the Arab World | Monday, November 21 | 3:00pm – 4:30pm | Brookings Institution | Click HERE to RegisterThe breakdown of regional order in the Middle East was driven by domestic crises in the relationship between Arab citizens and their governments, but the resulting disorder has unleashed civil violence, sectarian and ethnic conflict, and fierce geopolitical competition. What is the relationship between the region’s power politics and the breakdown in the Arab social contract? What does the collapse of Arab governance tell us about the requisites for lasting stability in the Middle East? And what role can outside powers, especially the United States, play in helping the region move toward more sustainable governance?
On November 21, the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council and the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings will launch a report on this topic written by Tamara Cofman Wittes: “Real Security: The Interdependence of Governance and Stability in the Arab World.” The report was commissioned by the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Strategy Task Force (MEST), co-chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. To discuss the report, they will be joined by Amr Hamzawy, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. - Ambassador Series: Ambassador of Finland, H.E. Kristi Kauppi | Tuesday, November 22 | 6:00pm – 8:00pm | World Affairs Institute at the Ronald Reagan Building | Email to RegisterPlease join the World Affairs Council-Washington, DC as we host Her Excellency Kirsti Kauppi, Ambassador of Finland to the United States. She will address the US – Finland bi-lateral relationship, the country’s approaching centennial, Finland’s climate change research in the Arctic, and its relationship with Russia.
Ambassador Kauppi took up her post in Washington in September 2015. She has over 30 years of experience in foreign policy. She previously served as advisor to the Finnish State Secretary and head of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy coordination in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Helsinki. Her previous diplomatic postings include Permanent Representative to the UN-related international organizations located in Vienna, where she served for three years as the Finnish Governor in the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors.
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