| | | | Were 176 Lives the Price of Killing Soleimani? | | After receiving credit when it appeared the crisis was over, David Frum writes for The Atlantic that President Trump now ought to shoulder some responsibility for the lives of 176 Ukraine International Airlines passengers and crew, amid news that US and Canadian officials believe Iran mistakenly shot down the plane that crashed in Tehran on Wednesday—and a video that appears to show a missile striking it.
Blame lies with Iran, Frum writes in a scathing column, but Trump's escalation led to a situation in which Iran may have perceived a threat in its skies. "That's the way it is with unintended consequences—and why governments are supposed to weigh carefully the decision to employ deadly force," Frum writes. "President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama both flinched from doing justice to Soleimani, because they asked, 'And what will happen next?' Trump did not ask that question. Families across half the world are now grieving a consequence that Trump's ego forbade him to imagine or ponder." | | After he campaigned on skepticism of foreign wars, the Soleimani strike revealed a contradiction in President Trump's foreign policy: As former under secretary of defense Michèle Flournoy put it to NPR's Tamara Keith, Trump mixes "wanting to appear the tough guy that nobody's gonna mess with … but also genuinely having an isolationist streak that says, 'Why are we in the Middle East?'"
It might not be a personal tic. In the Financial Times, Janan Ganesh argues the paradox is endemic to Trump's "America first" ethos, which produces both isolationism and a tendency to lash out at national insults. A prime example: Trump's threat to sanction Iraq if it forces US troops to leave—something Trump himself seemed to want. "All it took was an impudent framing of the same idea—by a sovereign parliament—to make him reach for harsh measures to save American face," Ganesh writes.
Nativism "can have its chest-beating sense of honour or it can have its dream of a quiet life in a world of sovereign states minding their affairs," Ganesh writes—but it can't have both. One upshot, he argues, is that any similarly nationalist successor will get caught in the same trap. | | America's 'Narcissistic' Self-Critics | | | On the American left, criticism of the Soleimani strike is veering into national narcissism, Shadi Hamid argues at The Atlantic. Qasem Soleimani aided Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's campaign against civilians, Hamid reminds us; posing Iran as a righteous victim, he writes, means drawing a false moral equivalency and assuming an outsized American importance in the region. Middle East-based experts are not only less "alarmist" but are "less fixated on Trump himself and less likely to put the United States at the center of their analysis." It's worth remembering, in Hamid's view, that while Trump deserves some criticism for the impulsiveness of his decisions, not "everything is America's fault; others are sometimes to blame; and no one, not even the weaker parties, are devoid of agency or freed of responsibility." | | How the US and Iran De-escalated on Twitter | | Twitter just might have stopped a war between the US and Iran, Garrett M. Graff writes for Wired. As Tuesday night's strikes unfolded, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and President Trump both used the site to make their intentions clear: As Ilan Goldenberg tweeted, diplomacy was playing out online:
Clear and fast communication has long been important in a crisis, Graff writes, noting how far things have come: During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it "took the US Embassy in Moscow nearly 12 hours to encode one 2,750-word message from the Soviet Union, the equivalent of about five typed pages." Russia's embassy in Washington relied on bike messengers to communicate with Moscow: "'After he pedaled away with my urgent cable, we at the embassy could only pray that he would take it to the Western Union office without delay and not stop to chat on the way with some girl,' Ambassador Anatoly Dobrydin recalled years later in his memoirs." (Or boy, we might add.)
So despite the terror of seeing global security unfold on a microblog, in some ways we're better off. | | Is Taiwan Pulling Away From China, Permanently? | | Concerns are mounting that China will build up for an invasion of Taiwan, Kathrin Hille and Christian Shepherd write in the Financial Times, while at The American Interest, Gary J. Schmitt asks if Taiwan's politics are about to tilt away from the mainland permanently. Beijing considers Taiwan to be a part of China, but pro-independence candidates have won four of five presidential elections in Taiwan since 2000, and current anti-China President President Tsai Ing-wen is poised for reelection on Saturday. The crisis in Hong Kong hangs over Taiwanese politics—"[a]lthough most Taiwanese are not looking for a fight with the mainland, the majority have reacted to events in Hong Kong by dramatically boosting Tsai, as the leader of the party seen as most reliable in guarding the island's democracy," Schmitt writes—while fewer in Taiwan identify as Chinese.
"This trend is running headlong into President Xi Jinping's goal to bring the island into the mainland's fold," which clashes in turn with US interests, Schmitt writes. "Something has to give." | | | | | | |
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