Mick Hartley

Worth a read – Michael Totten interviews Claire Berlinski:

Donald Trump won last year’s Republican civil war and most of the losers surrendered.

A buffoonish and narcisistic reality TV star who spent his entire life as a boorish Democrat and who had nothing but contempt for the Republican Party and traditional American conservatism has managed, like a conquering warlord, to rally the vanquished around him.

There are exceptions, however, and Claire Berlinski is one of them. She and I spent the last decade covering foreign affairs in the Middle East and Europe and are alarmed by the new president’s contempt for the American-made trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific security architecture and at how whimsically American conservatives are willing to reverse their own party’s longstanding positions on everything from Vladimir Putin to NATO.

She and I spoke last week.

MJT: I want to start with a quote from retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus.

"Americans should not take the current international order for granted. It did not will itself into existence. We created it. Likewise, it is not naturally self-sustaining. We have sustained it. If we stop doing so, it will fray and, eventually, collapse.”

That is an excellent rebuttal to the Obama administration’s limp foreign policy of managed American decline overseas, and we heard a version of Petraeus’ critique from conservatives for eight years during the previous president’s term. But Petraeus said that two weeks ago while chastising the Trump administration. Donald Trump doing worse than doubling-down on Obamaism rather than reversing it as John McCain or Mitt Romney would have done. He seems to be willing to set the entire American-made international order on fire, as if everything from 1945 onward is suddenly on the table, not just NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership but even Japan’s demilitarization and NATO. He is consistently friendlier to Vladimir Putin’s Russia than he is to Europe. The Republican Party would have a stress-induced heart attack if a Democratic president were doing these things, wouldn’t it?

Claire Berlinski: Yeah, on Twitter David Frum wrote, "It’s as if a hostile foreign power has seized the US government and is by remote control steering it toward the maximum possible catastrophe.” Which it really is. I mean, what more would you do?

Did you see that CNN piece about what happened at a Mar-a-Lago dinner party after they got news of the North Korean missile launch? “Trump and [Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo] Abe’s evening meal quickly morphed into a strategy session, the decision-making on full view to fellow diners, who described it in detail to CNN.”

You’re there, I’m not—I can’t tell if people are slowly beginning to realize just what an insane catastrophe we’ve got ourselves into, as in, we could all die from this kind of incompetence and from his species of mental illness—or are the people who voted for him still mostly stuck in cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias, minimizing reports like that as, yeah, overwrought, pearl-clutchers' Lügenpresse? 

I’m scared. Trouble sleeping, scared….