Unstatesmanlike Statesmen

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

A few years ago in Switzerland, to which then I was giving some serious thought to relocating, a local asked me about my view of Swiss politics. I said that when it comes to Switzerland, I am a conservative. He asked if this meant I thought well of the Swiss People’s Party, the Swiss vessel for the kind of rightist populism currently resurgent elsewhere in Europe. I replied that what I meant was not that I favor the political right in Switzerland but that I am conservative in the sense that I like Switzerland the way it is, and, more to the point, that I am conscious of the fact that Switzerland got the way it is with very little input from slightly disreputable American journalists over the course of its now nearly seven and one-half centuries of existence. Schweiz für die Schweizer may be a right-wing slogan (and everything sounds more right-wing in German, even Swiss German), but the underlying sentiment—that Switzerland is for the Swiss—is one that Swiss people of many different political persuasions will voice, from time to time, usually politely.

 

I think a little about the story about how Secretary of State George Shultz would direct newly appointed ambassadors to a globe and say, “Show me your country,” at which point the freshly elevated diplomats would invariably point out the country to which they were being dispatched. “No,” Schultz would say, tapping his finger on the United States: “This is your country.” I could live happily in Switzerland or Italy or France, but none of those is my country.

 

In the United States, the au courant expression on the right is “America First!”—never mind the ugly history of that particular phrase. (“Switzerland for the Swiss” also echoes antisemitic campaigns from the 20^th century.) But the notion that America is for Americans, first and foremost, ought not be controversial—for whom else should it be? I would think that a reasonably intelligent right-wing populist and a reasonably intelligent democratic socialist (a double dose of question-begging there, I know) could agree in a general way that U.S. policy regarding immigration or military deployments ought to be conducted with an eye to U.S. interests—even the few genuine advocates of an open-borders immigration policy typically argue that this policy would be good for the United States rather than argue that the United States has some kind of moral duty to present itself to the world as a kind of global public resource. Nationalist ideology is not a prerequisite for a policy oriented toward national interest.

 

Nor is nationalism per se necessary for understanding that relations between citizens of the same country are different from relations between those citizens and foreigners—and it should be understood that different is a value-neutral term: I feel differently about Americans than I do about Canadians or Mexicans or Japanese, and that is not exclusively in a positive way. We have different countries for a reason, and we have different kinds of interpersonal relationships for a reason, too.

 

Which brings me, first, to Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

I do not follow internal Israeli politics closely, but I would say that I am better disposed toward Netanyahu than most of my friends and colleagues. I have friends who follow Israeli politics very closely and who are dauntless and long-standing friends of Israel who believe that, whatever his merits and whatever good he may have done in the past, Netanyahu has overstayed his time. These are questions for history, but what I am interested in here rises barely, if at all, past the level of etiquette: I did not care for Netanyahu’s coming to New York City to lecture the mayor of that city, Zohran Mamdani, about his political views. Yes, Mayor Mamdani has imbecilic and morally unsound views when it comes to Israel, and, yes, the United Nations is notionally outside of the United States under the extraterritoriality agreement attached to its founding, but as anyone who ever has sat through a traffic jam caused by a meeting of the General Assembly could tell you, the United Nations is in New York City, whatever some piece of paper somewhere says. The Israeli prime minister is a guest when he visits New York City, and he should act like one. The U.N. is a forum for diplomatic exchange, but that is not what Netanyahu was offering. Netanyahu was campaigning.

 

The episode illustrates a strange aspect of politics in our time: A generation ago, the proverbial wisdom was that all politics is local; for a minute or two, it appeared to be the case that all politics was national; and now, all politics—or at least a lot of politics—is global. In spite of the fact that New York City has no meaningful foreign policy to speak of (the mayor of New York City does not even have jurisdiction over the No. 6 train), Mamdani has made Israel and Gaza central to his political message, and his positions are championed by his fellow Democratic Socialists of America and increasingly common among progressives and mainstream Democrats at large. In Slate, Aymann Ismail writes:

 

Since 2024, Democratic voters have moved substantially further away from Israel. Candidates attacking unconditional support for the Israeli government have won Democratic primaries. More than 100 House Democrats recently voted to eliminate billions in military assistance to Israel. And several of the people who spent the 2024 convention trying to convince Democrats that they were attempting to save the party, not sabotage it, have spent the intervening years burrowing further into Democratic politics.

 

That tendency is not limited to Democrats seeking national offices where they might expect to have some influence on foreign affairs. Gaza is a factor in the politics of, e.g., the Oakland school board, as the Wall Street Journal reports:

 

The board had scarcely embarked on its agenda, which included school-site improvements and enrollment issues, when a pro-Palestinian speaker’s microphone was cut off after his two minutes expired. When the man continued to talk, Mike Hutchinson, Oakland school-board president, announced a five-minute recess.

 

While Hutchinson and his colleagues remained seated, demonstrators chanted “Free Palestine!” and “Shame!” The school-board president then adjourned the meeting before the measure was formally introduced, as dozens of people were still waiting to speak.

 

In the largely progressive San Francisco Bay Area, other local governments and political organizations have already taken steps to condemn Israel’s actions, drawing praise from Palestinian supporters and accusations of antisemitism from Jewish groups—along with questions about why they are taking positions on a war on the other side of the world.

 

Oakland’s public schools are such that only one-third of students are proficient in reading at their grade level, while only one-quarter are proficient at math, in both cases underperforming the California average, which is not great. The evidence suggests that the people who run the schools in Oakland probably should not be allowed to adopt kittens from animal shelters, much less be empowered to manage the education of the children of a city with more than 400,000 residents—and how much less ought we to care what they think about a conflict that has been raging either for about 80 years or (if you take the long view) about 14 centuries? Similarly, the thinking person probably will discount Mamdani’s views on complex geopolitical questions until after the sage of Astoria figures out how to get the trash picked up on Bruckner Boulevard.

 

Netanyahu and his party have reciprocated Mamdani’s unseemly interest, leading to the bizarre fact that the name and likeness of the mayor of New York City can be seen on billboards and in campaign literature in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. And that is fair enough, I suppose, if strange: Mamdani has invited the attention, and his equivocation (and worse) between Israeli self-defense and the Palestinian campaign of (among other things) raping and murdering civilians at music festivals is grotesque, illiterate, and—yes—profoundly antisemitic, in that (and not only in that) the idiotic claim that Israel is engaged in genocide against the Arabs is categorically antisemitic, an anti-Jewish smear applied to Jews because of the Jewish experience as the targets of a campaign of genuine genocide. Netanyahu has a right to be steamed. But a statesman should be statesmanlike, which entails moderating one’s speech and behavior when one is outside one’s own country. And Netanyahu probably should forgo presenting himself as the tribune of Jewish Americans, many of whom do not wish to enjoy the very slight honor of being used as the prime minister’s political props.

 

Likewise, a statesmanlike statesman ought to tailor his behavior when dealing with foreign nationals—especially foreign heads of state. Donald Trump’s simpering courtship of Chinese autocrat Xi Jinping would be difficult to bear under any circumstances, but the American president’s gleeful denigration of his predecessor in the office as president for the amusement of a foreign despot was intolerably shameful. There is almost nothing that Trump could do that would surprise me—nothing short of an act of courage or generosity—and the business with the autopen “portrait” of Joe Biden is textbook Trump stuff: petty, corrosive, dumb. I do wonder how Trump’s sycophantic circle, the members of which are obsessed with the notion that they and the man they love are “alpha males,” received Trump’s display of subordination to Xi. Presumably, they will do what they usually do and try to convince themselves that it is part of some brilliant tactical ploy. One can safely bet what Xi is thinking: “Here’s a couple of pandas, boy, and I’m taking Taiwan.”

 

If it means anything, then “America First” means Americans first, even Americans as dotty and useless as Joe Biden, a contemptible and grubby little grasper who did not have much of a working brain back when he had something of a working brain. If you are a nationalist in any genuine sense, then your people are your people. But, of course, Trump is not a nationalist in any meaningful sense, for the same reason he isn’t really much of a patriot or a racist or a Christian—Trump is his own god, and he recognizes no loyalty at odds with his interests and no good that is not in accord with his appetites and desires. Trump may say that he cares about “America First,” but naturally he will wait and see what Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin or some Qatari potentate has to offer to him, too. Trump has on a hundred occasions sold out genuine American interests in the service of his own vanity and greed, and he’ll probably do it a hundred more times before he leaves office, however he leaves office.

 

The president of the United States is not the United States. The president is not the country. But in one-on-one dealings with Xi or any other head of state, the president represents the United States, and while he does so he is clothed with vast symbolic and actual power. Batting his eyelashes at Xi and putting on a sophomoric mean-girls act to ingratiate himself with the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party? That is a funny kind of nationalist, indeed, and a desperate one.

 

Economics for English Majors

 

By request: How is it that the proposed ban on diesel exports could actually raise diesel prices in the United States?

 

To be sure, a diesel export ban likely wouldn’t have the exclusive effect of raising diesel prices. The bad news: A diesel export ban likely would have the effect of raising the prices of diesel, gasoline, jet fuel, and other refined-petroleum products.

 

A little background:

 

Because of the way oil is refined into usable petroleum products, it is not the case that refiners say: “Well, we need this much diesel, this much gasoline, and this much jet fuel, so we’ll turn x barrels of crude into diesel, y into gasoline, and z into jet fuel.” Rather, it is the case that each barrel of crude simultaneously produces a variety of petroleum products in more or less fixed amounts. Typically, a 42-gallon barrel of oil will give you around 20 gallons of gasoline, 12 or 13 gallons of diesel and heating oil, around 5 gallons of jet fuel, and a quantity of other stuff (asphalt, lubrication oil, petrochemicals) that accounts for the rest. (N.B.: 42 gallons of petroleum produces more than 42 gallons of refined product.) In the United States, the total amount of oil that gets refined into fuels and other products is determined mainly by demand for gasoline. Producing enough gasoline to supply the U.S. market means producing more diesel than Americans consume. Happily, the world is full of people who want to buy American petroleum products, and so surplus U.S. diesel helps to deliver food to shops in the United Kingdom and powers buses in Brazil and runs backup hospital generators hither and yon. It also provides Americans with something Americans absolutely love: corporate profits, which, beyond making sure that some oil barons get a new yacht every couple of years, shore up various tax bases and pay dividends into retirement accounts and fatten up paychecks with profit-sharing programs, etc. Hooray for profit!

 

Given that refiners export that diesel because doing so is profitable, what do you think they will do if Uncle Stupid tells them that they cannot export it anymore? Do you think that taking away one source of profit is likely to get them to cut prices in the United States? No. That would be what the economists call stupid wishful thinking. Exxon did not get to be Exxon by being blasé about profit.

 

At first, the refiners probably will divert diesel into storage. Diesel doesn’t last forever, but neither do stupid export bans. Once the storage facilities are full, then refiners probably would begin reducing their output—remember, they already produce all the diesel U.S. consumers use plus a bit of what the rest of the world uses, too. Producing less diesel would not mean only that refiners were no longer producing the diesel they used to export—it would also mean that they would no longer be producing the gasoline, jet fuel, etc., that they produced in the course of producing that exported diesel. That probably would lead to higher prices for all of those fuels, lubricants, and chemicals, because less is … less. Reduce supply, keep demand steady, and prices can be expected to go up.

 

Higher prices for fuels, lubricants, and chemicals mean upward price pressure on … pretty much everything. Not great for a country already dealing with persistent inflation.

 

An export ban would also create business opportunities for overseas competitors to U.S. producers legally prevented from serving export markets. That would not be great news for those producers’ shareholders and employees.

 

Now, presenting the Trump administration with a dumb and destructive economic policy is like presenting a kid with a cookie—or a marshmallow, as in the famous Stanford experiment. If a thing is dumb, it is a safe bet these dummies are going to do the thing. That’s what dummies do. It’s a dumb marshmallow, and they are going to eat it pretty much every time.