The View from Right Field

Gaffes, Red Lines, and Credibility

[This is a follow up and elaboration on my post of March 26, 2022.¹ ]

In the 2020 presidential election, I didn’t vote for Joe Biden even though I wanted Donald Trump to lose.  I couldn’t bring myself to vote for President Biden because, as Robert Gates said in 2014, “I think he's been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”^2,3  Fortunately, I live in Illinois, so my vote was not necessary for President Biden to win Illinois’s electoral votes. 

Which brings me to President Biden’s recent “gaffe tour” of Europe.  Michel Kinsley famously defined a gaffe as “when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say."  President Biden gave us two great examples of this on his trip.  First, he said, apparently unscripted, that Vladimir Putin was a “war criminal.”  That is probably true, but how is it helpful?  We need to get the war in Ukraine over.  How does making Vladimir Putin think he might be prosecuted as a war criminal help do that?⁴

Biden Has Defined Success in His Afghan Exit: Nobody Pulled Off an Embassy Roof By Helicopter

When Joe Biden was asked last week if there was any similarity between Kabul today and Saigon in 1975, he said no:

“None whatsoever.  Zero.  What you had is you had entire brigades breaking through the gates of our Embassy.  Six if I’m not mistaken.  The Taliban is not the South, the North Vietnamese army.  They’re not – they’re not remotely comparable in terms of capability.  There’s going to be no circumstance where you’re going to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy [in Afghanistan].”

He also defended the withdrawal by asking:

The Washington 180 – Once Again

With Joe Biden being elected President and the Republicans very possibly keeping a majority in the Senate,¹ we may have another “Washington 180” coming up next year. 

After the Republicans took the House in 2010, Barack Obama couldn’t get Congress to pass his agenda.  When Congress wouldn’t pass the laws he wanted, President Obama turned to what he called his “pen and phone.”²  Sometimes, departments and agencies followed the Administrative Procedure Act and adopted formal regulations.  Other times, they just issued new interpretations of laws or prior regulations.  Or they sent so-called “Dear Colleagues” letters to state and local governments setting out new rules, with an implied threat to cut off federal funding if they didn’t follow the new rules or standards.

Foreign Policy: Are Presidents Trump and Obama All That Different?

Wilbur Ross, Donald Trump’s Secretary of Commerce said, last Wednesday, that Hong Kong was an internal matter for Hong Kong and added: “What are we going to do – invade Hong Kong?”  In response, Edward Luce, of the Financial Times, commented: “In a few words, Mr Ross captured the degeneration of US foreign policy.”¹  Which may be true, but it didn’t start January 20, 2017.

Secretary Ross’s choice, invasion or doing nothing, sounds suspiciously like the phony choices Barack Obama used to justify his do-nothing, or at least, do-as-little-as-possible, approach to foreign policy.  For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine, annexed Crimea, and fomented a war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, President Obama asked: “Do people actually think that somehow us sending some additional arms into Ukraine could potentially deter the Russian Army?”  In fact, the Trump administration, even though President Trump is supposedly in the pocket of Vladimir Putin, has sent the kinds of defensive weapons that President Obama refused to send.  And it has seemed to help.

President Trump’s Foreign Policy Claims Are Often Bizarre, But It’s Not the First Time We’ve Seen That

The foreign policy follies (and worse) of Donald Trump are so bad, it sometimes makes us forget bizarre positions that prior administrations have taken.  For example, in 2011, when the United States was involved in the bombing of Libya (because, inter alia, Moammar Gaddafi was threatening to massacre Libyan civilians), the question of the War Powers Act arose.  The War Powers Act was passed over President Nixon’s veto in 1973.  It provided that presidents are to get Congress’s approval or authorization within 60 days¹ after they send troops into hostilities.

The Obama administration, however, did not want to seek Congressional approval of our operations in Libya.  But it also did not want to say, as other presidents have said, that the War Powers Act was an unconstitutional limit on the President’s power.² So, the State Department legal advisor, a politically appointed position, came up with the theory that the War Powers Act did not apply to the bombing of Libya because we were not engaged in “hostilities” since the other side could not effectively shoot back at us.  (See here and here,)

Did Barack Obama Really Make America the Biggest Oil and Gas Producer?

In a speech at the Baker Institute at Rice University in Houston last week, former President Barack Obama said:

“You wouldn’t always know it, but it [oil production] went up every year I was president. … [S]uddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas [producer] — that was me, people."

Two comments.  First, separate from whether it’s true (it’s not, see below), could you imagine George H.W. Bush ever bragging about himself like this?  I can’t either.

“We’ll Be Coming Out of Syria, Like, Very Soon.” Not a Good Idea.

Donald Trump probably wouldn’t like being told that any of his policies are like Barack Obama’s, and former President Obama probably wouldn’t like it either.  But last Thursday, President Trump said, in what was apparently an unscripted aside, during a speech/campaign event in Ohio, that “we’re knocking the hell out of ISIS” and that “we’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon.  Let the other people take care of it now.”  All of which sounds an awful like President Obama’s policy in Iraq (and, especially with respect to the last part, Syria). 

President Obama never wanted to be in Iraq.¹  And so, once he got into office, he used the agreement George W. Bush signed with Iraq in 2008, which required the United States to get all of its troops out of Iraq by the end of 2011, as the reason (aka excuse) for leaving.  President Obama could have tried to get the agreement changed.  In fact, the expectation probably was that the United States would do so – and that Iraq would agree.  But President Obama didn’t really try.  He wanted out. 

What’s Worse: Trump’s Scandals or Obama’s Executive Overreach?

I was talking to a friend last night.  He was very worried about the scandals in the Trump administration.  Now I don’t know which scandals he was talking about.  The possibilities are many: possible collusion with the Russians during the 201 campaign;¹ firing the head of the FBI; Michael Flynn lying; Trump family products promoted from the White House; Stormy Daniels;² the Secretary of HHS resigning after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on private flights; etc., etc..  Then there are things like some of his tweeting, which may not fit the definition of a “scandal,” but are appalling just the same. 

My friend then said that Barack Obama didn’t have any scandals.  I disagreed, which I think surprised him.  When he asked me what they were, I decided not to talk about President Obama publicly prejudging the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, both because I’m tired of former Secretary Clinton’s emails and because I wanted to mention what I think was real scandal in the Obama administration: what I saw as the gross overreach of executive power by the President and his administration.

A Few Comments on the Government Shutdown

Everybody is talking about the federal government shutdown, so maybe I should, too.  First, I suppose the proper libertarian response to the shutdown is that it is unfortunate – that it will eventually end.  (Just to be clear, that is a joke.)

Second, you can tell something about a presidential administration not only by the President himself (someday, herself), but also by the way the people in the administration act.  In that regard, the response of the lower down people in the Trump administration to the shutdown is so much better than the response of some of the lower down people in the Obama administration in 2013.

The Dangerousness of Donald Trump’s Comments on Venezuela

What Donald Trump said about Venezuela last Friday was lost in all the news about what happened in Charlottesville on Saturday, and what President Trump has said about it, but I think it’s worth looking at what President Trump said about Venezuela:

“We have many options for Venezuela.  And by the way, I’m not going to rule out a military option.  We have many options for Venezuela.  This is our neighbor.  This is, you know, we are all over the world.  And we have troops all over the world, in places that are very, very far away.  Venezuela is not very far away, and the people are suffering, and they are dying.  We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option, if necessary.”

Obviously, this statement will be a big help for President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.  With things going absolutely horribly in Venezuela, because of President Maduro’s policies, what better distraction and what better way to deflect blame than a threat from the United States.  President Trump couldn’t have helped President Maduro any more, except maybe by sending him a billion dollars of food and medical supplies.