Israel’s Victory Will Be a Success for American Grand Strategy

By Richard Goldberg

Friday, October 04, 2024

 

Iran’s large-scale strategic attack on Israel this week came in the wake of Jerusalem’s utter decimation of Hezbollah, Tehran’s flagship terrorist organization. The United States and Israel have now come to a strategic fork in the road — a decision point on how to respond.

 

Despite the Biden administration’s best efforts to appease Iran and restrain Israel over the past four years, and certainly over the past few months, Israel is finally executing a victory strategy to defeat Iran and its axis of terror in the Middle East. That strategy’s logical conclusion — never clearer or within closer reach than at this very hour — is one that would be not just a win for Israel but a major achievement for American grand strategy: Iran must lose.

 

In addition to sustained missile-defense contributions, we should be providing Israel all the logistical and intelligence support it needs to do severe damage to Iran’s most lethal threats: its missile arsenal, nuclear infrastructure, and Revolutionary Guard Corps command and control. We should also not hesitate to use our own stand-off capabilities against the regime in response to any attack on U.S. interests by its proxies, including the Houthis. It goes without saying that the Biden-Harris era of appeasement must, at the same time, come to an end: The U.S. must shut down the regime’s access to financial resources, increase its political isolation, and find new, creative ways to support Iran’s people.

 

The threat that Tehran by itself poses directly to the world is reason enough to support Israeli military action to cripple its nuclear and missile infrastructure, alongside a U.S.-led Reagan-style strategy to help the Iranian people bring down their radical Islamic regime. But its more recent evolution into a center of gravity for the global China-led axis of anti-American powers offers another compelling reason to seize the moment.

 

As the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, Iran has not only set the Middle East on fire from the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, it continues to plot terror attacks on the U.S. homeland — from plotting to assassinate American officials, including a former president, to attempting to kidnap American citizens from the Port of New York.

 

Iran’s terror subsidiaries in Iraq and Syria have killed and maimed American soldiers and contractors while its terror arm in Yemen rains missiles and drones down on U.S. Navy destroyers on a nearly daily basis, attempting to shut down one of the world’s most strategic waterways.

 

And that’s what Iran can do on its own without nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles — both of which the regime is pursuing in earnest. For the first time in 17 years, even though we’ve watched as the assembly line was built before our eyes, the U.S. intelligence community can no longer assess that Iran isn’t working on a nuclear weapon. And Iran’s recent satellite launch reminds us that its ultimate objective, beyond the destruction of Israel, is the destruction of the U.S. homeland — and it won’t stop until it develops the delivery system to fulfill its infamous pledge, “Death to America.”

 

President Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, the JCPOA, played along with Iran’s extortion game: The U.S. paid a racket to fund terrorism and missile production in the false hope that doing so might delay a military showdown. President Biden’s reversion to this failed strategy in 2021 allowed Iran to recover from President Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign.

 

Over the past three years, the regime raced toward the nuclear threshold as terror budgets skyrocketed, with Hamas’s terror subsidies tripling in the months before the October 7 massacre. But Iran has also become a strategic linchpin for America’s top two adversaries and thus a strategic vulnerability for both should the regime ever collapse.

 

China depends on Middle Eastern oil to run its economy, and with the United States not enforcing sanctions, Iran has emerged as China’s discount gas station. Beijing has positioned itself as a pseudo Middle East power broker, luring Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates into its strategic orbit on the promise it can mediate with Iran. Beijing hopes those relationships will lead to port access, missile-production cooperation, and nuclear-energy deals in the future.

 

Meanwhile, Iran’s support to terror proxies like the Houthis in Yemen keeps the U.S. military distracted in the Middle East instead of diverting more resources to the Indo-Pacific. And a nuclear-armed Iran aligned with China would be an insurance policy against any attempt by the United States to cut off Beijing’s oil supply in the middle of an assault on Taiwan.

 

Russia, which once held the senior-partner status in the relationship with Iran — building nuclear reactors and selling air-defense systems — now depends on Tehran for drones and ballistic missiles as Putin’s war in Ukraine drags on through yet another year. Iran also advises Moscow on how to find the holes in the Swiss cheese of multilateral Russia sanctions.

 

The collapse of the Islamic Republic — or at the very least the severe degradation of its military, missile, and nuclear capabilities — would be a strategic blow to both China and Russia. It would mean an easier time for Washington as it keeps Gulf allies anchored in a U.S.-backed, Arab-Israeli regional-security framework and proceeds with a visionary economic and energy corridor stretching from India to Saudi Arabia to Israel to Europe. The U.S. will see further benefits as Iran’s terror infrastructure crumbles in Latin America and Africa.

 

The United States has an opportunity to fundamentally reshape global relations in our favor and to benefit the West. We should seize the moment.

Israel Needs to Make Up Joe Biden’s Mind for Him

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 03, 2024

 

The Biden administration wants you to know that, despite its many public disagreements with the way Israel has prosecuted its defensive war against Iran and its terrorist proxies, it has been fully supportive of Israel’s counter-terror campaign in private. At least, that’s what it wants you to believe now that the parade of horribles it feared Israel’s vigorous defensive operations would unleash has failed to materialize.

 

Sure, Politico recently reported, there were internal dissenters against this secret pro-Israeli consensus, U.S. officials “urged caution,” and the White House still believes that “the only way to end the conflict was through a negotiated diplomatic agreement.” But “behind the scenes,” some of the administration’s point-people on the crisis in the region welcomed the decimation of Iran’s terror networks. Those contingencies “could offer an opportunity to reduce Iran’s influence” and “reshape the Middle East for the better for years to come.”

 

That’s quite an attempt at revisionism, and the president himself doesn’t seem to be playing along. This week, Joe Biden was asked if Israel should respond to the unprecedented ballistic-missile attack on its territory from Iran by targeting the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. “The answer is no,” the president replied. In addition, Biden insisted that “the response must be proportionate” to the Iranian attack, which consisted of a volley of medium-range missiles carrying powerful payloads aimed at civilian and military targets alike. Presumably, the Biden administration would react in horror to something resembling reciprocity, just as it apparently would to a calibrated but overwhelming display of force aimed at neutralizing the Iranian missile and nuclear threat.

 

Despite the post hoc satisfaction the Biden administration allegedly took in Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah positions, the president and his senior aides are strenuously advising Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to underreact to Tuesday’s unprecedented attack. Per Politico, the “Biden administration is settling for limiting Israel’s response rather than discourage it entirely, according to two administration officials.” And yet, that dispatch concedes that the White House’s influence on events in the Middle East has deteriorated precipitously in recent weeks, and its admonitions may fall on deaf ears.

 

If the president’s allies resent their diminished authority among the region’s combatants, they have only themselves to blame. Biden and his party have long indulged the fantasy that a different Israeli government — one led by anyone other than Netanyahu — would prosecute the wars imposed on Israel by the 10/7 massacre in a less aggressive fashion. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer went so far as to call for the ouster of Netanyahu’s government — a desire no doubt shared by other leaders of the Democratic Party. But recent events have revealed the idea that a different leader would wage a different war to be a fantasy.

 

If former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett is indicative of what a plausible alternative to a Likud-led government would look like, we have no indication that such a government would be any more receptive to Biden’s rebukes. Indeed, if Bennett’s recent remarks are any indication, such a government might be even more likely to court risk. “That’s exactly what we need to do,” Bennett told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer when asked if Jerusalem should strike Iranian nuclear sites. “You know, sometimes history knocks on your door, and you’ve got to seize the moment,” he continued. “If we don’t do it now, I don’t see it ever happening.”

 

Bennett is right. “Iran is fully vulnerable,” he observed, with the two pillars of its deterrent strategy in the Middle East — Hamas and Hezbollah — “temporarily paralyzed.” Whether an operation aimed at kinetically disabling Iran’s well-fortified nuclear-research and -development sites would succeed is an open question, but a terrible Iranian retaliation for such an attack has never been more unlikely. If successful, such an operation would forestall indefinitely the threat posed by an Iranian nuclear weapon.

 

Iran’s two ballistic-missile attacks on Israel demonstrate that it has the means to deliver a fissionable warhead over Israeli population centers, and the October 7 massacre indicates that it has the genocidal will to slaughter millions of Jews. Jerusalem cannot accept an Iranian breakout. If there ever was a time to put that threat to bed, this is it. As Bennett made clear, Netanyahu would have the support of a broad political majority in Israel for such an action. And, if past is prologue, we can presume that the Biden White House would revise the record of its opposition to that operation to claim some credit for its success.

 

When it comes to Israel’s defensive war, the Biden administration doesn’t know its own mind. But we have repeatedly seen now that Israel can make up the White House’s mind for it by creating conditions on the ground favorable to U.S. interests that Biden administration officials lack the creativity to envision for themselves. Israel did that with Hamas in Gaza. It did that with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. It may be time for Israel to do that again at Natanz, Fordow, Isfahan, and Bushehr. The only outstanding question is whether the Biden administration will get out of the way.

The Full Liz

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, October 03, 2024

 

Who said it?

 

“Kamala Harris is a radical liberal who would raise taxes, take away guns & health insurance, and explode the size and power of the federal gov’t. She wants to recreate America in the image of what’s happening on the streets of Portland & Seattle. We won’t give her the chance.”

 

No, it’s not Donald Trump. The words are properly spelled and capitalized, aren’t they?

 

It’s not J.D. Vance either. He would have thrown something in about foreign parasites sucking the blood out of American communities (and out of their pets, specifically).

 

It’s Liz Cheney. She tweeted the above on August 11, 2020, the day Joe Biden chose Harris as his running mate. Her post circulated again on Thursday morning as she prepared for a joint appearance in Wisconsin with the candidate she’s supporting this year: Kamala Harris.

 

How you feel about that tweet depends on how you view the choice next month.

 

If you’re treating the election as a competition of policy visions, Cheney’s post is evidence of hypocrisy so ludicrous that it should neutralize whatever influence her endorsement might carry with conservatives. Four years ago she claimed Harris was too liberal to be trusted with power; four years later she’s campaigning with her against a Republican. She’s free to be a progressive if she likes, but no right-winger who cares about policy should take her seriously ever again.

 

If you’re treating the election as a competition of civic visions, Cheney’s position then and her position now are consistent. Her old post bolsters the case for the Democrat today, in fact: If someone with as many misgivings about Harris’ policy agenda as Cheney had in 2020 is willing to lay them aside to support her in 2024, the civic threat posed by the Republican ticket must be truly dire.

 

And it is truly dire, as Cheney discovered belatedly after the last election and as we were all reminded again on Wednesday.

 

As rumors swirled last night that she would campaign with Harris today, one Dispatch colleague asked when was the last time a prominent Democrat put “country over party” by endorsing the opposition’s candidate, as Cheney is asking Republicans to do this year. Names were tossed around—Zell Miller? Joe Lieberman?—but I think the answer to that question is a question. When was the last time Democrats nominated someone so plainly menacing to the civic order as to make a right-wing “country over party” appeal to liberals compelling?

 

The correct way to view Cheney’s appearance with Harris, I think, is as part of a tug-of-war of sorts with a fellow Reagan Republican who cosplayed as a serious critic of Donald Trump in this year’s GOP primary. Cheney is tugging conservatives toward believing that the Republican Party has become unsalvageable and deserves to lose; Nikki Haley is pulling them toward believing that it isn’t and doesn’t, especially if it has the good sense to give her a shot at leading it someday.

 

It’s “the full Liz” versus “the half Liz.”

 

Burning bridges.

 

Harris and Cheney are in Ripon, Wisconsin, where the Republican Party was founded in 1854. The symbolism is obvious, although I think its meaning is slightly different for the two.

 

For Harris, having Cheney with her at the birthplace of the GOP is a bid to create a “permission structure” for conservatives to cross over and vote Democratic this fall. Cheney’s longtime partisan allegiance is important to that pitch: So long as she claims to represent the spirit of the true Republican Party against the usurper Trump, Reaganites who are reluctant to vote for him can reassure themselves they’re not betraying their political “tribe” by backing Harris.

 

For Cheney, I suspect, there’s an additional dimension to the symbolism.

 

One of the arguments Never Trumpers often make for voting Democratic this year is that only a Trump defeat can break populism’s spell over the Republican Party. She doesn’t seem to share that optimism, though. Her visit to Ripon to endorse the other side’s candidate feels like the last rites for a political party that’s no longer worthy of conservatives’ support. She’s laying it to rest in the city where it was born.

 

It was just a few weeks ago that she wondered whether the GOP has been so hollowed out by Trump’s influence that nothing short of starting fresh will do. “It’s hard for me to see how the Republican Party, given what it has done, can make the argument convincingly or credibly that people ought to vote for Republican candidates until it really recognizes what it’s done,” she told an audience in Wisconsin last month. When her host asked whether the solution might be to start a new party, she replied, “It may well be.”

 

Notably, she framed her core objections to the GOP as moral and civic more so than policy-focused. People “want a president that kids can look up to” and who will “defend the peaceful transfer of power,” she said. “That’s where we have to start, whether it’s organizing a new party.” She didn’t use the word “unsalvageable” but someone who got trounced in a GOP House primary for the sin of holding a demagogue accountable for a coup attempt doesn’t need to.

 

Cheney’s appearance with Harris in Ripon and her comments about a new party amount to what I call “the full Liz.”

 

I defined the term in a newsletter back in January in the thick of the Republican primary, contrasting her approach to Trump with Nikki Haley’s. “By ‘the full Liz’ I mean a frontal assault on Trump’s fitness for office, largely dispensing with arguments over policy differences,” I wrote. “Cheney has sharp disagreements with Trump on foreign policy, for instance, but those have become an afterthought to her core critique that he’s unbalanced and an authoritarian threat to American democracy.”

 

Trump is shockingly unfit for office, both morally and civically, and never more so than after January 6. That’s all you should need to know to justify supporting his opponent. That’s “the full Liz.”

 

Haley wouldn’t go there. During the primary she practiced what I described as “the half Liz,” attacking Trump’s fitness without ever quite daring to disqualify him on moral or civic grounds as Cheney does. Trump is too old; Trump is undisciplined; Trump is responsible for most of his own political problems. Those were Nikki Haley’s critiques, and they went further than most Republicans are willing to go in questioning their leader. Just not so far as to make you think that Haley believed Trump was less qualified than the Democratic alternative.

 

What Haley calculated, correctly, is that Republican primary voters would tolerate “the half Liz” from one of their candidates but not “the full Liz.” To call Trump morally or civically unfit is to affirm the Democratic critique of him. That’s high treason, unforgivable, and it’s why Cheney has become a pariah. But to call Trump tactically foolish, as Haley did, is acceptable because it aims to help him and the party by fixing a fixable mistake. “The half Liz” is compatible with wanting Trump and the GOP to win. “The full Liz” is not.

 

No wonder Cheney and Haley ended up where they did once the primary ended, the latter endorsing Trump and the former endorsing Harris. You don’t practice “the full Liz” unless you regard a second Trump presidency as a threat so sinister that you’re willing to durably alienate the American right for the sake of trying to prevent it. After appearing with the Democratic nominee on the trail, there’s no longer any scenario in which Liz Cheney will be welcomed back into a post-Trump GOP, even one that ends up eager to reform. Her affront to tribalism is too grave.

 

By insisting on treating this race as a contest of civic rather than policy visions, she’s burned what’s left of her bridges and written off her party forever. Go figure that she’s prone to fantasizing about starting something new.

 

Nikki Haley, on the other hand …

 

A bridge to nowhere.

 

In January’s newsletter I argued that “the half Liz” was a sensible primary strategy for a Reaganite like Haley who needed to challenge Trump’s fitness without challenging it so much as to offend Republican voters. She had a difficult hand and she was playing it as best she could.

 

But there was a catch.

 

“The obvious problem with the half Liz strategy is that it offers no reason not to prefer Trump in November as the least bad option available,” I wrote. Because it stops short of disqualifying him from office, it allows Republicans to believe that he’s too old and undisciplined to be the optimal GOP nominee yet still better for the country as president than Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.

 

Unlike in the primary, where “the full Liz” and “the half Liz” shared the goal of defeating Trump, the two are now pitted against each other in what they hope to achieve. “Unless it eventually progresses to the full Liz, the half Liz is ultimately just a ‘permission structure’ to vote MAGA in the general election, albeit a bit more grudgingly than you otherwise might have,” I noted in January. And that’s been borne out: As Liz Cheney strains to convince conservatives and right-leaning independents that it’s okay to vote for Harris, Nikki Haley is on the radio implying that no, it’s really not.

 

On Thursday SiriusXM circulated a transcript from her new show. We’re 33 days out from Election Day, nearly seven months after she quit the race, and she’s still practicing “the half Liz.” Quote:

 

“You know, the biggest takeaway that I have, that I’ve watched the whole time is that he’s still campaigning like he’s in a primary. That’s the one thing I wish I could just shake him and say, stop. He needs to shift to a general. He’s talking a lot of primary talking points. … And J.D. was doing that for a while. J.D. showed the shift last night. Now Trump needs to show that shift. … Quit talking about the red meat stuff. You are only talking to suburban women. Independents. That is, it is less than a million people will decide this. That 5 percent of people, talk to them. Tell them, and guess what? Tone matters. … Because suburban women care about what their kids see. And they want someone that they can show their kids, ‘That’s our president.’… Yeah, he can be a likable guy, but when you put him out there to rally or you put him, you know, and stop calling her ‘Dumb.’ Stop saying she’s got mental problems, like all that stuff. No one likes that. And actually take a playbook from your VP last night.”

 

Everything there, even the Cheney-esque bit about children wanting a president to be proud of, is carefully framed as a strategic or tactical critique rather than a moral or civic one. It’s bad that Trump is running the most demagogic campaign in modern American history—but only because it risks alienating independents and suburban moms.

 

“The half Liz” wants Trump to win but fears that his behavior is undermining that important goal. “The full Liz” wants Trump to lose because it doesn’t want America governed by a proto-fascist sewer rat. That’s the difference.

 

More Haley:

 

“MAGA very much was, you know, people were tired of government. They were tired of government intrusion, they were tired of government being slowed. They didn’t trust government. It was just, they wanted to see the red tape out of the way and you know, all of these things. And so the MAGA movement was born with the help of Donald Trump. A lot of Americans wanted to see the change that Donald Trump brought in. But what you’re seeing is the MAGA movement’s doing what the Tea Party did. It’s starting to fringe out, and they’re caring about these one-off issues that wasn’t something that was thought about. That’s not all of MAGA, but you’re seeing it kind of fringe out. And what’s concerning is you’re seeing certain MAGA people not like other Republicans. And so MAGA doesn’t like moderate Republicans. They don’t necessarily talk about Independents. And the biggest thing I’ll say, especially going into a presidential election, I would remind MAGA, you need everybody. You need those RINOs you talk about. You need suburban women. You need Independents. You need people who don’t necessarily think like you because that’s how you win an election.”

 

Again, the idea that Trump’s movement is “starting to fringe out” (starting?) is presented not as something that should concern conservatives on the merits but as politically inconvenient because it’s off-putting to swing voters. Inescapably, you’re left to wonder how “the half Liz” will cope if Trump’s grotesque apocalyptic rhetoric turns out enough low-propensity voters next month for him to prevail. If you can prove to Nikki Haley that calling Haitians dog-eating savages and Kamala Harris mentally disabled are an electoral winner, will she drop her objections to that sort of rhetoric?

 

A clue as to why Haley persists in this nonsense comes at the start of the last quote. It is, uh, not correct that MAGA rallied to Donald Trump in 2016 because they were “tired of government” and “government intrusion.” Quite the opposite: Populists love Trump because, unlike Reaganite eggheads, he’s less interested in shrinking government than in harnessing its power to persecute their cultural enemies. They’re not tired of government, they’re tired of government not hurting the right people.

 

But this is the sort of retconned nonsense an ambitious conservative like Haley needs to indulge in to keep alive the dream that a post-Trump GOP might turn for leadership to someone like, well, her. You can imagine her in 2028 pushing this revisionist claptrap on the primary campaign trail, trying to convince Trump voters that supporting her is the logical next step of Trumpism because, after all, she’s as “tired of government” as they are.

 

Or maybe the claptrap is her way of trying to delude herself that the party to which she’s pledged her eternal loyalty, no matter how lousy it gets, still basically shares her conservative politics. Reaganites are tired of government and MAGA populists are … also “tired of government”? Sort of?

 

“The half Liz” desperately wants to remain a part of the right-wing tribe. “The full Liz” couldn’t care less or is insulted by the prospect.

 

There’s an irony to Haley’s pandering, though. If in fact she’s eschewed “the full Liz” as a matter of ambition, because she hopes to be a national player in the GOP after Trump is gone, “the half Liz” approach she’s taken instead might inadvertently make that impossible.

 

After all, Haley could win her tug-of-war with Cheney. As Liz goes about tugging conservatives toward Harris, granting them “permission” to vote Democratic this time, Nikki is tugging them back toward Trump by granting them “permission” to stay put. She’s even offered to campaign for him to try to stymie Cheney’s efforts to flip Republicans who voted against him in the primary.

 

If Haley prevails and Trump is reelected, it is very hard to believe that the GOP will turn to a traditional conservative to succeed him as nominee in 2028. Why should it? Populism will have won two presidential elections in three tries and nearly won the third. It won’t matter that Nikki Haley is more “electable” on paper than Donald Trump or J.D. Vance once the Trump-Vance ticket has proven to be electable enough. There’ll be no need for the right to change course. Having J.D. or Tucker Carlson as nominee will do.

 

Essentially, then, Haley is letting Liz Cheney do her dirty work for her. If “the full Liz” wins the tug-of-war then Trump will lose the election, the GOP will be chastened afterward (potentially), and Haley will be well positioned for 2028. But she won’t lend a hand; for the sake of her viability within the party, she needs to remain the conservative woman who didn’t campaign for Harris. Not only will she not join the effort to protect her country from a civic emergency, in fact, she’s actively undermining that effort in a 50-50 race by urging “Haley Republicans” to stick with the team.

 

She doesn’t deserve to be president. It’s a consolation that she won’t be.

Iran’s Ballistic-Missile Attack Is a Failure of Democratic Appeasement

National Review Online

Wednesday, October 02, 2024

 

Iran launched 180 ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday, setting off sirens across the entire country and driving its 10 million citizens into bomb shelters.

 

Fortunately, due to the incredible work of the IDF’s anti-missile systems as well as help from the U.S. Navy, most of the missiles were intercepted — or they landed in areas where they did not kill civilians. As of this writing, one Palestinian in the West Bank was killed and two Israelis were injured in falling shrapnel. Video also showed large craters near Tel Aviv and severe damage to a school in central Israel (luckily, the attack came when school was out of session).

 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised a severe response that will make Iran pay a price — as it should.

 

As we await the Israeli reaction and its implications for the region, it’s worth emphasizing that Tuesday’s attack is the latest example of the failed policy of appeasing Iran that has been a fixture of Democratic administrations dating back to Barack Obama.

 

When President Obama took office in 2009, he pursued a strategy that attempted to reorient United States policy in the Middle East. The U.S. was too reflexively pro-Israel, he argued, and only by showing more “daylight” could America earn the respect of the Arab states. At the same time, he wanted to move away from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states and pursue warmer relations with Iran, deluded into thinking that doing so would usher in more moderation despite the fact that the regime was founded on Islamic fanaticism, has one of the worst human-rights records in the world, and is the leading sponsor of state terrorism.

 

To grease the wheels of diplomacy, Obama turned a blind eye to the malign behavior of Iran and its terrorist proxies. Its efforts to downplay Iran’s destabilizing effect on the region culminated in a disastrous nuclear deal that provided tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief to the regime, allowed it to pursue ballistic-missile development, and left it on a long-term glide path toward nuclear weapons.

 

Donald Trump wisely tore up the nuclear deal and ratcheted up sanctions, delivering a crushing economic blow to the terror state. But President Biden and Kamala Harris brought back many of the same advisers responsible for the Obama catastrophe. In hopes of resurrecting the deal, the Biden-Harris administration once again gave billions in sanctions relief to Iran and once again downplayed its bad behavior. In the process, they removed all deterrence, and Iran felt a free hand to pursue its evil designs and replenish its terror subsidiaries.

 

To Israel’s south, Hamas was rebuilt and emboldened to orchestrate the October 7 attacks; to its north, Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets at Israel, making the top part of the country uninhabitable to 80,000 residents who were forced to flee; in Yemen, Houthis have fired with little restraint at ships traveling through an economically significant section of the Red Sea (and the rebels have taken credit for downing multiple American-made Reaper drones).

 

At every escalation by Iran, the response by the Biden-Harris administration has been to show weakness. Sure, the administration has held that its support for Israel’s defense is “ironclad,” and it has now for the second time helped Israel avoid a mass-casualty event. But it has failed to recognize that defensive measures against Iran can only go so far when they aren’t accompanied by a strong offensive response to reestablish deterrence. Instead, Biden has repeatedly told Israel to stand down, to de-escalate, to “take a win,” out of a desperate hope of avoiding a broader war that could imperil Democratic hopes of retaining the White House. This strategy of weakness has only brought the region closer to the war he is trying to avoid.

 

This time, the response to Iranian aggression must be different. For the second time in five months, Iran has fired hundreds of projectiles at Israel. Thanks to the gains the regime is believed to have made in uranium enrichment under the Biden-Harris administration, there is simply no way Israel can take the chance that the next time Iran launches such an attack, some of the missiles could be loaded with nuclear warheads.

Stop Complaining About the Electoral College

By Daniel McGraw

Monday, September 23, 2024

 

As the November election approaches, the United States’ electoral system is coming under renewed scrutiny. The US uses an Electoral College system, which counts every person’s vote and then assigns that vote a value based upon the size of their state. States with larger populations get more Electoral College votes. So, for instance, Alabama (population ~5 million) has seven congressional districts and two senators, which gives the state nine Electoral College votes; California (population ~39 million) has 52 congressional districts and two senators, which gives the state 54 Electoral College votes.

 

There are 538 Electoral College votes up for grabs, so whoever wins 270 or more wins the presidential election. With the exception of Nebraska and Maine, all states allocate their Electoral College votes on a winner-takes-all basis—so if a presidential candidate wins California by a single vote, he or she will nevertheless receive all 54 Electoral College votes. This can lead to lopsided results that do not reflect a candidate’s popular support. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden got 81.3 million popular votes (51.3 percent) to Donald Trump’s 74.2 million (46.8 percent), but he won 306 Electoral College votes to Trump’s 232.

 

Occasionally, an election result will be split between the popular vote and the Electoral College, as it was in 2000 and 2016, when the Democrats won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College count. At the time of writing, there is a nontrivial chance that this outcome could be repeated in November. In a post published on 17 September, US polling analyst Nate Silver estimates:

 

There’s now almost a 25 percent chance that Harris wins the popular vote while losing the Electoral College (and only a 0.2 percent chance of the other way around). This gap has continued to grow. And it can make poll-reading really counterintuitive. You’ll see lots of headlines saying that Harris is leading—but our elections aren’t determined by the popular vote. 

 

The prospect of a split result returning Donald Trump to the White House is leading more and more political analysts to argue that the Electoral College system is unfair and unrepresentative and that America should adopt a system of popular-vote tabulation to determine the winner instead. As Perry Bacon Jr. argued in the Washington Post on 16 September, “The U.S. presidential election system—with winner-take-all states and the electoral college—warps the political process and even the way people see their own country.”

 

Maybe it does. But Bacon doesn’t explain why the Electoral College system was introduced in the first place. Nor does he address the obstacles anyone seeking to change it will encounter. I don’t want to get into the pros and cons of the popular vote versus the EC system. I want to explain why discussing such a change is moot, because it is simply not possible in practice.

 

Compromise is an unavoidable part of any democratic system. When the US Constitution was drafted in 1787, the founders had to decide how the freshly independent and conjoined British colonies would elect the president of the new union. That debate provoked a good deal of disagreement and distrust. Some states wanted their legislatures to vote for the president, while others argued for a popular vote. The compromise solution didn’t make anyone happy but it was deemed acceptable enough to win ratification. As Jonathan Gienapp, a professor of history at Stanford University, explained in 2022:

 

Why did the Constitution’s authors choose this particular system for electing the president? The most important thing to appreciate is that they chose the Electoral College not because it was the most desirable option, but because it was the least undesirable. The leading alternatives—legislative selection by Congress or a national popular vote—were met with powerful objections. If Congress elected the president, it was feared that the latter would become the puppet of the former, nullifying any hope of executive independence. When it came to a national popular vote, meanwhile, there were worries that, at a time when information moved slowly, especially across such a large nation, voters would be familiar only with the candidates from their home states and thus tend to choose them. There were also grave concerns that the people would be seduced by demagogues. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention chose the Electoral College less because of its virtues than because of its competitors’ perceived shortcomings.

 

The Electoral College system was enshrined in Article II of the US Constitution, which sets forth the rules governing how the president and vice president are elected. It has been tweaked a bit in the years since, but it still basically operates in the same way it did when it was first adopted in 1789. The constitutional amendment required to change or replace this system would have to be passed by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, and then ratified by the legislatures of three-quarters of the states—38 states out of fifty. Alternatively, two-thirds of state legislatures could ask Congress to call a Constitutional Convention.

 

It is very rare for 38 out of fifty states to agree on anything in the US. Of almost 12,000 amendments proposed since the country’s constitution was ratified in 1788, only 27 have been adopted (the last one of any substance was passed in 1971, lowering the voting age to eighteen). Ten of those amendments constitute the Bill of Rights, ratified by states in 1791. “We have an amendment process that’s the hardest in the world to enact,” Aziz Rana, a professor of constitutional law at Cornell University, wrote in 2021. “That’s the reason why it’s basically a dead letter to enact constitutional amendments. You have to have rolling supermajorities across the country to do so.”

 

Under the Electoral College system, candidates must focus their campaigning on closely contested “swing states.” This time around, the Democrats are spending their time door-knocking, advertising, and stumping in states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Arizona, but not in states they can expect to win comfortably like New York, California, and West Virginia. Switching to a popular-vote system, however, would bring cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York into contention. As I pointed out in a 2019 article for the Bulwark, the fifty largest metropolitan areas would replace the swing states as the focus of campaigning, which would mean that large swathes of the US voting population would be simply ignored. In a polarised environment, the American public is unlikely to agree to such an outcome in practice, even though 65 percent of them say they prefer a popular-vote system in theory.

 

Some advocacy groups have suggested that the constitutional-amendment hurdle could be sidestepped entirely if states simply require their electors to vote for the winner of the popular vote rather than the winner of their states. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) would, in effect, try to implement popular-vote rules while keeping the electoral college. There are numerous problems with this approach, and were it adopted, it would almost certainly precipitate a constitutional crisis and a host of furious legal challenges.

 

But there are also practical reasons such a proposal would fail. For such a system to work, states with over 270 Electoral-College votes combined would need to agree. Currently, only seventeen states, with a combined total of 209 EC votes, have signed up, and getting the additional 61 votes looks nearly impossible. Red states are unlikely to agree to replace an electoral system that favours the GOP with one that is likely to advantage their opponents. It may be even less democratic than the present system. As Princeton University researcher Alexandra Orbuch has argued: “The states involved would effectively be silencing the rest of the country. And as we have seen, that means that the right-wing of the country would lose its voice in elections and thereby in policymaking essentially eradicating the diversity of thought and plurality that is so key to the American political character.”

 

Unfortunately, we have not heard the last of this debate, because activists persist in believing that any system that advantages their own party must be fairer by definition. All the alternatives on offer have problems of their own. We could try them all before agreeing that the one selected by the founders was indeed the least undesirable option available, but this would not be a valuable use of time and resources. Given the insurmountable obstacles to changing the US electoral system, critics of the electoral college would be better off directing their energies into formulating better campaign strategies under the existing system.

NATO and the Return of Trump

By Matt Johnson

Tuesday, September 17, 2024

 

For the past couple of years, there has been a lot of anxious speculation about what will happen to the United States’ relationship with Europe if Trump wins a second term. European leaders are trying to “Trump-proof” NATO with pledges to increase military spending. A measure in the 2023 National Defence Authorisation Act prevents the president from unilaterally withdrawing from the alliance. Even if Trump doesn’t push for such a drastic step, his promise to “finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission” has raised urgent questions about the future of the alliance—and the transatlantic relationship more broadly—if he returns to the White House. 

 

The gravest fear in Washington and European capitals is that Trump will pull the United States out of NATO altogether. “His goal here is not to strengthen NATO,” according to former Trump national security advisor John Bolton. “It’s to lay the groundwork to get out.” Trump repeatedly discussed withdrawing from NATO with administration officials when he was in office, and his criticism of the alliance has always gone far beyond complaints about defence spending among “free-riding” allies. In 2017, he described NATO as “obsolete.” He introduced doubt about the United States’ commitment to Article V, the collective defence provision of the NATO Charter. He has long viewed the system of American alliances as a protection racket, which is why he recently declared that the Russians should feel empowered to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO members that are “delinquent” on defence spending.

 

Foreign-policy experts in Trump’s orbit say he will pursue a “radical reorientation” of the alliance. There are several elements of this reorientation, including a drastic reduction in the United States’ military presence in Europe and the creation of a two-tier system within the alliance (first proposed by Trump advisor Keith Kellogg) in which the United States would only provide Article V protection to countries that spend over two percent of their GDP on defence. But the most immediate policy shift would be toward Ukraine—Trump is reportedly interested in negotiating a deal with Vladimir Putin over how much stolen Ukrainian territory will be handed over to Russia. He’s also reportedly considering a pledge to Moscow that NATO won’t expand eastward, barring Ukraine and Georgia from entry.

 

This is likely what Trump has in mind when he promises to end the war before he even takes office (or “in 24 hours,” as he often puts it). He appears to believe that Kyiv will have no say in the matter, and that Ukrainian forces will stop fighting the moment he strikes a backroom deal with Putin to carve up their country and determine the fate of their political and security arrangements for decades to come. Even the Russians recognise that Trump’s plan to immediately end the war is a fantasy: “The Ukrainian crisis cannot be solved in one day,” Russian ambassador to the UN Vassily Nebenzia said in July.

 

Trump also blames the United States for the Ukrainian conflict. Beyond his frequent claim that Putin “never would have invaded Ukraine” on his watch, he also argues that the promise of NATO membership for Ukraine (originally made at the 2008 Bucharest summit) is “really why this war started.” Trump ignores Putin’s imperial ambitions—which he has been outlining ad nauseam for years—and assumes that Moscow only reacts to what the United States does. Similarly, he doesn’t believe the Ukrainians have any agency, which is why he thinks he can end the war with a phone call to the Kremlin.

 

It would be bad enough if Trump were merely delusional about what he could accomplish in the Oval Office. But his plan to abandon the United States’ commitments in Europe will inflict a potentially fatal blow on NATO, even if the US doesn’t withdraw from the alliance entirely. The transatlantic alliance will fracture at a time when Europe is still years away from being able to defend itself. Other American allies around the world, such as South Korea and Japan, will realise that the United States is no longer a reliable partner. And NATO’s deterrent power will be permanently undermined, which may encourage Putin to probe Europe’s defences further and directly challenge Article V, possibly with a military incursion into a small European state like one of the Baltics.

 

The United States has made European security a major strategic priority for the past three-quarters of a century—a period of unprecedented peace and stability on the continent. Trump would start unraveling that effort immediately upon retaking office.

 

***

 

Trump isn’t interested in strengthening American alliances, holding aggressive dictatorships accountable, or defending besieged democracies like Ukraine. His transactional, zero-sum worldview dismisses the possibility of countries cooperating on the basis of shared values and institutions. As far as Trump is concerned, there are no friends and enemies, only winners and losers.

 

This means that Trump’s commitment to institutions like NATO is always contingent on whether he believes the United States is “winning” in some sort of imaginary competition with its allies, and he has made it clear for many years that he doesn’t think this is the case. Despite significant political and institutional constraints that would make it difficult for Trump to pull the United States out of NATO, any attempt to do so would have devastating consequences for the cohesion of the alliance and the security of the democratic world. Putin and Xi Jinping would interpret such a deep fault line within NATO as a clear sign that Western resolve is crumbling. NATO’s newest members, Finland and Sweden, would be left to wonder whether the alliance will survive. The Baltic states would suddenly face an existential crisis, and the prospects for a secure and Western-oriented Ukraine would be much diminished overnight.

 

While Trump may decide to remain in NATO, he has repeatedly declared that he believes “NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission” should be “fundamentally” altered. This is consistent with the plan outlined by Project 2025—a blueprint for Trump’s second term produced by the Heritage Foundation and a constellation of other conservative organisations. According to the Project 2025 manifesto, the next administration must “Transform NATO so that U.S. allies are capable of fielding the great majority of the conventional forces required to deter Russia while relying on the United States primarily for our nuclear deterrent, and select other capabilities while reducing the U.S. force posture in Europe.”

 

The most immediate problem with this strategy is that the United States’ European allies are simply not militarily powerful enough to deter Russia without American support. With its US$884 billion military budget, the United States is the anchor of NATO—American defence expenditures will comprise nearly 64 percent of the alliance’s total this year. There are currently over 100,000 US troops stationed in Europe, including around 20,000 who were sent to countries such as Poland to defend NATO’s eastern flank after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The top US commander in Europe, General Christopher Cavoli, recently testified to the House Armed Services Committee that infrastructure is in place to increase the number of troops if necessary. 

 

Trump has long sought to reduce the United States’ military footprint in Europe. In the summer of 2020, he ordered the Pentagon to move almost 10,000 troops out of Germany and cap the total number of troops in the country at 25,000—down from 52,000. At the time, a senior US official told the Wall Street Journal that the decision reflected the “Trump administration’s long frustration with German policy.” A German defence official said, “We always knew Trump would lash out when he is under pressure domestically.” Germany is a cornerstone of the United States’ military infrastructure in Europe, and Trump wanted to disrupt operations there out of spite. As the Wall Street Journal reported: “Moscow is likely to welcome the open display of differences between two key North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies, U.S. experts said.”

 

***

 

It was dangerous for Trump to intentionally damage the United States’ relationship with vital NATO partners and undermine the security architecture of Europe in 2020, but abandoning our European allies in the middle of the largest conflict on the continent since World War II would be a historic mistake. What makes Trump’s plan to desert NATO in 2025 all the more vexing is that Europe has finally demonstrated a real commitment to building up its own defences.

 

While defence expenditures in NATO, Europe, and Canada increased by 2.5 percent in 2021, collective spending is expected to surge by nearly 18 percent this year. Just six NATO allies spent more than two percent of their GDP on defence in 2021, but this number has now spiked to 23. It will take time for the United States’ European allies to build up their defences, but they’re on the right trajectory. Withdrawing from Europe in an era of renewed great-power conflict and with war on NATO’s doorstep would be a calamitous misstep.

 

Trump’s hostility to NATO and his opposition to continued support for Ukraine will also put him in a much weaker negotiating position with Putin. If Trump takes office in January, Putin will conclude that time is on his side in Ukraine—without the United States, Europe won’t be able to supply the equipment Kyiv needs to continue fighting the war. Trump would give up all his leverage before negotiations even begin. What incentive will Putin have to take anything less than a maximalist position on Ukrainian territory and Kyiv’s ambitions to join Western political, economic, and security institutions?

 

The main MAGA rationale for retreating from NATO is that the resources dedicated to Europe should be shifted toward China. Trump’s vice presidential pick, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, frequently describes China as the “biggest threat” to the United States. He argues that Ukraine is a distraction from the “real issue, which is China,” and he has been calling for more weapons to be sent to Taiwan instead. As Semafor reports, Vance joined a “team of Trump advisers who have repeatedly called for the US to invest more military resources in the Indo-Pacific in an attempt to deter China.”

 

But weakness in Europe won’t project strength in Asia. The idea that surrendering to Putin and withdrawing from NATO will deter China is backwards. If the United States abandons Europe, Beijing will be more emboldened than ever. After all, Trump has long made the same argument about the United States’ East Asian allies that he makes about NATO—they don’t pay enough for America’s security guarantees, and they may have to get used to the idea that the United States won’t always be there to defend them. When Trump announced that the United States would remove thousands of troops from Germany, he was simultaneously embroiled in a dispute with South Korea over the cost of stationing US troops in the country. Former defence secretary Mark Esper later revealed that Trump demanded a “complete withdrawal” from South Korea. Despite the emphasis on Asia among would-be Trump administration officials, Taipei has no reason to expect anything different.

 

America’s allies don’t have to speculate about what a second Trump term would look like. While it’s unclear whether or not Trump would withdraw from NATO entirely, he has explicitly promised to betray Ukraine and reward Russia for launching a devastating imperial war against its neighbour. Meanwhile, Trump will punish NATO member states that are finally making historic investments in their own security by withdrawing US forces with no plan for how to replace them. Amid war in Europe and resurgent great-power conflict, this reversion to America First isolationism will inflict a permanent blow on the most successful military alliance in human history—as well as the liberal international order it has underpinned for three-quarters of a century. 

The Happy-Face Killer

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, October 02, 2024

 

I thought J.D. Vance cleaned Tim Walz’s clock at Tuesday’s vice presidential debate. But then, I thought Donald Trump was destined for landslide defeats in 2016 and 2020.

 

My instincts are terrible. Honestly, I don’t know why any of you read this newsletter.

 

An hour into last night’s event, my verdict was that Walz shouldn’t be too hard on himself afterward since Trump was going to win this election anyway. But then I remembered how atrocious my instincts are and wondered if viewers would see things differently.

 

Would it surprise you, dear reader, to learn that viewers saw things differently?

 

CNN’s post-debate snap poll found Vance winning by only a whisker, 51-49 percent. CBS News’ survey had it even closer, 42-41. Politico’s version saw a dead heat at 50 percent apiece. According to that last poll, independents deemed Walz the victor by a margin of 16 points, 58-42, and preferred him as vice president on balance.

 

And while both candidates emerged more popular than they were going in, Walz easily topped Vance. He went from plus-14 in favorability to plus-37 in CNN’s poll and from plus-11 to plus-25 in CBS News’. By comparison, Vance went from minus-22 to minus-3 and from minus-14 to plus-2 in those two surveys, respectively.

 

Maybe Walz’s bug-eyed terror at being quizzed on policy before an audience of millions made him more sympathetic to the audience, especially in contrast to Vance’s unflappability. Politicians in our era seldom benefit from seeming like the slicker, more polished option of voters’ two choices. It would be ironic if J.D. Vance of all people ran afoul of Americans’ populist instincts.

 

Or maybe this was the debate equivalent of a boxing match in which one fighter dominates for 11 rounds before getting knocked unconscious in the 12th. The anticipated exchange over Trump’s 2020 coup plot didn’t come until the very end, but Vance took it on the chin when it did. If you believe CNN’s panel of undecided voters in Michigan, that mattered. A lot.

 

Still, I’m inclined to trust my terrible instincts. Vance won, Walz lost.

 

It’s hard not to feel buyer’s remorse on Kamala Harris’ behalf at this point. The other finalist to be her running mate was Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a forceful speaker and a man with obvious appeal in a must-win state that’s currently dead even at 48.2 percent, if you can believe it. Walz hasn’t done Harris any harm but he hasn’t added much to the ticket either; even his television appearances, which put him on the political map during the VP audition process, have dried up. She should have picked Shapiro.

 

Walz wasn’t the story on Tuesday night, though. Vance was, as he managed to achieve something very difficult: He made his party look … not “good,” exactly, but competent. Sober. Even decent. He put a happy face on Trumpism.

 

And that’ll help him in this presidential cycle and in cycles to come.

 

Very demure, very mindful.

 

The dominant emotion among the commentariat after the debate was surprise at how cordial the evening had been.

 

There were no attacks on “Tampon Tim” or digs at Vance’s “weirdness.” The candidates found themselves in agreement on policy at several points, to the dismay of Reagan conservatives watching. At the end their spouses joined them onstage and they all chatted amiably. It was shockingly normal, a glimpse of what once was and what might be again. America’s civil war had turned, well, civil.

 

Was it really so surprising, though?

 

Recently a wise man (with terrible instincts) argued that Vance should have been playing good cop on the trail all along to Trump’s bad cop. J.D. has the brains, policy chops, and message discipline to act as the GOP’s “suburbs-whisperer” while his running mate runs around starting fires. He should have been the party’s “populism for grown-ups” pitchman. Instead, idiotically, he was consumed with rage-tweeting about Haitian immigrants eating cats.

 

On Tuesday we saw the “suburbs-whisperer” at last. “Anyone who feared that Trump 2.0 would be a mad ride into authoritarian chaos could listen to Vance’s soft-spoken policy pitch and feel reassured that there’d be some sweetness amid all the bitterness,” I wrote last month, imagining how Vance in “good cop” mode might help the ticket. That’s the Vance we got at the debate—very demure, very mindful, to borrow a meme of recent vintage.

 

And that Vance can only help Trump. Undecided voters who are trying to get to yes on the Republican nominee but worry that by doing so they’ll be voting for idiocracy with a mood disorder could have watched J.D. last night and come away optimistic. He didn’t seem “weird,” as the media had repeatedly insisted he was. And despite his tender age, he didn’t appear unqualified for the top job. How could he have? He’s plainly twice as smart and 10 times as well-informed as his running mate, who’s already served as president.

 

There are few figures in either party as chameleonic as Vance, a man who began his political journey as a Never Trumper when it looked like Trumpism would be a passing fad and became a Trumpist zealot once it became clear that it wasn’t. It’s the opposite of surprising that he’d adapt again before a primetime national audience by swapping out his demagoguery about the Haitian menace for something resembling statesmanship.

 

He made a good impression on swing voters, judging by the polls. But the group he really helped himself with, I think, is the right-wing professional class.

 

“Exceptionally competent and conspicuously congenial” is how one establishment Republican excitedly described his performance to New York magazine. We’re approaching 10 full years since the GOP has been able to say either of those things about its leader. Rank-and-file right-wingers might not care about it, but the professional class—politicians, donors, consultants, pundits, educated upscale Republicans various and sundry—yearns for a candidate who can replicate Trump’s appeal to the working class without drowning the party in filth in the process.

 

I imagined nationalist intellectuals and the “reformicons” of yesteryear watching intently on Tuesday, their eyes aglow, as Vance realized their vision of Trumpism without Trump and populist policy without populist culture. Here at last was a man from their own class, of their own educated sensibility, making a calm, measured case for the MAGA agenda without the demagogic histrionics that unfailingly accompany it. Even some Democrats were cheered: “I Have Seen the Republican Future—and It’s Less Terrible Than Trump,” Damon Linker announced afterward. 

 

If you squinted hard while watching, you could imagine Vance expanding Trump’s coalition in 2028, offering populist red meat to keep the base happy with a patina of intellectualism that might entice wayward college graduates into returning to the GOP. Or, if you were feeling really good, you might convince yourself that J.D.’s latest incarnation as a Trump bootlicker extraordinaire is just another way station on his political journey and that “the real Vance” will emerge once he’s free from his patron’s influence.

 

In 2028, with Trump retired, J.D. 5.0 might reinvent himself as the sort of populist-conservative fusion candidate of whom right-wing intellectuals dream and which Ron DeSantis tried but failed this year to be. Perhaps the toxic, juvenile race-baiting about Haitian pet-eaters will be quietly retired and replaced by more respectable passions like whether, ackshually, tariffs are good.

 

Respectable Trumpism: As of Tuesday night, that’s Vance’s political “brand.”

 

It’s a contradiction in terms.

 

Trumpism without Trump?

 

The right-wing professional class doesn’t care about respectability on the merits because it desires a more decent Republican Party. If it did, it wouldn’t still be invested in J.D. Vance.

 

It cares about respectability only insofar as Trump’s indecency is an electoral drag on their party. Swing voters worry about coup plots and felony convictions and glaring sociopathy in their political leaders, and in a democracy the right’s leaders are obliged to worry about whatever swing voters are worried about. If, 33 days from now, we find out that swing voters don’t care much about that stuff after all, those leaders will drop whatever pretense remains that they do too.

 

In fact, Vance’s sudden transformation into the “suburbs-whisperer” at Tuesday’s debate plays like a satire of how facile the professional right’s pretensions to decency are. Over the past few weeks he’s engaged in some of the ugliest politics of his career—only to be eagerly redeemed as the future of the GOP after 90 minutes of sounding competent-ish on television.

 

He, not Trump, got the ball rolling online in demonizing Haitians in Ohio as dog-eating savages. He, not Trump, made two appearances this month with Tucker Carlson after Tucker offered his megaphone to a Holocaust revisionist. He, not Trump, showed up at a town hall last week hosted by a Christian nationalist leader who’s far out even by the exceedingly wacky standards of grassroots right-wing populism. And as we were reminded again in the closing minutes of Tuesday’s debate, there remains every reason to think that as vice president he’d try to obstruct the transfer of power if Republicans lost a national election.

 

The sharpest line of the evening came when Walz pointed out that there’s a reason Vance rather than Mike Pence was onstage. Pence did everything Trump asked of him as vice president—except for one thing. But that one thing was so unforgivable to his boss and to his party that it single-handedly disqualified Pence from joining the ticket a third time.

 

Vance, the supposed avatar of respectable Trumpism, would do the one thing if given the chance. In a contest between him and Walz for a job that famously carries almost no actual duties, that’s the only detail about him that ultimately matters. He’s a happy-face killer.

 

The fact that so many Vance apologists are prone to glossing over that detail made the rave reviews for J.D. ironic, our friend David French noted. The candidate’s calm demeanor and genial approach to Walz was designed to reassure voters that he’ll be a restraining influence on Trump but the substance of his answer about the 2020 election proves the opposite. Pence couldn’t tame the populist beast; an enabler like Vance won’t bother to try.

 

“In choosing Vance and discarding Pence, Trump traded actual decency for a man who can simulate decency,” David wrote. “Simulating decency” is a nice, pithy summary of what “respectable Trumpism” means in practice.

 

I’m also less sold than the right-wing professional class is on how much Vance improved his chances in 2028 last night—although I do think he improved them.

 

No one knows how many Republicans will accept the results next month if Trump loses this election, and it’s a safe bet that Mr. Respectable will parrot whichever conspiracy theories to explain the outcome that he’s tasked with by his running mate. But to the extent right-wingers do concede that Trump lost, they’ll find it easy to rationalize the result as a problem with the messenger, not the message. There’s nothing wrong with populism, we’ll be told; the GOP lost because the wild man at the top of the ticket scared away more voters in the upper class than he managed to attract among the working class.

 

What the party needs is a calmer, more cerebral populist, someone capable of pants-ing his Democratic opponent in a battle of wits on a national stage without so much as raising his voice. Someone more … respectable. Vance might not be the natural first choice of grassroots Trumpists but watching him handle a liberal with ease in a big spot will earn him significant goodwill among them. After two straight presidential defeats, they might be amenable to sacrificing a bit of bravado in their next nominee for greater electability.

 

They might be. But neither you nor I would wager very much on it, would we?

 

“Do Trump voters want a kinder, gentler version of MAGA?” a skeptical Jonathan Last wondered today. I share that skepticism. I suspect the great hope of reformicons and nationalist intellectuals is that in time right-wing populists will develop an appetite for policy rather than for combative spectacle, the steak rather than the sizzle. The pro-wrestling aspect of Trumpism is what got their attention, the theory goes; now that they’re engaged, they’ll mature and begin thinking harder about what the two parties are offering once the ringmaster finally leaves the ring.

 

What if they just like wrestling?

 

“The craziest son of a b–ch in the race,” to quote Rep. Thomas Massie, has won the Republican presidential nomination in three straight cycles. GOP voters passed on the steak offered by various candidates in this year’s primary because they preferred the sizzle. Vance will have meaningful advantages in 2028—extremely high name-recognition, for starters, and probably the backing of the Reaganite rump as the least bad option in a post-Trump party—but he surely won’t be the craziest son of a b–ch in the race.

 

How would he fare, do you think, in a one-on-one debate with the Riddler?

 

“Respectable Trumpism” is a smart pitch for a general election, but ask the governor of Florida how smart it is in a primary when you’re facing an opponent with more Trumpian sizzle. Right-wing intellectuals dream of Trumpism without Trump; my sense of right-wing voters is that they’d happily keep Trump if he ditched Trumpism. 

 

The least bad option.

 

Maybe I’m wrong, though. (Remember: terrible instincts!)

 

If there’s anyone in the party capable of shape-shifting deftly enough to satisfy primary voters and general election voters in turn, it’s J.D. Vance. And his simulation of decency on Tuesday night might hold more appeal for Republican voters than I’ve given them credit for. Once Trump is gone and his persona no longer defines what it means to be right-wing, a party that runs on nostalgia might find itself feeling nostalgic for how politicians used to interact.

 

And less nostalgic about other elements of the Trump era.

 

I’ll believe it when I see it, though. “Trump’s secret sauce is his ability to turn out low-propensity voters who were never closely affiliated with the old Republican Party,” Last writes, pointing to the outcome of this year’s primary. “And those voters show no sign of being interested in either kinder or gentler. They want the chaos. The transgression. The violence.” 

 

To impress those voters and get out of a primary in 2028, J.D. Vance, the respectable Trumpist, will need to indulge in quite a lot of unrespectable politics. But I know he has it in him, just like I know his cheerleaders among the professional right have it in them to keep looking the other way as he goes about behaving disgracefully. He’s a terrible person, unfit for office—and, in their eyes, very possibly the best this rotten party can realistically do. They might be right.