The View from Right Field

Niall Ferguson’s “Ferguson’s Law” – No, But Yes.

Niall Ferguson wrote, in February, about what he called “Ferguson’s Law”¹: any great power that spends more servicing its debt than it spends on defense risks ceasing to be a great power.

I understand the point, but I wonder if debt service is the correct measure for today’s world.  I am not a historian of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but I would think that, back then, defense and interest on debt were the two major expenditures of government and that the ability of governments to raise money was more limited than today.

Was Abraham Lincoln Really a “Country Lawyer” Who Missed a Chance for Peace?

According to Harold Holzer’s review of 1861: The Lost Peace, by Jay Winik, in last Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, Mr. Winik apparently views Abraham Lincoln as a “country lawyer” who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make the necessary compromises to avoid war.  Given that such compromises would have allowed the further expansion of slavery and its continuation for who knows how long and until who knows what might happen, we are left with the words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural:

“[I]f God wills that [this mighty scourge of war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

and the question of whether the ultimate civil war would have been even worse.

Are Things Really the Worst Ever?

In an editorial yesterday about the events in Los Angeles and elsewhere entitled “MAGA morphs into Make America Cruel Again,” the Chicago Tribune “wondered how on God’s green earth this country can hold it together for three-and-a-half more years of this level of presidential overreach, this amount of hatred and division.”  My response is simple: Does the Tribune remember the 1960s?  Consider just 1968.  Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April.  The ensuing riots all over the country make what is happening in LA look minor.  You can still see the effects of those riots in parts of Chicago today. 

Two months later Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.  Then came the Democratic convention in Chicago.  I assume the Tribune remembers that.

How Was Trump Able to Come Back?

In a review of three books¹ on “The great Biden cover-up” in last Saturday’s Financial Times², Lionel Barber notes that missing in three books “is a deeper analysis of why Trump was able to stage of one of the greatest comebacks in US political life.”  Here is my suggestion: In looking back at 2021-24, the one constant was that every time Donald Trump was impeached, sued, indicted, or even convicted, his approval ratings among Republican voters went up. 

In January of 2021, I hoped those who were outraged by what Donald Trump had done would ignore him as he left the presidency and not give him new things he could use as grievances, however appropriate it was to do them, to begin his comeback.  That is not what happened.

Instinct, Not Strategy

Not that we didn’t know this, but Donald Trump has explained how he would be making decisions on tariffs, and probably other things, in the coming weeks:

“Instinctively, more than anything else.  You almost can’t take a pencil to paper, it’s really more of an instinct than anything else.”

That is just not going to work.  Maybe instinct works in real estate deals and in politics, but it doesn’t work in government – and certainly doesn’t work in foreign affairs and international economics. 

It Would Be a “Reverse Nixon”, Not a “Reverse Kissinger” – Though Trump Couldn’t Do It Anyway

In last Saturday’s Financial Times, Edward Luce wrote on Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.¹  At one point, in comparing the foreign policies they advised on with that of Donald Trump, Mr. Luce said: “Notions of Trump pulling off a ‘reverse Kissinger’ – bringing the Russians into America’s orbit, much as Kissinger exploited the Sino-Soviet split in the other direction – are fanciful.”  I certainly agree with Mr. Luce on the idea of President Trump doing something like that, but I disagree with Mr. Luce both as to what such a maneuver would be called – it would be a “reverse Nixon” – and, perhaps more importantly, whose idea the original policy was.  Certainly, Dr. Kissinger played an important role in the secret diplomacy that was required to accomplish the opening to China, but the credit for the policy and the idea behind it belongs to Richard Nixon.

The problem is that Richard Nixon has been blamed by so many for so much for so long, sometimes fairly (in the case of the Watergate coverup) and other times unfairly (for example, the exposure of Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy), that it has become almost impossible to give credit to Mr. Nixon for anything. 

Donald Trump and the Failure of Policy in Ukraine

As Donald Trump’s presidency continues, I get more and more worried, perhaps especially about foreign policy.  He is bad domestically, but I am hopeful we can overcome the problems he is causing here.  The damage he is causing in foreign affairs seems greater.  I don’t know why he is doing what he is doing, but here are some possibilities:

1. He a zero-sum kind of guy. 
2. He thinks almost everybody has played us for suckers and has taken advantage of us. 
3. He is very thin-skinned, and he thinks people are out to get him.¹  Also, he seems to take it personally when people disagree with him (especially on a deal he wants to get done).
4. I am not sure how much history he knows, but I fear it is not enough.  History does not repeat, but knowledge of history does inform.
5. Government is different than business; making agreements between countries is different than making agreements between companies.  I don’t think President Trump understands this.  He thinks deals are deals.  They aren’t.²

Is Trump Trying To Do a “Reverse Nixon” With Putin?

In trying to explain why Donald Trump is sudden ripping on Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and siding with Vladimir Putin and Russia, some people are asking whether President Trump and his people might be trying to do a “reverse Nixon”, i.e., trying to separate Russia and China, though in this case befriending Russia, as opposed to China as Richard Nixon did.

The Wall Street Journal‘s chief foreign correspondent, Yaroslav Trofimov, does an excellent job here of explaining why the two situations, Russia and Ukraine today as opposed to the Soviet Union and China back then, are very different.  There is no need for me to repeat what he says, though I do note there is another article, also in yesterday’s Journal, that talks about the increasing number of joint military exercises between Russia and China.  Which is different than the late 1960s/early 1970s, when the only joint military exercise the Soviets and the Chinese held was a border war between each other in 1969.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan Was Wrong. We Can Have Our Own Facts.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”¹  Except that is not true anymore.  Both sides in politics, and probably other things, do have their own facts today.  Fox vs. CNN/MSNBC.  The New York Times vs. The Wall Street Journal editorial page.  People watching/reading one silo of information vs. people watching/reading another.  People really do have different facts today, which means you can see why their opinions differ – because their facts are different.

And what may be even worse is that most of the people watching/reading in different silos don’t even understand that people watching/reading in other silos see things differently.  They still think there is only one set of facts and that everything else is just misinformation or disinformation.² 

We Should Not Be Inaugurating Donald Trump as President on January 20

As the title of this post says, we should not be inaugurating Donald Trump as President on January 20, 2025, because … well, let me explain.

First, if it wasn’t for FBI Director James Comey and his totally bizarre decision to re-open the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server just eleven days before the 2016 election, it is entirely probable she would have won the election.¹  I am not sure Mr. Comey’s decision to do this has ever been adequately explained.  Even though Mr. Comey said, nine days later, on November 6, that nothing new was found, the damage was done.  By resurrecting the issue at the last minute of a very close election, Mr. Comey very probably swung the election to Donald Trump.