‘Know the adversary’ is the first law of politics, as of war. But how should such knowledge proceed? In examining the thought-worlds that informed American foreign-policymaking, the young Anders Stephanson was drawn to the moments of flux, when the country’s overseas stance was in contention; pre-eminently, the turn of 1945–47, from war-time military and economic alliance with the Soviet Union to nuclear confrontation and high Cold War. A key figure in articulating the premises for that switch—and endowing them with the force and urgency that could animate an ideology—was George Frost Kennan. Wisconsin born, an unlikely recruit for the us Foreign Service, he was a staunch conservative and trained Russianist who had been posted to Moscow after stints in Geneva, Hamburg, Riga, Prague, Berlin, Lisbon. A convinced opponent of the Soviet regime from the 1920s, Kennan had described the Bolsheviks as ‘spiteful Jewish parasites’, declared when Hitler invaded in 1941 that the ussr had no claim on Western sympathy and observed in 1945 that ‘ten good hits with atomic bombs’ could finish its war-making capacity for good. Asked by the State Department in February 1946 for an interpretive report, he dictated from his sickbed in the Embassy the 5,000-word Long Telegram that electrified Truman’s Washington with its account of a regime fanatically committed to the destruction of the American way of life (somewhat contradicted by its reading of Stalin as ‘cautious’). Returning to the us as an intellectual hero, Kennan expanded in his ‘X’ article in Foreign Affairs on the Soviet leaders’ particular brand of fanaticism and the Russian-Asiatic world from which they had emerged, making them impermeable to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of compromise. Active us ‘containment’ and the use of counterforce at every juncture—ideally with measures short of war—was the indicated response.
Whatever the Bolsheviks’ hopes in 1918–21, this was an empirically false description of the ussr in 1947, exhausted from the War, whose main aim was to retain its defensive buffer against a resurgent Germany and to carry on the Big Three understanding affirmed with Churchill at Yalta. Yet the notion of an inherently expansionist Soviet threat, which only America’s superior power and vigilance could prevent from overrunning the world, would be a core claim of Cold War ideology for the next twenty years. Meanwhile us expansionism had ringed the ussr, its forces implanted in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Turkey, Greece, the Persian Gulf and Western Europe. Within a year of the X article, however, Kennan, alarmed by Truman’s belligerence and America’s new global role, began to change his mind. The leading spirit of the early Cold War became one of its most powerful critics, shocking Western establishments with his eloquent case for military disengagement and nato drawback from Germany; later, from his berth at Princeton, opposing the renewed drumbeat against Moscow under Carter and Reagan. When Stephanson approached the old man for permission to quote his papers, he was therefore something more complicated than an opponent.
In the selection of letters between the student and the grandee, published below, Stephanson rather disarmingly shares the conceptual harvest he has gleaned from, broadly speaking, the Western Marxist world, as more productive than either Anglo-Saxon empiricism—mere reporting—or an ideological reductionism that fails to register the relative autonomy of mid-level structures. In Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, Stephanson’s lethally precise use of his voluminous writings, expertly stitched together by the running contextualization and courteous but highly critical evaluative commentary, provides a fully historical portrait of both his sensibility and his function, illuminating why he was—and where he wasn’t—in tune with us global expansion. It is an achievement that makes Kennan’s respectful reception of the book and recognition of himself in it, registered in these letters, all the more remarkable.
Trump is playing the madman. But he’s doing it all wrong
As the Iran war veers in and out of apocalyptic brinkmanship, there are reasons to think unhinged bombast will prove even less successful than in the past.
The following conversation was tape-recorded in the Oval Office some 55 Aprils ago. Richard Nixon is authorising his envoy, Henry Kissinger, to take a message to the North Vietnamese, with whom the US is at war. The message is that Kissinger’s boss is unhinged.
Nixon: “You can say, ‘I cannot control him’. Put it that way.”
Kissinger: “Yeah. And imply that you might use nuclear weapons.”
Nixon: “Yes, sir.”
The president’s aide, HR Haldeman, in his memoirs, recalled another chat to the same effect. And so the “madman theory” – that making extreme threats can bring opponents to the bargaining table – took root.
Editor: Has Janan Ganesh run out of ideas, the reader might ask herself? Or does Nixon, as portraid by Ganesh, read as if Nixon were not the master of the Vietnam War, but an assistant to masterful Kissinger? This essay seems to wander, yet still recognisisng Nixon’s use of ‘private channels’ as some how repesents a more rational approach to Americas criminal aventurism in Vietnam?
Editor: Ganesh assertions take wing! The reader might note that Janan Ganesh was born in 1982, and the Vietnam War ended in April 30, 1975. Ganach’s attempts to weave together something that attempts to resemble History, that seeks to place the reader within a mere backdrop for the faultering American Hegemony?
Donald Trump was practising it almost by name even in his first term. As the Iran war veers in and out of apocalyptic brinkmanship, there are reasons to think the ploy will be even less successful now than it was then.
For one thing, Nixon made his threats through private channels. If he decided to back down from them, he would not lose face in front of the entire world. In contrast, Trump’s threats to erase a civilisation could scarcely be more public.
Another difference is that mid-20th century Vietnam was not central to the world economy. Early-21st century, Iran unmistakably is.
If a few weeks of bombing can trigger the worst energy crisis for half a century, a “mad” escalation might turn oil-price inflation into outright oil shortages.
There is already infrastructure damage that European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde fears will take years to mend. And none of this touches on the likely refugee exodus in the event that Iran becomes a failed state.
This tends to be the problem with madman-ism. The threat is too extreme to be entirely credible. On the other hand, if it is carried out, then by definition, the strategy has failed.
“A Trump apologist could string together a circumstantial case that his ‘worst’ traits – the aggression, the amorality – act as deterrents.”
There is something else that Trump should have learnt from the Nixon experience. Public opinion matters. To even threaten, let alone perform a mad action, would alienate domestic and international audiences.
Unpopular wars
Had Nixon used nuclear weapons in a war of choice, the already vehement anti-war protests at home might have tipped into total civil breakdown. Allies would have recoiled. The communist bloc would have been given a leg-up to the moral high ground.
Similarly, Trump cannot allow a war that now commands the support of 34 per cent of Americans to become much more violent. Autocracies can read the domestic politics of democracies. Just as North Vietnam spotted and harnessed America’s divisions over the war, so could Iran.
(Democracies have a much foggier window into public opinion in closed societies.) Nor can Trump ignore allied countries, as he tacitly concedes whenever he scolds them for not helping to secure the Strait of Hormuz.
We have to reach back into the previous century for the last unambiguously successful US-led war. The failures since then happened in part because there wasn’t enough domestic or foreign buy-in to sustain the scale of force required in, say, Iraq.
In other words, there is an operational case for behaving attractively, not just a moral one. You cannot – whatever the MAGA refrain – “just do things”.
How might a madman theorist respond? What is the strongest case to be made that erratic leadership does work?
Well, Trump is the one US president elected this century under whose watch Russia has not launched a foreign invasion. Vladimir Putin attacked Georgia under George W. Bush, Crimea under Barack Obama and Ukraine under Joe Biden. The sample size is small enough to suggest that nothing more than coincidence is at work here.
But a Trump apologist could string together a circumstantial case that his “worst” traits – the aggression, the amorality – act as deterrents. No state wants to test a man who might respond with sadistic force.
Likewise, Ronald Reagan’s forward nuclear posture in the 1980s seemed unconscionable at the time. Before the decade was out, the Soviets had folded with hardly a shot being fired.
“Circumstantial” is the word, however. Good luck establishing cause and effect here with much confidence. What a thin evidential basis on which to rest such high-stakes statecraft.
The wonder is that madman theory is still discussed with a straight face. Nixon practised it about as well as possible – working in secret, threatening a country of little global significance – and still achieved next to nothing. To the extent that he did go feral, bombing Cambodia and Laos, it sullied the US more than it forced concessions from the other side.
There is a desperation out there to see cunning and forethought in Trump’s wildest behaviour. This has skewed financial markets, which were too optimistic at the start of the war, and in Lagarde’s view still are.
If something good is to come of the present chaos, it might be a new realism about the US leader. Even if Trump does have a strategy that can be called madman theory, that doesn’t mean it is a good one. It just means that he has a weird reading of the past.
Four years after the Oval Office conversation between Nixon and Kissinger, the North Vietnamese took Saigon. Of the 58,220 US deaths in the war, over 20,000 occurred under the genius pair.
Newspaper Reader.
Saturday, April 11, 2026
Editor: Ganesh is by any measure a Flâneur as my comments over time will demostrate !
Newspaper Reader. stephenkmacksd.com/ Mar 05, 2026 Middle East war Be glad of Starmer’s caution over Iran Bellicose critics of the UK prime minister have learnt nothing from the recent past Janan Ganesh Newspaper Reader.
Newspaper Reader offers ‘A Janan Ganesh Cornucopia’! stephenkmacksd.com/ Feb 18, 2026 Headline: Maga will regret embracing Europe’s hard right Sub-headline: Nationalists on the continent have historically opposed America more than anything else https://www.ft.com/content/0baf4e30-3501-4aec-a189-5c49e40908aa Some selective quotation from Ganesh’s essay, for … Continue reading →
stephenkmacksd.com/ Feb 15, 2026 Life & Arts Liberals should mourn the passing world Why apologise for what was the most successful international order in history? Best regards! StephenKMackSD
Newspaper Reader. stephenkmacksd.com/ Feb 11, 2026 Opinion Keir Starmer Britain should pray that Starmer survives The country did not and would not vote for the Labour left An unsustainable situation can be sustained for quite a long time. John Major, Gordon … Continue reading →
Newspaper Reader comments. stephenkmacksd.com/ Oct 04, 2025 Opinion Life & Arts The war against the quite good The bidding war for geniuses will antagonise those just below Janan Ganesh https://www.ft.com/content/0fc44c6b-277c-4472-a235-65f59a9195f3 Editor: Janan almost pulls out all the stops, for his … Continue reading →
Political Observer and my other critical guises ! stephenkmacksd.com/ Oct 01, 2025 Reader I can’t quite break my habit of critiquing Ganesh… Yet I am unable to break the ban, that FT has imposed upon me, to be again a … Continue reading →
Posted on February 3, 2021 by stephenkmacksd stephenkmacksd.com/ Aug 29, 2025 Title this ‘The Enlightenment of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’ ? Mr. Ganesh doesn’t need to dust off his Madame Arcati shtick, he uses C-Span to demonstrate that Bill Clinton’s utter … Continue reading →
Political Reporter. stephenkmacksd.com/ Aug 21, 2025 At The Financial Times: Janan Ganesh demonstates The Myopia of the Winner, a comment by Political Reporter Posted on October 20, 2015 by stephenkmacksd Mr. Ganesh demonstrates that the enemy of the political winner is the inability … Continue reading →
Literary Observer re-aquaints himself with Ganesh as *flâneur? stephenkmacksd.com/ Jun 25, 2025 Headline: How Los Angeles made the modern world Sub-headline: The troubled city has done more than most to shape how people now live https://www.ft.com/content/7f416e2b-a89b-4083-b3c2-77461d3986c4 It’s been sometime since … Continue reading →
StephenKMackSD. stephenkmacksd.com/ Mar 03, 2025 Janan Ganesh’s Hipster L.A. American Writer comments Posted on September 6, 2020 by stephenkmacksd Mr. Ganesh is my favorite flâneur! He can write a feuilleton, the rhetoric of the Sunday Supplement’s decorous chatter, like no other writer in … Continue reading →
Newspaper Reader comments. stephenkmacksd.com/ Feb 07, 2025 As usual Janan Ganesh has a lively and insightful conversation with himself -its like a fast moving current in a river of ideas, speculations, and just plain political chatter – some call this … Continue reading →
Newspaper Reader comments. stephenkmacksd.com/ Jan 02, 2025 Headline: Things have to get worse to get better Sub-headline : Voters can’t be sold on change until their nation is in acute trouble https://www.ft.com/content/c9a8d92a-0c1d-424e-83be-c3469c370c19 Editor:The Reader of Mr. Ganesh’s latest essay is … Continue reading →
Editor: Even the utterly tepid Sherman McCoy as imagined by the long forgotten Tom Wolfe, captured the imaginations of America of circa 1987? But Stephens unremarkable chatter, is at best a collection of political moments, offered as somthing more that itself !
Imagine, for a moment, that you are a gifted midcareer intelligence officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Because of the nature of your work, you have access to foreign sources of news. Because of your intellect, you preserve a capacity for independent judgment even as you remain loyal to the regime.
How’s the war going? To read various accounts in the Western press, remarkably well — for Iran.
For all the damage the United States and Israel have inflicted on Iran’s leadership ranks and war-making capabilities, the regime remains intact, unbowed, functional. There has been no mass uprising, thanks to the brutal crackdown that followed protests in early January. Closing the Strait of Hormuz, which required minimal military effort by Iran, has exercised maximum leverage over the global economy while boosting your oil revenues. The war is even more unpopular in the United States today than it was at the start; it is also causing more Americans to rethink the wisdom of their reflexive support for Israel. President Trump’s expletive-laden social media posts increasingly sound more desperate than they do fierce. And the I.R.G.C. is more powerful than ever.
One insight, repeatedly cited by Western pundits as evidence that Iran has the upper hand in the current war, has led you to its source, a 1969 critique of U.S. policy in Vietnam from none other than Henry Kissinger.
This should bring you comfort. It doesn’t.
Though Iranian military doctrine often resorts to guerrilla-like means, Iran itself is a conventional state, with a government that works out of office buildings, oversees infrastructure projects, pays its bureaucrats their salaries, runs an airline and so on. Nor (until the war) did the regime normally embed and hide itself within the general population, as guerrillas do. On the contrary, it lords over them with a ferocity that, in moments of honest self-reflection, shames you.
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Editor: Here are the final paragraphs of Stephens unimpressive exercise of cut and paste! The Readers of Wolf’s novel will recall the escape from the father and son duo, to the safety of Sherman McCoy’ home, if I recall correctly, ends or better yet is awash in Presbyterianism : in sum the most forgetable sexual coupling ever alluded to in American Fiction!
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There’s always a chance the Americans and Israelis could blunder militarily in ways that hurt them strategically. It was a shame that the two American Air Force officers shot down over Iran last week were able to evade capture, denying you valuable bargaining chips while again underscoring your military’s relative weakness and incompetence.
More promising is the prospect of American bombs falling on civilian targets, which is why your superiors are now urging young Iranians to form human chains around power plants. You are decent enough to recognize the cruelty of the tactic — and cynical enough to appreciate its potential efficacy. As the war in Gaza made clear, Western public opinion won’t support bombing children, no matter who’s to blame for putting them in harm’s way. And a U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign that kills hundreds of civilians could give the regime the one gift it would not have had otherwise: an Iranian public that’s on its side.
Right now, there’s no telling what will happen. But as you survey where Iran stands now compared with where it stood just three years ago, you are overwhelmed with a sense of loss. Your once-powerful proxies in Gaza, Beirut, Damascus: decimated, deposed or dead. The Arab states: increasingly on side with the Americans and Zionists. Your nuclear program: set back for years or decades, if not forever. Your economy: in even deeper crisis than it was before the war, with no turnaround in sight. Your most capable leaders: dead. Your own people: waiting for the war and the state of emergency to end so they can rise against you again.
It’s a solace of sorts that sophisticated Western commentators think you’re winning this thing. From wherever you are now hiding — since it’s not safe to go to work — it doesn’t feel that way.
Is ‘Breaking Poinst’ the latest iteration of reinvigorated ‘Liberalism’ ? that has managed to carve a place for itself, within a strata of the overeucated graduates, whose chatter to each other, for an auidence composed the great grandchildren of Mario Savio?
MARIO SAVIO, “AN END TO HISTORY” (2 DECEMBER 1964)
Berkeley, California
[1] Last summer I went to Mississippi to join the struggle there for civil rights. This fall I am engaged in another phase of the same struggle, this time in Berkeley. The two battlefields may seem quite different to some observers, but this is not the case. The same rights are at stake in both places—the right to participate as citizens in [a] democratic society and the right to due process of law. Further, it is a struggle against the same enemy. In Mississippi an autocratic and powerful minority rules through organized violence to suppress the vast, virtually powerless majority. In California the privileged minority manipulates the university bureaucracy to suppress the students’ political expression. That “respectable” bureaucracy masks the financial plutocrats; that impersonal bureaucracy is the efficient enemy in a Brave New World.
[2] In our free speech fight at the University of California, we have come up against what may emerge as the greatest problem of our nation—depersonalized, unresponsive bureaucracy. We have encountered the organized status quo in Mississippi, but it is the same in Berkeley. Here we find it impossible usually to meet with anyone but secretaries. Beyond that, we find functionaries who cannot make policy but can only hide behind the rules. We have discovered total lack of response on the part of the policy makers. To grasp a situation which is truly Kafkaesque, it is necessary to understand the bureaucratic mentality. And we have learned quite a bit about it this fall, more outside the classroom than in.
[3] As bureaucrat, an administrator believes that nothing new happens. He occupies an ahistorical point of view. In September, to get the attention of this bureaucracy which had issued arbitrary edicts suppressing student political expression and refused to discuss its action, we held a sit-in on the campus. We sat around a police car and kept it immobilized for over thirty-two hours. At last, the administrative bureaucracy agreed to negotiate. But instead, on the following Monday, we discovered that a committee had been appointed, in accordance with usual regulations, to resolve the dispute. Our attempt to convince any of the administrators that an event had occurred, that something new had happened, failed. They saw this simply as something to be handled by normal university procedures.
[4] The same is true of all bureaucracies. They begin as tools, means to certain legitimate goals, and they end up feeding their own existence. The conception that bureaucrats have is that history has in fact come to an end. No events can occur now that the Second World War is over which can change American society substantially. We proceed by standard procedures as we are.
[5] The most crucial problems facing the United States today are the problem of automation and the problem of racial injustice. Most people who will be put out of jobs by machines will not accept an end to events, this historical plateau, as the point beyond which no change occurs. Negroes will not accept an end to history here. All of us must refuse to accept history’s final judgment that in America there is no place in society for people whose skins are dark. On campus students are not about to accept it as fact that the university has ceased evolving and is in its final state of perfection, that students and faculty are respectively raw material and employees, or that the university is to be autocratically run by unresponsive bureaucrats.
[6] Here is the real contradiction: The bureaucrats hold history [h]as ended. As a result significant parts of the population both on campus and off are dispossessed, and these dispossessed are not about to accept this ahistorical point of view. It is out of this that the conflict has occurred with the university bureaucracy and will continue to occur until that bureaucracy becomes responsive or until it is clear the university cannot function.
[7] The things we are asking for in our civil rights protests have a deceptively quaint ring. We are asking for the due process of law. We are asking for our actions to be judged by committees of our peers. We are asking that regulations ought to be considered as arrived at legitimately only from the consensus of the governed. These phrases are all pretty old, but they are not being taken seriously in America today; nor are they being taken seriously on the Berkeley campus.
[8] I have just come from a meeting with the Dean of Students. She notified us that she was aware of certain violations of university regulations by certain organizations. University friends of SNCC, which I represent, was one of these. We tried to draw from her some statement on these great principles, consent of the governed, jury of one’s peers, due process. The best she could do was to evade or to present the administration party line. It is very hard to make any contact with the human being who is behind these organizations.
[9] The university is the place where people begin seriously to question the conditions of their existence and raise the issue of whether they can be committed to the society they have been born into. After a long period of apathy during the ‘50s, students have begun not only to question but, having arrived at answers, to act on those answers. This is part of a growing understanding among many people in America that history has not ended, that a better society is possible and that it is worth dying for.
[10] This free speech fight points up a fascinating aspect of contemporary campus life. Students are permitted to talk all they want so long as their speech has no consequences.
[11] One conception of the university, suggest by a classical Christian formulation, is that it be in the world but not of the world. The conception of Clark Kerr by contrast is that the university is part and parcel of this particular stage in the history of American society; it is a factory that turns out a certain product needed by industry or government. Because speech does often have consequences which might alter this perversion of higher education, the university must put itself in a position of censorship. It can permit two kinds of speech, speech which encourages continuation of the status quo and speech which advocates changes in it so radical as to be irrelevant in the foreseeable future. Someone may advocate radical change in all aspects of American society, and this I am sure he can do with impunity. But if someone advocates sit-ins to bring about changes in discriminatory hiring practices, this cannot be permitted because it goes against the status quo of which the university is a part. And that is how the fight began here.
[12] The administration of the Berkeley campus has admitted that external, extralegal groups have pressured the university not to permit students on campus to organize picket lines, not to permit on campus any speech with consequences. And the bureaucracy went along. Speech with consequences, speech in the area of civil rights, speech which some might regard as illegal, must stop.
[13] Many students here at the university, many people in society, are wandering aimlessly about. Strangers in their own lives, there is no place for them. They are people who have not learned to compromise, who, for example, have come to the university to learn to question, to grow, to learn—all the standard things that sound like clichés because no one takes them seriously. And they find at one point or another that for them to become part of society, to become lawyers, ministers, businessmen, people in government, that very often they must compromise those principles which were most dear to them. They must suppress the most creative impulses that they have; this is a prior condition for being part of the system. The university is well structured, well tooled, to turn out people with all the sharp edges worn off, the well-rounded person. The university is well equipped to produce that sort of person, and this means that the best among the people who enter must for four years wander aimlessly much of the time questioning why they are on campus at all, doubting whether there is any point in what they are doing, and looking toward a very bleak existence afterward in a game in which all of the rules have been made up, which one cannot really amend.
[14] It is a bleak scene, but it is all a lot of us have to look forward to. Society provides us no challenge. American society in the standard conception it has of itself is simply no longer exciting. The most exciting things going on in America today are movements to change America. America is becoming ever more the utopia of sterilized, automated contentment. The “futures” and “careers” for which American students now prepare are for the most part intellectual and moral wastelands. This chrome-plated consumers’ paradise would have us grow up to be well-behaved children. But an important minority of men and women coming to the front today have shown that they will die rather than be standardized, replaceable, and irrelevant.
Headline: You Can Smell It Now: The Trump Presidency Is in Total Free Fall
Sub-headline: A loyal army of followers, a huge disinformation network, and a party of soul-selling cowards can crowd out facts for a long time. But eventually, reality catches up.
Editor: Michael Tomasky is a paid political apologist for the Clintons. Yet what might the reader think of the Joe Biden candidacy as a check on Bernie Sanders?
These were and are Trump’s four pillars (there is considerable overlap between the first two groups, but they’re somewhat different). They have sustained him in and out of power for more than a decade, and they’ve proven stronger than the two things that in theory have the power to bring Trump down: the political opposition and plain reality.
But take a good, contemplative whiff of the zeitgeist right about now, and you’ll smell change in the air. The opposition is stronger. And I don’t mean chiefly the Democrats in Congress. We all know that some of them are effective, others not so much, but even those who do speak to the anger so many Americans feel don’t have much institutional power to do anything about it.
No—the opposition arose not in Washington, but in Chicago and Minneapolis, and in the thousands of No Kings Day marches that brought eight million Americans out into the streets. And as Trump is not a normal American politician, this is not a normal political opposition. These millions of Americans aren’t merely against his policies, although they surely are that. They’re against his hatred and lawlessness and corruption, and the moral rot he’s spreading over this country like blight over trees.
Editor: Reader note that ‘No Kings Day’is about the political erasre of the utterly bankrupt New Democrats Bill and Hillery, and there coterie of a Political Technocrats like Tomasky!
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I never understood, in 2024, how all these people convinced themselves that Trump could lower the price of a gallon of gas and a pound of ground chuck. He has raised the price of gas through his war on Iran. The price of beef is at an all-time high, and while that’s not really his fault—it’s mainly because cattle inventories are at a 75-year low due to drought and other factors—the increase makes the crucial point that there are many price inputs over which a president has no control.
I also never understood why anyone believed that he wouldn’t start dumb wars if the circumstances, in his mind, warranted doing so. The one fundamental fact about Donald Trump is, as my late friend and great Trump chronicler Wayne Barrett famously put it, he’ll say whatever he needs to say to wriggle through the next 10 minutes. He said what he said about wars to get elected. Period. Anyone who believed otherwise was, frankly, an idiot. And so now here we are, with Trump mocking Allah and likely this week to commit acts defined as war crimes under the Geneva Convention.
A loyal army of followers, a huge disinformation network, and a party of soul-selling cowards can crowd out facts for a long time. But eventually, reality catches up. It’s finally happening. I’d say we should celebrate. But there now arises the question of how he’ll react as reality closes in on him. I fear we haven’t begun to see the worst.
Editor: The final paragraph of Tomaski’s rant is awash in Sturm und Drang! Trump was elected President and served from 2017–2021, and was suceed my Joe Biden as predident from 2021 to 2025. Perhaps my comment on Age of Fracture by Daniel T. Rodgers of September 7, 2011 might offer some insights?
I finished Age of Fracture almost a week ago and decided that I would give some time to let my thoughts on this book coalese, but the further I got from that point in readerly time the more distant my thoughts became, the more faded, as if I had read a novel that rivited my attention only for the time of my engagement and was lost upon turning the last page. I reread the Epilogue to remind myself, to reacquaint with that dissatisfaction.I was very dissatisfied when I first completed my reading of it. I found that the Epilogue was a complete disappointment, a summing up that somehow didn’t really match the obvious research and time that went into this fascinating act of historical/intellectual reconstruction. It could have been entitled From Reagan to Obama: A Political History, but that, of course, would not carry the World Historical import that Age of Fracture carries with it, for good or ill. Professor Rodgers is an utterly conventional thinker, in some ways, not that you would be able to grasp that fact from the chapters that proceed the Epilogue, which are gems of historical prose and analysis. This book is a pleasure to read and worthy of your time and attention, the only real test, as far as I’m concerned. It is rather disappointingly obvious when the summing up of the Epilogue is finished, that the chapters that precede it are the worthy center of this history. Please read this book for the pleasure of its’ cast of familiar characters who come to vivid life illuminated by a more careful reading of history. I am a plodder, so it took me a week to read this book, but for that pesky Epilogue this is first rate.
Here is Professor Rodgers stunning historical precis of the Mythology of the Market as idea, political,economic and legal practice, in our national life. The pernicious idea of the Market as metaphysical quantity,historical/political actor and household god is here treated to a breathtakingly rigorus thirty five page history. He manages to make this historical recreation completely, absorbingly readable, and to top it off,not withstanding it utter complexity, comprehensible.Bravo!
Who is the anti-Trump? The human opposite of him? Robert Mueller, who once investigated the US president, had a strong claim. He spent the great bulk of his career in unremunerative public life. He joined the Marines because a friend died in the corps, not despite that fact. In obituaries since his own death last month, the word “integrity” recurs. Donald Trump instead went with: “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.” Perhaps this wasn’t just personal animus talking but also total mystification at the values of someone like Mueller.
Trump does not understand people who believe in things. Recognise this blind spot, and his current struggles abroad become easier to explain.
Editor: How did Robert Mueller come to dominated Ganesh’s lattest – reader think of it as the nessesary ballist, to hold his feather-weight chatter aloft mere inches from it’s imminent collapsec ?
If Iran has put up more of a fight than he had expected, that is because it really is devoted to certain causes. The survival of the Islamic revolution is one. National amour propre is another, for the less theologically minded in the regime. Then there is plain hatred of America and Israel. You need not admire these beliefs to recognise their motivating power in Tehran.
Editor: Ganesh presents a highly inflected version with his minscule Iranian acters.
Trump struggles to make that imaginative leap: to think himself into the mind of a zealot. To this businessman, Iranian slogans (“The blood in our veins is a gift to our leader”) sound like the opening bluster of a negotiation. It is the equivalent of quoting an extortionate price for a distressed asset. That Iran means it — that anyone means anything — strikes him as incredible.
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Editor: The reader who once read Timothy Snyder for his Anti-Russian hysterics now confront a political actor who tired of Zelenskyy, and has moved on?
Consider the other foreign policy failure of his second term. It genuinely baffles Trump that he cannot foist a quick settlement on the warring parties in Ukraine. It baffles almost no one else. Ukrainians believe in their independent nationhood. Vladimir Putin is no less attached to the idea of a Greater Russia that includes Ukraine. And so the conflict, while terrible, is not weird or anomalous — except to someone who cannot believe that other people believe.
Editor: These nexxt three paragraphs are awash in a Ganesh public morilizing about Trumps ‘faulty picture of the world’ ! This morsel of Ganesh chatter signafies what?
Trump has been irreverent enough about Americans who are captured or maimed in the line of service. How is he to fathom foreigners who make that sacrifice?
There is a kind of cynicism so extreme that it crosses over into naivety. If Trump will not credit that people often act out of conviction, that human behaviour can have a moral or ideological root, he isn’t “red-pilled”. He isn’t “based”. He just has a faulty picture of the world. And so, as we are seeing, a lack of purchase on world events.
His colleagues are open about his confusion in the face of other people’s intransigent beliefs. According to his envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump found it “curious” that Iran did not surrender as soon as the US amassed force in the region. All that firepower should have scared the regime into making concessions. “And yet it’s sort of hard to get them to that place.” Adorable.
Editor: This above sentence of Ganesh chatter in italics signafies what?
Or consider this from JD Vance about his boss’s way of thinking: “Rather than Russia and Ukraine killing one another, why don’t they actually engage in some commerce with one another . . . ?” In other words, how could people let national feeling get in the way of win-win economics? No one is more damning about Trump than a colleague striving to praise him.
His cynicism is sometimes borne out, of course. When he raised tariffs on Europe a year ago, the continent more or less folded. At home, the GOP is made up of once-proud men and women who abased themselves to him in return for high office or a quiet life. Given how often Trump has seen people forfeit their ideals under duress, he can be excused his low view of humankind: his belief in the essential negotiability of everyone. He is right often enough.
When he is wrong, however, the consequences are world-changing. China countered his tariffs with its own. A year on, it seems the saner if not the more attractive superpower. Ukraine did not submit to Trump’s invidious peace plan and has lived to fight on. But the example that should shatter the Trump worldview is Iran. The regime turns out to have the ideological conviction to sustain a fight, not just the military assets.
Editor: The Reader developes a kind of politial/moral ennui as Ganesh attempts to stitch together the whole, with collection of disparate parts?
If Trump had true believers around him, he might at least gain a vicarious insight into how some foreign governments think. Instead, he has the likes of Vance, a former moderate who turned hard right when it became convenient to do so. Marco Rubio is another changeling. Witkoff and Jared Kushner are commercial animals. Stephen Miller is a rare zealot, with no cabinet rank. And the “administration”, if an increasingly crowded gravy train can be so dignified, sits on top of a Maga base that has reversed its opinion about foreign wars essentially overnight.
Editor : Ganesh attempts to dignose, via in the above quotation, that Trump and his four operatives: Vance, Rubio, Kushner & Miller have not just failed but are without a clue?
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Editor: On the very question of Fascism, as related to Trump and his minions, Ganesh applies this well worn platitude, : ‘The theme here is not “fascism” — a word cheapened through overuse — but almost total emptiness.’
The theme here is not “fascism” — a word cheapened through overuse — but almost total emptiness. Of course, a government of spivs and cynics is not the worst thing. (Try a government of fanatics.) But it is ill-equipped to understand and therefore to navigate a world of sincere believers, whether these be Chinese communists, Russian irredentists or Iranian clerics.
Editor: In his political deperation Ganesh now postulates the notion/reality of a ‘Rightwing Marxist’
In the end, Trump is what might be called a rightwing Marxist. He is sure that material interest is what drives people, that ideals are mere dressing for base motives. It is hard to conceive of a president less suited to taking on a revolutionary state in war. The lesson of the past month, though obvious, might be too much for a man of Trump’s commercial ken to accept. Not everyone has a price.
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