Patrick Lawrence

PATRICK LAWRENCE—In effect, Rhodes via Platner makes the case for a fundamental renovation of American foreign policy — a turn toward 21st century realities, chief among these the end of U.S. preeminence and the arrival of a multipolar order. Platner’s voice is to be altogether welcomed for this.

Is such a turn possible — and possible via the Democratic Party, as both Rhodes and Platner implicitly propose? This is our question.

And I simply don’t see it. The trap that springs on Donald Trump as we speak will spring again and again until the trap itself is destroyed. 

P. LAWRENCE—But Netanyahu is not a Western leader, you say. Oh, no you don’t: The power Bibi exerts in Washington and most of the European capitals transcends geography by a long way. He takes a prominent place in this pencil-sketched group portrait. At writing, Netanyahu has just finished his fifth visit to President Trump during this, the Trumpster’s first year back in office. Think of it: A psychotic and an emotionally-arrested narcissist who seems to have something to prove to somebody, probably his father, spent the Monday of Christmas Week planning another military operation against the Islamic Republic — this one to destroy its missile program and air defenses.

PATRICK LAWRENCE—After the Soviet Union’s collapse we had the Russia-as-junior-partner years, when the inebriated Boris Yeltsin stood aside while Western capital raped the formidable remains of the Soviet economy. And then to the Putin years. What we live through now would amount to a third Red Scare, apart from the fact that Russia is no longer Red.

Looked at another way, U.S.–Russian relations are back where they more or less started. “Putin’s Russia,” as the phrase goes, is again America’s great Other, and by easy extension the West’s, just as it was two centuries back. Then as now, the project is to “make Russia great again,” as we might put it; then as now the West drifts into irrational reaction in response to the emergence of a nation of another civilizational tradition.

There is no missing the fungibility inherent in the U.S. stance toward Russia over the years, decades, and centuries — the extent, I mean, to which it is changeable according to changing geopolitical circumstances. It is not merely possible that the reigning Russophobia of our time will at some point pass. History’s lesson is that this is probable — maybe even inevitable.

PATRICK LAWRENCE—Incessant breaches of international law, cavalier abuses of the sovereignty of other nations: This will go on for who knows how long. But Trump and his people and the neoconservatives who appear to control them just went some distance destroying all possibility that the U.S. might participate in the making of a new world order.

This matters nil in Washington now, but such an order materializes as we speak, and the day will come when this foreclosed prospect will be up for regret.

I read something else in Trump’s Saturday night speech. To me it was the culmination of weeks of irrationality, a frenzy of it that led — just as the Israelis hoped it would — to senseless attacks with no logical justification.

PATRICK LAWRENCE—There was a day or so just before Netanyahu’s lion began to rise when Trump put Marco Rubio, his hapless secretary of state, out in front of the microphones and cameras to tell the world no, the U.S. had no prior knowledge of Israel’s plans and there were no “American airplanes” involved. It transpires that Rubio meant no jets with the “USAF” insignia painted on their fuselages. Newsweek reported the day the Israelis attacked that Israel has deployed a variety of American-made fighter jets in the Israeli inventory — F–35s, F–16s and F–15s — against the Iranians. You might ask whether this amounts to tacit consent, but don’t bother. The Israelis, ever eager to boast of America’s approval of all their malevolence, have clarified the matter.

Antiwar.com, the libertarian news site, reported June 13 that a senior Israeli official disclosed to The Jerusalem Post that the Netanyahu and Trump regimes colluded “to convince Tehran that diplomacy was still possible after Israel was ready to attack Iran.” As the Jerusalem Post reported, “The round of U.S.–Iranian nuclear negotiations scheduled for Sunday was part of a coordinated U.S.–Israeli deception aimed at lowering Iran’s guard ahead of Friday’s attack.”