But any trust-the-plan case for Trump’s approach underrates how much time can be wasted and policy opportunities lost unraveling problems of your own making. The idea that we’re going to end up with the optimal form of re-industrialization at the end of all the Trump trade drama is, let’s just say, extremely unproven; a scenario where the economy just survives the drama seems more like Trump’s best case, with worse ones still very much in the picture.
And then there is just the inherent danger in living, for three years and eight months more, with a president who we know from the experience of Jan. 6, 2021, doesn’t always backtrack when he enters dangerous terrain.
A contained, checked form of Trumpian aggression seems to be what a subset of Americans want from this presidency. But their support, now as last November, rests on a gamble — that there will be forces strong enough to check him even if he decides not to chicken out.
Editor: the above is an example of the ‘Lowbrow Douthat’ in the ending of his essay at the
The some selected paragraphs of Mr. Doutaht on Gaza :
…
How would you weigh the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, with reference to a decadent empire’s ability or inability to maintain a Pax Americana?
One could imagine a synthesis of Biden’s Ukraine policy and Trump’s impulses that would be correct. The us overextended itself in making guarantees to Ukraine that it was never going to be able to fulfil; like our failures in Afghanistan, that was an example of imperial overreach. Once Russia invaded Ukraine, it made sense to support the Ukrainians. The failure of the Biden Administration was not recognizing the moment to cut a deal—which is hard to do. But there was a window, when Ukraine had regained a certain amount of territory, when the Administration should have said, ok, this is the frontier of our empire. Ukraine is never going to be in nato, it’s not going to get all its territory back; but they could have cut a deal to end the war in a way that would have allowed Ukraine to retain territorial integrity. There are people in the Trump Administration who want to do that. But there is also an impulse to just wash our hands of this. The outcome will depend on which impulse prevails. But Russia is in a better position now than it was two years ago. A Harris Administration would have ended up pushing in a similar direction. But Trump’s wash-his-hands impulse might leave Ukraine in a more unsustainable position than it should be.
And Gaza?
There, too, there’s a version of the Trump position which says we’re broadly on the Israeli side, but we’re not letting them just set the agenda, that could be correct. But the absence of a solution for Gaza is an intractable problem. Biden was in an impossible position, caught between his own base and the Republican Party, and his own senility and inability to be an effective actor on the world stage, which made America basically a bystander. Notwithstanding rising sympathy for the Palestinians, America’s going to retain a basic pro-Israel alignment for the next twenty years, but within that it needs to exert more influence over Israel than Biden was able to do. But toward what endgame, I don’t know. If I knew that, I’d be Jared Kushner.
To describe Washington’s role in the war in Gaza as that of ‘bystander’—given that the us has supplied Israel with tens of thousands of massive bombs and the aircraft dropping them to obliterate the Strip, together with the requisite diplomatic coverage operation at the un and elsewhere—isn’t that a euphemism of the kind you otherwise tend to avoid?
‘Bystander’ in the sense of the Biden Administration not exerting any clear strategic influence over Israel, over the conduct of the war or over the larger regional drama. That largely reflected Biden himself being effectively checked out as a major actor in his own presidency. The us remains a patron of Israel and remains directly involved in the conflict. By virtue of being a hegemonic power, the us is not a bystander in any absolute sense.
Editor: In these paragraphs The Reader discovers that Douthat is just another New York Times Political/Moral conformist, like Friedman, Brooks, Stephens and the rest of the second-stringers at this newspaper. Douthat, in his New York Times iteration, plays the role of just another political mediocrity! Yet Nick Burns interview of Douthat is revelatory of what?
Political Observer.
Added 6/1/2025
Editor : I do recall reading four of Douthat’s essay at the Spectator, which I’m having trouble finding, yet the writer of those essays seemed to be less of The New York Times persona, and more like an actual Conservative voice!
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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