Bret Stephens

So far, the result has been closer to the opposite.

That much was further made clear thanks to excellent reporting this week by The Times’ Ben Hubbard. “Iran’s financial crisis, exacerbated by American sanctions,” he writes from Lebanon, “appears to be undermining its support for militant groups and political allies who bolster Iranian influence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere.”

Well, heavens to Betsy. When the Obama administration negotiated the nuclear deal, the president acknowledged that sanctions relief for Tehran would inevitably mean more money for groups like Hezbollah. But he also insisted it wouldn’t make much of a difference in terms of Iran’s capacity to make mischief in the Middle East.

Hubbard’s reporting suggests otherwise. Iran can no longer finance civilian projects or credit lines in Syria. Hezbollah fighters and Palestinian militants aren’t being paid, and their families are losing subsidized housing. Even Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has complained publicly about the effects of U.S. sanctions.

Nor are those the only benefits of withdrawal. The U.S. is no longer looking the other way at Hezbollah’s criminal enterprises, including drug smuggling and money laundering, the way it did during the Obama administration in order to engage Iran diplomatically. Iran’s protest movement, quashed in 2009, has shown signs of renewed life, not least because of public fury that the regime spends money on foreign adventures while economic conditions worsen at home.

Most importantly, Iran has not used the U.S. withdrawal from the deal to restart its nuclear programs, despite its threats to do so. Part of this has to do with Tehran’s belief that it can wait Trump out, especially since Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris have promised to re-enter the deal if elected.

But it also suggests an edge of fear in Tehran’s calculations. The U.S. can still impose a great deal more pain on the Islamic Republic if it chooses to do so.

How so? Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told me this week that the sanctions needle now stands at around a 6. With a nod to Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel, he says, “We need to get to 11.”

Iran still exports about 1 million barrels of oil a day; the administration could bring it to zero by refusing to hand out sanctions waivers. The State Department could also designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organization, on a par with al-Qaida or Islamic State. Such a designation, Dubowitz says, would “make the entire Iranian economy radioactive” to foreign investment, since the IRGC is heavily involved in scores of Iranian businesses.

Even here Dubowitz is merely warming to his theme. Freeze Iran’s foreign exchange reserves? Doable. Expose the immense wealth of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and sanction the companies he and other leading regime figures control? Ditto. Unleash lawsuits against companies still doing business with Iran to recover billions of dollars in outstanding terrorism judgments against the country? That, too.

The point isn’t to punish Iran for punishment’s sake. It’s to create leverage for a better nuclear deal. In May, Mike Pompeo set a dozen parameters for an agreement, including “unqualified access” to U.N. nuclear inspectors, permanent cessation of uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing, the end of Iran’s ballistic-missile program, withdrawal of its forces from Syria, and the release of U.S. nationals held in its prisons.

Pompeo’s demands have been alternatively dismissed as silly or reckless by most of Washington’s foreign policy establishment. But it says something about the debasement of diplomatic expectations — both of what we have a right to expect and what we think we can achieve — that any of it should be controversial.

Non-nuclear states that sponsor terrorism and subscribe to millenarian ideologies should never have access to any part of the nuclear fuel cycle, ever. Any U.S. administration that abdicates the responsibility to do everything it can to prevent such access effectively renounces America’s status as a superpower as well.

Iran’s gross domestic product is roughly equivalent to that of the greater Boston area, with 17 times the population. The regime may be a force to be reckoned with in the Middle East. But it is hardly a giant on the world stage, immune to any form of economic pressure short of military attack.

The Trump administration has succeeded in dramatically raising the costs to Iran for its sinister behavior, at no cost to the United States or our allies. That’s the definition of a foreign-policy achievement. It’s time to move the needle up again. The longer Hezbollah fighters go unpaid, or Bashar Assad's regime unaided, the better off the people of the Middle East will be.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/opinion/iran-us-foreign-policy.html" id="85005f91-f7ff-3cd5-adb0-bc798ae20d9e">The New York Times</a>.

It’s been nearly a year since Donald Trump made the decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, to loud cries that the decision would bring nothing but woe to the United States and our interests in the Middle East.

The Foreign Policy Fiasco That Wasn't

Maybe Donald Trump isn’t just some two-bit con artist who lucked his way into the White House thanks to an overconfident opponent. Or a second-rate demagogue with a rat-like instinct for arousing his base’s baser emotions and his enemies’ knee-jerk reactions. Or a dimwit mistaken for an oracle, like some malignant version of Chauncey Gardiner from “Being There.”

Thanks to Robert Mueller, we know he isn’t Russia’s man inside, awaiting coded instruction from his handler in the Kremlin.

Maybe, in fact, Trump is the genius he claims to be, possessed — as he likes to boast — of a “very good brain.”

OK, I don’t quite believe that. But going forward, it would be wise for all of his inveterate critics in the news media, including me, to treat it as our operating assumption. The alternative is to let him hand us our butts all over again, just as he did by winning the GOP nomination and then the election, and then by presiding over years of robust economic growth.

That should be the central lesson from the epic media fiasco of Russiagate.

Let’s specify what the fiasco is not. It’s not that there was nothing for Mueller to investigate. It’s not that he uncovered no wrongdoing. It’s not that the president did not act in suspicious ways, epitomized by his appalling performance at Helsinki. It’s not that he didn’t lie and mislead, not least about his business ties in Russia. It’s not that the Trump campaign wasn’t studded with people who were, at a minimum, profoundly vulnerable to Russian blackmail. It’s not that the Kremlin didn’t actively seek to interfere in the election, with a favorable eye toward Trump’s candidacy.

Pace the president and his sycophants — the ones who spent nearly two years casting aspersions on Mueller’s integrity, only to now hail his conclusions as dispositive — the nature and extent of Trump’s ties to Russia required a thorough investigation. It got done. Barring some major discrepancy between the attorney general’s summary of Mueller’s report and the report itself, it’s time to say: Case closed. Thank God the president is not a Russian stooge.

The fiasco was to assume that the result of Mueller’s investigation was a forgone conclusion. And to believe that the existence of dots was enough to prove that they had to connect. And to report on it nonstop, breathlessly, as if the levee would break any second. And to turn Adam Schiff into a celebrity guest. And to belittle or exclude contrarian voices.

In July, I wrote of the special counsel’s inquiry: “The smart play is to defend the integrity of Mueller’s investigation and invest as little political capital as possible in predicting the result. If Mueller discovers a crime, that’s a gift to the president’s opponents. If he discovers nothing, it shouldn’t become a humiliating liability.”

Instead, as Matt Taibbi perceptively observed last week, what we have is a WMD-size self-inflicted media disaster, which ought to require some extensive self-criticism before we breathlessly move on to Trump’s latest alleged idiocy. Assume for a moment that Trump’s odd Russia behavior, including the obsequiousness toward Vladimir Putin and the routine eruptions against Mueller, was merely a way of baiting journalists for years.

If so, he could hardly have played us better: He’d be the Keyser Söze of media manipulation. To adapt a line, perhaps the greatest trick Trump ever pulled was to convince the world his brain didn’t exist.

There’s a simpler, opposite explanation: Trump was never sophisticated enough to have been involved in some high-flown conspiracy with Russia. It would have required too much guile. Forget Söze; think Inspector Jacques Clouseau. The difference between suspicious and shambolic behavior often depends on who is doing the watching. Where some see chaos, others detect patterns. From a certain distance, they can be hard to tell apart.

For years I’ve bounced between these two interpretations of the president — at times astonished by his incompetence; at other times amazed by his cunning. There’s much about the world that Trump will never understand. What he knows, however, is that success is above all a matter of being seen (regardless of results); that the more one lies, the less people notice; that winning is a matter of playing by one’s own rules (and changing them as needed); that, while hope may be inspiring, rage is intoxicating.

These ideas may be noxious, but they are also the fundamental political insights of our time.

Whichever view one takes, Donald Trump has just won a major victory over his chosen political enemies, including this newspaper. Whether he’s achieved this through genius or luck, it would behoove us not to take him for a fool. This was the week to examine our own foolishness instead.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/opinion/trump-mueller-russia-report.html" id="cc7e5d14-348d-3ced-ad03-16d78096b33a">The New York Times</a>.

Maybe we’ve had this all wrong.

Is Trump Keyser Söze -- Or Inspector Clouseau?

Sensing a political opportunity, Bill Clinton went before Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition to rebuke Williamson. “If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black,’ and you reversed them,” the Arkansas governor said, “you might think David Duke was giving that speech.”

Jackson was furious. But Americans were reassured that Clinton really was a new kind of Democrat, not in thrall to the party’s left wing. He was elected president later that year.

American politics could use another Sister Souljah moment. Two, in fact.

The obvious need is among Republicans. In the past week, President Donald Trump has renewed his campaign of insult against John McCain, proving that the lowest place on earth isn’t the Mariana Trench — it’s the president’s soul. Yet with the notable exception of Mitt Romney, no Republican of national stature has done much more than clear his throat by way of objection, as if the president were no worse than a bumptious uncle passing gas at a Thanksgiving table.

It won’t do. What Trump said wasn’t rude. It was grotesque. It didn’t just besmirch the memory of the honored dead. It assaulted the feelings of the grieving living. It didn’t just transgress bounds of ordinary decency. It blew a hole (another one) in our already shattered expectations of presidential behavior. It showed that Trump isn’t merely unsuited to leadership. He’s unfit for manhood.

This would be the moment for a rising Republican leader — Nikki Haley comes to mind — to say, in clear and categorical terms, that is not us. She could give a speech in Sedona, Arizona, noting how John McCain’s values represented the Republican Party at its best: courage and freedom; faith and forgiveness; individualism and engagement.

Such a Sister Souljah moment won’t derail Trump’s renomination. It may even harm the immediate political viability of whoever does the denouncing. But it will send a signal, essential for the party’s long-term health, that a future Republican president will restore honor and dignity to the White House.

Democrats, too, desperately need such a moment if they are serious about winning the election next year.

John Hickenlooper had his chance this month on “Morning Joe” to describe himself, based on his business record, as a “proud capitalist.” He flubbed it. Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker had a chance to repudiate Rep. Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitism forcefully and without equivocation, just as Nancy Pelosi did. They flubbed it. Kamala Harris had a chance to break out beyond her deep-blue base by opposing the Green New Deal in the name of fiscal responsibility. She flubbed it. Kirsten Gillibrand could have embraced her centrist record as a Blue Dog Democrat rather than run away from it. She’s flubbed it. Beto O’Rourke, Julian Castro and Pete Buttigieg could have bucked the charge that Democrats are becoming an anti-Israel party by showing up at next week’s AIPAC conference. They’ve flubbed it.

There’s still time. Trump’s executive order Thursday on campus free speech could provide another opportunity for a Democrat to break with progressive orthodoxy.

Step 1: Criticize the order as an example of federal government overreach to which conservatives usually object. Step 2: Acknowledge that there is a serious problem on the left when it comes to speech, and that protecting the speech rights of all Americans is an irreducible and nonnegotiable principle of liberalism. Step 3: Pledge that as president you will restore America’s moral leadership when it comes to defending press freedom, ideological diversity and individual conscience.

The chances of this happening seem slim. And the blowback a candidate would face from the progressive social-media furies would be great.

But the point of a Sister Souljah moment isn’t to ingratiate a candidate to the party base. It’s to demonstrate independence and nerve. And furnish evidence that the candidate is of the center, not the fringe. And that he or she can appeal beyond the Democratic base to Americans who think capitalism is mainly good, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are profoundly bad, and the intellectual commissars of the woke left are intolerant bores.

Donald Trump plans to win re-election on the strength of a fanatically devoted base, a prosperous economy, a Mueller report that finds no smoking gun and a Democratic Party that increasingly seems to find nothing wrong with the word “socialism.” It’s not a bad theory of the race, especially if there isn’t a Democrat willing to stand up and prove him wrong.

As for the rest of the Republican Party, they believe they can squeak to re-election with a president who extols scoundrels, defames heroes, lies without compunction, holds to no higher principle than his personal gratification and thinks he can always get away with it, because he always does.

Is there no Republican willing to stand up to all this, lest Trump be proven right?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/opinion/trump-mccain-2020-republicans-democrats.html" id="6a195b6f-e28f-3f25-ad57-029349ec43ff">The New York Times</a>.

In 1992, recording artist Lisa Williamson, better known as Sister Souljah, opined, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” She also said, “If there are any good white people, I haven’t met them.”

We Need More Sister Souljah Moments

That’s odd: Some media outlets are prepared to devote months of journalistic effort in order to trace the trajectory of a single bullet that accidentally kills a Palestinian — provided the bullet is Israeli.

The difference this time is that the shots are being fired by Hamas, the militant Islamist group that has ruled Gaza since 2007, when it usurped power from its rivals in the Fatah movement in a quick and dirty civil war. Since then, no genuine elections have been held, and no dissent brooked.

The current round of demonstrations, which began last week, comes in reaction to years of Hamas’ economic mismanagement, price hikes and recent tax increases. This is not for lack of funds on Hamas’ part: Since 2012, the group has taken in over $1 billion from Qatar alone to pay the costs of fuel, humanitarian aid and civil-servant salaries.

Where that money goes is another question. In 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hamas had spent some $90 million building attack tunnels into Israel, at an average cost of nearly $3 million a tunnel. The material devoted to each tunnel, the Journal reported, was “enough to build 86 homes, seven mosques, six schools or 19 medical clinics.” Three wars against Israel, each started by Hamas, have also taken their toll in lives, injuries, infrastructure and isolation.

All this has meant suffering and deprivation for the people of Gaza, irrespective of anything Israel does. In February, Amnesty International reported that the Palestinian journalist Hajar Harb had been tried in absentia by Hamas for publishing a report on al-Araby TV detailing alleged corruption in the Ministry of Health. Hamas officials have also reportedly enriched themselves by controlling the underground trade in goods, from poultry to furniture to cars, between the Strip and Egypt.

And so Gazans are making their despair known. Hundreds took to the streets last week, only to be shot at, clubbed and arrested by Hamas security forces.

“The crackdown on freedom of expression and the use of torture in Gaza has reached alarming new levels,” noted Saleh Higazi of Amnesty. Incidents include the arrest of human-rights activists, the beating and jailing of more than 15 local journalists, and violent attacks on peaceful demonstrators “using sound grenades, batons, pepper spray, live ammunition and physical assaults.”

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Hamas bills itself as a “resistance” movement, and such movements, from the Irish Republican Army to the Viet Cong to Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF, tend to behave in strikingly similar ways: fanatical, thuggish, militaristic, hypocritical and corrupt.

To such groups, liberation rarely means more than the replacement of some form of foreign occupation with local despotism. They avow democracy but never hold a truly fair election. They create secret police, parallel security services, politburos, inner- and outer-party structures. They make war on their neighbors to distract from their inevitable failure to create prosperity at home. Their leaders preach struggle and martyrdom while living lavishly.

Nor should you be surprised by the scantiness of Western coverage: It would complicate a convenient narrative of the Israel-Palestinian conflict that holds that the former isn’t just the principal oppressor, but the only one. That feeds into the larger progressive fiction that the great crimes of the post-World War II world are the ones the West perpetrated on the rest of the world. In fact, far worse were the crimes of non-Westerners — Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Idi Amin, Nicolás Maduro — perpetrated against their own people.

The same goes for the Palestinians. More have died in Syria in the last decade, mainly on account of the depredations of the ostensibly pro-Palestinian regime of Bashar Assad, than have been killed by Israel. And Palestinians continue to be the victims of leaders who see no reason to subject themselves to regular elections, or financial audits, or criminal investigations, or any other mechanism of political or moral accountability.

That lack of accountability is chiefly a Palestinian failure. But it’s abetted by Western journalism that, with some honorable exceptions, for too long has been depressingly incurious about any form of Palestinian suffering for which Israel cannot be held responsible. That is sometimes a function of ideological bias, but it is also a failure of basic journalism.

Israelis and their friends abroad often complain about slanted coverage that seems to find fault in everything they do, while finding excuses in everything their adversaries do. If the protests in Gaza demonstrate anything, it’s that Palestinians hardly benefit from the coverage, either.

Palestinian lives and livelihoods should matter despite who harms them. A world that shrugs at Hamas’ abuse of its own people merely licenses the abuse to continue, unchecked.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/opinion/palestinian-protests-gaza-strip-hamas.html" id="8baf141d-52f0-3d5c-a313-d5e4a0f429f1">The New York Times</a>.

The people of the Gaza Strip are protesting again, and soldiers are shooting again, and civilians are being victimized again. Only this time you may have missed the story, because these protests barely rated a buried paragraph in most Western news accounts.

Palestinian Lives Don't Matter*

“We’d like to give a special thanks to all those Americans who built the spacecraft, who did the construction, design, the tests, and put their heart and all their abilities into the [space]crafts,” says Armstrong. “To those people tonight we give a special thank you.”

The film cuts to a shot of thousands of technicians assembled in an immense hangar, beaming with pride. At the zenith of his fame, the hero proves his worth by honoring those to whom the glory is truly owed.

I watched “Apollo 11” twice this week, and came away with two very different impressions. What awed me the first time was scale: The crawler-transporter that moves the Saturn V rocket to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. The rocket itself, standing 363 feet tall. People lining up for miles to watch the launch. The shuddering noise and force of liftoff. Speeds accelerating to 24,000 mph. Re-entry temperatures hitting 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The smallness of Earth, the stillness of the moon, the limitlessness of space.

Everything is immense, mind-boggling. Having been born nearly a year after the last Apollo mission took flight, I have trouble wrapping my head around it. Reality isn’t supposed to be this epic.

By contrast, what I mainly noticed the second time around were the intimate sides of the endeavor. The look of suppressed nervousness on Collins’ face as he is being suited up on the morning of the flight. Biometric data showing Armstrong’s heart pounding at 156 beats a minute at the moment Eagle touches down on the lunar surface, belying his reputation as Mr. Coolstone. A shadow of deep melancholy that seems to overcome Aldrin as he speaks to his family once the mission is over.

Three men are going to try to fly to the moon. Three billion people will lionize them if they succeed; lament (or mourn) them if they fail; mock them if they screw up. No pressure.

How do they cope? In last year’s biopic, “First Man,” Armstrong (played by Ryan Gosling) is portrayed as a 1950s guy stuck in a 1960s world. Repression is the key to his emotional composure, achieved at the expense of family life. The 2007 documentary “In the Shadow of the Moon,” which mixes footage of the Apollo missions with interviews with the astronauts (minus Armstrong) as older men, is more revealing. Everyone is his own man; each one deals with his fears in his own way. There’s more than one formula for the Right Stuff.

But “Apollo 11” offers an additional insight, particularly when it comes to Armstrong. Asked by a reporter to describe his feelings “as far as responsibilities of representing mankind on this trip,” Armstrong brings the question down to size: “It’s a job that we collectively said was possible, that we could do, and of course the nation itself is backing us, so we just sincerely hope that we measure up to that.”

The answer is quintessential Armstrong: He’s the guy who prefers to turn poetry into prose. The one time he seems least himself is when he utters the line that’s supposed to immortalize him: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Dropping the “a” before “man” winds up being his sole extraterrestrial mistake.

It’s not that Armstrong is incapable of eloquence. It’s that his manner of eloquence is direct, gracious and above all modest when everyone else — Walter Cronkite and Richard Nixon in particular — strains for grandiloquence. To borrow a line from Barack Obama, he knows too well that he didn’t build that. His sense of his place in history is that he’s mainly an accident of it.

And there lies the greatest marvel of the Apollo program: Not so much the size of the endeavor, or the machines that were built to accomplish it, but rather the quality of self-effacement among the men most associated with its success. Armstrong, easily one of the most celebrated men of the last half-century, refused to become a celebrity. He kept his politics to himself. He made no oracular pronouncements. He did not amass fabulous wealth.

He stayed humble, and human, in the era of relentless puffery and self-promotion. This, too, feels as bygone as the Saturn V, the Right Stuff, and the “one small step"— and as missed.

That’s a moonshot-scale question, but here’s a worthy contribution. As I was writing this column, I got a call from Ken Burns, a friend and renowned documentary maker, who told me about a new prize endowed by Boston philanthropists Jonathan and Jeannie Lavine in collaboration with the Library of Congress and The Better Angels Society. The award, which is currently accepting applications through June 1, will annually grant $200,000 to a young documentary filmmaker in the final stages of producing a feature film.

“We are in a situation right now where we are dialectically preoccupied: red state or blue state, gay or straight, rich or poor, male or female,” Ken told me by way of explaining the prize’s significance. He’s looking for an antidote. “Films that will reach a broad audience and speak to the enduring themes of what we are and what we share in common.” Winning entries, he added, will focus on American history, be nonpartisan, “Homeric in scope but intimate in details.”

“Apollo 11” is such a film. Go see it. Now, more please.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/opinion/apollo-11-documentary-neil-armstrong.html" id="3f4f874c-8417-3817-a843-ae30cc6f7684">The New York Times</a>.

There’s a short scene near the end of “Apollo 11,” the thrilling new documentary about history’s greatest spaceflight, in which Mike Collins, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong make a TV broadcast on their way home from the moon.

How Neil Armstrong Stayed Humble

The film cuts to a shot of thousands of technicians assembled in an immense hanger, beaming with pride. At the zenith of his fame, the hero proves his worth by honoring those to whom the glory is truly owed.

Apollo 11's Forgotten Virtues

Johnson might be half-inclined to agree. As he once said of himself: “You can’t rule out the possibility that beneath the elaborately constructed veneer of a blithering idiot, there lurks a blithering idiot.”

I’ve always had a vague distaste for Johnson, based mainly on his history as a journalistic fabulist, as well as the unflattering testimony of friends who’ve dealt with him personally. Also, I opposed Brexit, which Johnson recklessly championed in 2016 and which he now promises to see through, one way or another, by the end of October.

But I’m rooting for him, hard, as you should, too. And there’s reason to suspect that, this time, the man might be suited for the challenge and the hour.

I’m rooting for him, first, because the alternatives are much worse. Waiting to feast on the entrails of a failed Johnson premiership are, from the left, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn — a man who called for closing down NATO, eulogized Hugo Chávez, and kept company with Holocaust deniers — and, from the right, Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage — a man who said he’d get rid of anti-discrimination employment laws because “there should be a presumption for British employers in favor of them employing British people as opposed to somebody from Poland.”

As between (a) an anti-Semitic bigot and (c) an anti-immigrant bigot, I’ll choose (b): Boris, who has even called for amnesty for some illegal immigrants.

I’m rooting for him, second, because Britain needs a successful Brexit, and he may be the only political figure in Britain who can do it.

It would be nice to think that the U.K. could simply hold a second referendum and that the “Remain” camp would prevail this time. Yet there’s no guarantee it will. And even if it did, a second referendum leading to a different result would convince nearly half the country that they had been cheated of their democratic due.

That could only energize, radicalize and even weaponize the populist right, at a moment when populism is a swelling force in global politics.

Britain voted for Brexit, foolishly, but Brexit is what Britain now needs to get.

I’m rooting for him, third, because the United States not only needs Great Britain. It needs Britain great.

One of the frequent criticisms of Johnson and other Brexiteers is that, like Victorians born a century late, they have an exaggerated sense of the U.K.’s significance. Yet for all of its relative decline, Britain has four of the world’s 10 best universities, the fifth-largest economy, the fourth-largest navy (by tonnage), and a globally deployed military. It is second only to the U.S. in Nobel laureates, just as London is second only to New York as a global financial capital. Its literary and artistic scenes remain fecund and globally influential, and its political leaders, until dismal Theresa May, always punched above their weight.

All this means Britain remains a pillar of the Western world. If Johnson fails badly, more than just his mandate or career go down with him.

And yet I have an inkling that he isn’t going to fail. His mistakes are many, but many of them are venial: He was sacked by The Times of London, for instance, for making up a quote concerning the love life of King Edward II (1284-1327). He has loads of enemies, but by many accounts he has a gift for personal friendship and, unlike his three immediate predecessors, a deep political base. He has a profound sense of history, and writes remarkably well about it. His two terms as mayor of London involved some harebrained schemes, but he still managed to leave office with a near-60% approval rating in a city that leans left. His close association with the Brexit campaign gives him a chance, as May never had, to command its allegiance.

He has charisma. He’s eloquent and disarming. He is capable of winning people over.

He’ll need to, if he’s going to bring Britain out of the political deadlock that led to the crushing defeats of May’s Brexit plan. He’ll need it, too, to negotiate a trade deal with the United States, which Johnson has promised and which post-Brexit Britain cannot do without. For once, Britons should be grateful that Johnson, who in 2015 described Donald Trump as “clearly out of his mind,” has done so much to cultivate a relationship with the president.

Johnson is often compared to Trump, but it’s inapt. Trump is a lout masquerading as a political virtuoso. There’s reason to suspect the new prime minister is much closer to the opposite. For Britain’s sake, but not just Britain’s, I hope that’s true.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/opinion/boris-johnson-britain.html" id="4b1ef5b1-62d3-3a4a-a3e3-8a5f73dece5b">The New York Times</a>.

Boris Johnson has been Britain’s prime minister for not quite a day, and the reviews are in. He’s a disaster! A fraud! A Trumpy toff and shameless showman whose ego is inversely correlated to his merit and whose tenure of office won’t just be bad for the United Kingdom, but very possibly the death of it.

Why I'm Rooting for Boris Johnson

The novel, set mostly in late 19th-century Nebraska, tells the story of Ántonia Shimerda — the first name is pronounced An’-ton-ee-ah — the eldest daughter of a family from Bohemia, in what would now be the Czech Republic. The Shimerdas are immigrants who know very little about farming. And Nebraska isn’t yet the global breadbasket it would later become.

“There was nothing but land,” Cather writes. “Not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

Ántonia’s family sets out to make the country, alongside immigrants named Pavel and Peter, Otto and Ole, Lena and Yulka. In 1888, the Nebraska State Journal noted that “the great west has received the largest share of the immigration which has poured into this country since the last census was taken,” roughly doubling populations in the Western states.

These were the people who made the Midwest great. Their English, on arrival, was generally poor or nonexistent. Their skills were often ill-suited to the needs of the places to which they came. Their religious beliefs were not those of their American neighbors. They were often accused of being clannish, and they were not always grateful to be here.

“He not want to come, nev-er!” Ántonia says of her father, after the young American narrator in the story opines, “People who don’t like this country ought to stay at home.” That sounds familiar.

The immigrants came, for the most part, because they were fleeing hard circumstances, much as immigrants from Central America do today. But they also came because our borders were practically open until 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was shamefully passed.

Otherwise, the American dream was available to anyone who could pay a 50-cent tax (about $12 in current dollars) and was not a “convict, lunatic, idiot or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” The Immigration Act of 1891 slightly expanded the list of proscribed persons, but not by much, and went out of its way to welcome political asylees.

To fourth- or fifth-generation Americans who now say their ancestors came here legally, unlike today’s unauthorized workers, that’s largely because the getting in was easy. Today, the average wait-time for an immigrant visa is about six years and can stretch past a decade, according to the Cato Institute’s David Bier — time desperate people usually don’t have.

What hasn’t changed is that immigrants, on the whole, succeed. “Foreign farmers in our county were the first to become prosperous,” Cather’s (grown-up) narrator notes. “After the fathers were out of debt, the daughters married the sons of neighbors — usually of like nationality — and the girls who once worked in … kitchens are to-day managing big farms and fine families of their own.” Yet many of the locals saw them as “ignorant people who couldn’t speak English.” That sounds familiar, too.

To read “My Ántonia” more than a century after its publication is a reminder of the timelessness of America’s bigotries, whose loudest and most dangerous champion sits in the White House.

But, more powerfully, Cather’s novel is a story of a country that can overcome prejudice. The narrator’s grandfather offers succor to the destitute Shimerdas, forgives them their debts, puts petty quarrels aside, and consoles them in their grief. After Ántonia’s father commits suicide, he prays “that if any man there had been remiss toward the stranger come to a far country, God would forgive him and soften his heart.”

It’s in such moments that “My Ántonia” becomes an education in what it means to be American: to have come from elsewhere, with very little; to be mindful, amid every trapping of prosperity, of how little we once had, and were; to protect and nurture those newly arrived, wherever from, as if they were our own immigrant ancestors — equally scared, equally humble, and equally determined.

That’s the “real America” that today’s immigrant-bashers, starting with the president, pretend to venerate and constantly traduce. You don’t have to favor sanctuary cities and the abolition of ICE to be on the right side of this debate. But you do have to recognize that the newest immigrants have as much claim to the country and its lawful freedoms as any other American. That would certainly include Minnesota’s Rep. Ilhan Omar, whose rights must be defended every bit as vigorously as many of her views should be opposed.

That we have a president who doesn’t believe this, and a party bending constantly to his prejudices, is a stain on the United States. We can erase it by recalling what we’re really about, starting by rereading “My Ántonia.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/opinion/trump-presidency-immigration.html" id="c6d932f3-9dd8-3b53-a5ff-2d85cf6533fb">The New York Times</a>.

When I was in high school I read Willa Cather’s “My Ántonia” and loved it for the love story it told. This week, I borrowed my daughter’s copy and read it again. It turns out to be a book for our times — and the perfect antidote to our president.

The Perfect Antidote to Trump

None of these arguments is tenable today. Anyone seriously interested in defeating Trump at the polls next year should stop making them.

The very pleasant reality of the U.S. economy was neatly captured in the headline of Neil Irwin’s analysis last Friday in The New York Times: “The Economy That Wasn’t Supposed to Happen: Booming Jobs, Low Inflation.” Unemployment is at 3.6%, a 50-year low. Job creation remains strong. Average hourly earnings are up 3.2% over last year. Inflation is 1.6%.

“After more than two years of the Trump administration, warnings that trade wars and erratic management style would throw the economy off course have proved wrong so far,” Irwin writes, “and tax cuts and deregulation are most likely part of the reason for the strong growth rates in 2018 and the beginning of 2019.”

Irwin allows that the economy could slow as the effects of the tax cuts fade. That’s always possible. But for now, the economy is in even better shape than the headline data suggest.

There have been more job openings than job seekers for 13 straight months. Workers without college degrees have seen significant gains in their wages. Productivity growth is up, unusual at this point in an almost decade-long expansion. There are no obvious bubbles in tech, real estate or other industries, and the Dow has mostly recovered from last year’s swoon.

And as an astute friend pointed out to me recently, Trump’s scary tweets even seem to have the effect of tempering market exuberance, acting as a kind of check in lieu of interest-rate hikes.

How should Democrats deal with the good news? Denial can’t work forever.

In 2017, denial took the form of emphasizing the issue of wage stagnation — but then wages stopped stagnating. In 2018 the critics said the tax bill would provide nothing more than a sugar high for the economy, and yet the recovery has, if anything, accelerated. Earlier this year, we had “the incredible shrinking Trump boom” — until the data showed no shrinkage.

Now the Often-Wrong-But-Never-Humbled Department tells us the boom is really just a big fat Keynesian stimulus incurred at the cost of our ballooning budget deficits. Perhaps it is, but then how does the department explain the last 30 months of its doom-saying?

Eventually, of course, a recession will come. Recessions always do. The problem for Democrats is that there’s no guarantee that it will come before the election. In the meantime, they’ve left a trail of bad forecasts that make them look silly and out-of-touch — which the Trump campaign will gleefully use against them.

More importantly, it creates the perception that Democrats (at least those of the more ideological variety) are secretly hoping for a downturn, both to help their electoral chances and vindicate their own past predictions.

It’s unbecoming. It suggests a party led by people for whom questions of job creation and growth will always be abstractions, since their own jobs and prospects will always be safe. It’s what The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan shrewdly described in 2016 as the “protected class” — the people who make policies but never really have to live with the consequences.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was the candidate of the protected class, Trump of the unprotected. If Democrats decide to run against prosperity — either by pretending it isn’t really happening or that it doesn’t matter — it will only send a message to the voters they lost last time that the party still doesn’t get it.

There’s a reason Trump’s approval rating is now at 46% — the highest of his presidency, according to Gallup — despite all the Democratic thundering about William Barr’s testimony to Congress and the renewed talk of impeachment. Wittingly or not, Trump is delivering on the core promise of the presidency.

There’s also a reason that Joe Biden has taken a commanding early lead in the race for the Democratic nomination. His central theme is that he’s a regular guy who will restore regular order to Washington and regular behavior in the White House without mucking things up through a grand redesign of American capitalism. It isn’t clear that Biden will be able to get through the primary without putting both feet in his mouth and falling flat on his face. But that’s the right theory of the race.

Democrats need a candidate who gets this. They need someone who will work to enlarge our prosperity, not redistribute it. They need someone who can communicate and deliver, without embarrassing and frightening normal people the way Trump does.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/trump-economy-democrats-2020.html" id="dec03567-f473-3c5d-a75e-3fcbaf02ae7c">The New York Times</a>.

For more than two years, Democrats and their media friends have confidently insisted the U.S. economy under President Donald Trump (a) would crash and burn; or (b) benefits only the few; or (c) was fake; or, failing all of that, was just (d) the lucky beneficiary of policies put into place under Barack Obama.

Democrats, the Economy, and the Election

The surprise was as complete as it was devastating. Only this was an Army-Navy war game, the attackers were American pilots operating from the carriers Saratoga and Lexington, and the bombs they dropped were sacks of flour.

The lesson of “Grand Joint Exercise 4,” as it was called, is that forewarned is not always forearmed. It took the actual sinking of much of the U.S. battle fleet nearly a decade later to bring the lesson home to U.S. military planners that the age of the carrier had arrived.

Fast forward to 2006, when a small Chinese diesel-electric submarine surfaced well within torpedo-firing range from the 80,000-ton Kitty Hawk, having gone undetected by the carrier and her escorts. That incident ought to have been a loud wake-up call to the Navy that the age of the supercarrier is drawing to a close just as surely as the age of the battleship was coming to an end by the 1930s.

The only question is whether we will learn the lesson for ourselves, or — as we did Dec. 7, 1941 — have an adversary teach it to us.

The question is also at the heart of an incisive and important essay in the forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs by Christian Brose, the former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“The traditional model of U.S. military power is being disrupted, the way Blockbuster’s business model was amid the rise of Amazon and Netflix,” Brose writes. “A military made up of small numbers of large, expensive, heavily manned, and hard-to-replace systems will not survive on future battlefields, where swarms of intelligent machines will deliver violence at a greater volume and higher velocity than ever before.”

The logic here is the same as the one that decided the Battle of Agincourt, where the humble and effective English longbow made short work of the expensive and vulnerable French cavalry. Today’s version of that cavalry consists of aircraft carriers priced at $13 billion apiece and fighter jets that go for $90 million (and cost $30,000 an hour to fly).

These systems are all beset by the usual technological hurdles, cost overruns and bureaucratic pitfalls. Still, they’d be worth their enormous price if they conferred a long-term, decisive edge over our adversaries, as U.S. technological superiority over the Soviets did during the Cold War.

The problem is that they no longer do. On the one hand, we are burning through billions of dollars by deploying state-of-the-art resources against technologically primitive enemies in the Middle East and Africa. Why? Because, for example, an Air Force obsessed with acquiring fifth-generation stealth fighters still can’t bring itself to purchase a squadron of cheap turboprop planes to patrol, say, the skies of northern Iraq.

On the other hand, we are burning through trillions in order to build a relatively small number of ultrasophisticated platforms that are increasingly vulnerable to detection and destruction by near-peer adversaries like China and Russia. “Put simply,” Brose writes, “U.S. rivals are fielding large quantities of multimillion-dollar weapons to destroy the United States’ multibillion-dollar military systems.”

That’s a recipe for strategic failure on budgetary grounds alone. The coming of technologies like hypersonic propulsion, space-based weapons and quantum sensors (able to detect minute disruptions of air or water) makes it a recipe for rapid military defeat as well — at least if nothing changes.

The answer, Brose argues, is to radically increase the numbers of military platforms, lower their costs and — within ethical limits — enhance their autonomy. This puts fewer war fighters in harm’s way, creates more (and more difficult) targets for an enemy to track, and makes the loss of any one of them far easier to bear. Right now the Navy is straining to reach a target of 355 ships. It should be aiming for a significantly higher number, much of it unmanned.

So what stops it? The answer is what Brose’s old boss, the late John McCain, called the military-industrial-congressional complex.

“Military pilots and ship drivers are no more eager to lose their jobs to intelligent machines than factory workers are,” Brose writes. “Defense companies that make billions selling traditional systems are as welcoming of disruptions to their business model as the taxi cab industry has been of Uber and Lyft. And as all this resistance inevitably translates into disgruntled constituents, members of Congress will have enormous incentives to stymie change.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. A Pentagon with a visionary and independent leader, a Congress ruled by a non-parochial and bipartisan spirit, and a serious president capable of long-term thinking could change the way America prepares for the next war — to prevent it if possible, to win it if necessary.

For that, we’ll have to wait for a future administration. In the meantime, the risk of being on the losing side of our own Agincourt grows.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/opinion/us-military.html" id="c4cdcab3-2a14-3fab-ab6c-96d630e3da66">The New York Times</a>.

Early on a Sunday morning in 1932, a fleet of some 150 fighters, dive-bombers and torpedo planes struck the naval base at Pearl Harbor. The ships lying at anchor on Battleship Row sustained direct hits. Also hit were the base’s fuel storage tanks and the Army Air Corps planes parked nearby at Hickam Field.

The U.S. Military: Like the French at Agincourt?

“Statements are made about me by certain people in the Crazy Mueller Report, in itself written by 18 Angry Democrat Trump Haters, which are fabricated &amp; totally untrue,” the president tweeted Friday morning. He went on to denounce the “Report” — scare quotes in the original — for containing statements that “are total bullshit &amp; only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad).”

So the Mueller report is now, in the official White House version, “total exoneration,” except when it’s “total bullshit.” Got that?

In June 2017, The Wall Street Journal editorial board, long a skeptic of Mueller’s probe, offered the central argument for why an investigation was necessary. “Russian meddling in U.S. elections is a serious matter and Americans need to know what happened,” they wrote. “If Mr. Trump or key associates canoodled with the Russians to steal an election, then he must face the likely consequence of impeachment.”

That’s exactly right. And it’s why an investigation by a partisan-controlled House or Senate committee would never have sufficed, either for the purposes of establishing the facts or affording the president the vindication he now claims. Would, say, the “Nunes Report” have convinced anyone who wasn’t already planning to vote for Trump that no collusion had taken place? Would a decision by the president to fire Mueller in 2017 — as he very nearly did — have allayed suspicions, much less put the matter behind us?

Only Mueller, with his reputation for probity and credibility among Democrats, could have prevented the collusion narrative from achieving the status of unshakable faith among millions of Americans, akin to the false “Bush lied, people died” narrative that still dogs the 43rd president. That required the no-stone-left-unturned approach manifest in the long investigation and 448-page report. Anything else would have been dismissed as a whitewash.

So why aren’t conservatives grateful?

From the beginning of the investigation, conservatives have been invested in a counter-narrative that is as flawed as the collusion narrative itself. This has various elements, from Trump’s repeated attempts to cast doubt on Russian interference, to the belief that the investigation had its genesis in Christopher Steele’s salacious dossier, to the equally spurious idea that there can be no obstruction of justice without an underlying crime — a point that ought to be obvious to anyone who supported impeaching Bill Clinton for lying under oath about a noncriminal act.

Most absurd: The claim, repeated Thursday by Attorney General William Barr, that the White House fully cooperated with the investigation. For more on that, read the part of the report where then-White House counsel Don McGahn opted to quit instead of participating in the firing of Mueller.

“He called his lawyer, drove to the White House, packed up his office, prepared to submit a resignation letter with his chief of staff, told [Reince] Priebus that the President had asked him to ‘do crazy shit,’ and informed Priebus and [Steve] Bannon that he was leaving.”

Here’s what conservatives have largely failed to acknowledge: Trump’s absolution by Mueller didn’t come about because his intentions were innocent but because his aims were thwarted or his methods were incompetent.

If his own staff hadn’t blocked him from firing Mueller, he would have done so. If Don Jr. had been delivered a crate full of stolen Clinton documents at that Trump Tower meeting with a shady Russian lawyer, he would have taken it. If The New York Times hadn’t exposed Paul Manafort for taking illicit cash from Ukraine’s president, he might well have wound up as a senior U.S. official vulnerable to Russian blackmail. If the Senate hadn’t blocked Trump from easing sanctions on Russia, or public opinion hadn’t revolted over his performance at Helsinki, he would have cozied up to Vladimir Putin.

Trump is the guy who keeps getting saved from walking into oncoming traffic, only to complain that someone yanked his collar. This makes Mueller the latest in a long list of figures whose scrupulousness saved Trump from the consequences of his unscrupulousness. For this, the special counsel will get no thanks from the president, much less an apology from all the two-bit talking heads who spent the past 23 months questioning his motives and impugning his integrity.

The good news in all this is that the rule of law and reason still function in the Age of Trump — despite Trump. Responsible officials checked a dangerous president. Political pressure allowed Mueller to finish his report and ensured its release. Americans got a comprehensive presentation and analysis of the facts, which may have exonerated the president legally but which clearly indict him morally. Ultimately the matter will be settled at the polls in November 2020.

The system, as they say, worked. Conservatives who claim to believe in that system should be grateful they didn’t get their wish when they sought to tear it down.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/opinion/mueller-report-donald-trump-2020.html" id="d564e8a0-20d5-385f-a1e9-45f1d8fcf799">The New York Times</a>.

For the better part of two years, President Donald Trump and his partisans did everything they could to denigrate and discredit Robert Mueller and his investigation.

Conservatives Should Thank Mueller

(1) The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 was “something some people did.”

(2) Last month’s attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, was “something someone did.”

(3) The 2015 massacre at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, was “something someone did.”

Now imagine that a public figure with a history of making racially inflammatory remarks — someone like Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, or, better yet, President Donald Trump — had said any of this. (Neither of them did.) Would you not be appalled?

Of course you would. You would be insulted by the evasiveness of the something and someone. You’d be revolted that a right-wing politician would fail to speak forcefully against the bigotries too often found among his followers and fellow travelers. You would be disgusted by the deliberate attempt to conceal the scale of the horror, the identity of the perpetrators, and the racist ideology that motivated them.

And you would make no allowances for the possibility that the politician in question might have merely misspoken, especially if he failed to apologize, clarify or correct himself. With political power comes rhetorical responsibility.

So it is that one should think about the furor — and counter-furor — over Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s claim, in a speech last month in California, that the Council on American-Islamic Relations “was founded after 9/11, because they recognized that some people did something, and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”

The bulk of Omar’s speech was devoted to preaching political empowerment for American Muslims and denouncing Islamophobia. That’s fine as far as it goes.

But contrary to claims by some of her apologists, the remark is not taken out of context, it is not contradicted by anything else she says in the speech, and it is not marred merely because it is factually mistaken. (CAIR was founded seven years before 9/11.) Nor is the problem a matter of inapt phrasing: Omar is a confident public speaker with a precise command of language and a knack for turning a phrase.

The problem is that the remark is foul, in exactly the same way that the hypothetical remarks listed above are foul. I live in lower Manhattan, near the Sept. 11 memorial and museum. No decent person can look at the portraits of the 2,983 victims of Islamist terrorists and say, by-the-by, that this was “something” that “some people did.”

The problem is also that the remarks didn’t come from just anyone. Just as Trump has repeatedly made his ethnic prejudices plain, so has Omar. She has demonized Israel, and American supporters of Israel, in terms that are unmistakably anti-Semitic. She has been reproached by fellow Democrats, claimed ignorance by way of apology, and then slurred Jews again — without apology. And despite claiming to be a champion of human rights, she has been oddly selective about the human-rights issues that elicit her outrage.

Now Omar’s defenders are keen to paint her as a victim of Islamophobia, which no doubt she is. In this case, however, a victim of bigotry is also a major and unflinching bigot in her own right. That the president has chosen to target Omar may smack of rank hypocrisy, but it would be political malpractice for him not to pick the fight. Her views as a public figure, and what they signify for the party she represents, are fair game.

All the more so as progressives rush to her defense. Omar is not a significant figure in her own right. And the House of Representatives has never lacked for cranks, knaves, fools and bigots.

What is significant is that Omar’s defenders don’t consider her prejudices about Jews as particularly disqualifying, morally or politically, at least not when weighed against the things they like about her (and hate about her enemies). As for her views about Israel, she’s practically mainstream for her segment of the Democratic Party — a harbinger of what’s to come as the old guard of pro-Israel liberals like House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer gives way to the anti-Israel wokesters typified by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Oh, right: the early days of Trump, when millions of Republican primary voters heard the candidate denounce Mexicans as drug dealers, criminals and rapists, and said to themselves, “We like that.” The central lesson of the moral collapse that followed for the GOP isn’t that conservatives are a uniquely perfidious bunch. It’s that partisans of any stripe are always susceptible to demagoguery, particularly when the demagogue refuses to back down in the face of outrage. Shamelessness has a way of inspiring a following, and Omar is in the process of cornering the market on the left.

Still, let’s not be entirely negative about the congresswoman. Toward the end of her speech, she said it was vital “to make sure that we are not only holding people that we don’t like accountable: We must also hold those that we love, have shared values with, accountable.”

Those words, at least, are wise. The best thing Democrats could do now is apply them to Omar herself.

Bret Stephens

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