Month: August 2022

Hi! It’s midweek somewhere in the US.

Stephen Colbert has a zinger in the aftermath of the FBI Search of Mar-a-Lago:

Okay, GOP, you win: we should arrest whoever appointed FBI Director Christopher Wray.

— Stephen Colbert (@StephenAtHome) August 10, 2022

Cheers!

I’m not a big fan of the Washington Post editorial board, but I credit them with not flinching from the threat of fascism. In a short-and-sweet posting on Wednesday, they deplored the Republicans’ reaction to the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, and gave absolutely no credence to their talking points. More importantly, they didn’t fret that the raid might lead to violence or civil war. Instead, they reasonable projected that the Department of Justice will have to explain themselves, and that Attorney General Merrick Garland will find that challenging if the raid doesn’t lead to criminal charges.

Of course, criminal investigations of presidents shouldn’t be undertaken lightly. The warrant in this case isn’t public; even if it were, only a sealed affidavit could tell the full story about the evidentiary basis for the search. The improper retention of records is a serious offense that shouldn’t be dismissed, but it is so far unclear whether Mr. Trump’s retention of these records constituted a violation of national security, a threat to democracy, or any other grave abuse. Attorney General Merrick Garland, then, finds himself in a tricky position: He may eventually be summoned before GOP-controlled congressional committees and ordered to explain himself for allowing the FBI’s actions — a job that will prove more difficult if the inquiry doesn’t lead to criminal charges or evidence of major wrongdoing.

The editorial board could have been much tougher, as well as more thorough. But they checked all the important boxes, from the “no-duh” point of Republican hypocrisy in light of their “Lock Her Up!” chants about Hillary Clinton, to the observation that blindly defending Trump and attacking the FBI is “disturbing and dangerous.”

A key point here is that GOP doesn’t even know what exactly they are defending. They don’t care, at all, what Trump might have done or that it could later be a big liability to have assumed he was an innocent victim of a politicized Justice Department. They are just doing their utmost to destroy faith in federal law enforcement and the federal system of justice.

It’s this act that I characterize as fascism, because the goal is to disempower the DOJ and FBI to hold conservative criminals accountable. When they seize control of these institutions again (and they eventually will), they will destroy their independence and use them exclusively for their own political ends. The remedy is not to preemptively do this job for them by making the DOJ stand down, but to address the threat head-on and to roll up the conspiracy to end our form of government and destroy our institutions.

If that leads to a civil war or some sort, at least it will begin with the defenders of democracy in charge rather than in a position of weakness. I’m glad to see the editorial board take a position that is both principled and unflinching. I’m marking my scorecard for those who show weakness and fear.

I think, like everyone else, my first reaction to learning that the FBI had raided Mar-a-Lago and entered the disgraced ex-president’s safe was to wonder what they were looking for. It soon began to leak out that the search warrant emerged from a grand jury that has been looking into Trump’s potentially illegal possession of highly classified material.

That was somewhat perplexing. Clearly a raid of Trump’s property would set off a massive political earthquake, and it would not be done lightly or for some ticky-tack crime. If it were really about classified materials, they must be the nuclear codes or the most secret weapons programs or a list of all the Chinese or Russians who spy for the United States. It certainly had to be about more than the menu for a birthday party held at the White House (which, we know, is one of the official documents Trump improperly secreted off to Florida).

The fact that a search warrant was authorized by a federal judge clearly indicates that Trump was not expected to comply with a subpoena, and also that a crime has been committed and the evidence of that crime was credibly believed to exist at the president’s Florida resort.

Then it emerged that the statute Trump likely violated includes a provision that the violator, upon conviction, “shall” forfeit any federal office they hold and become ineligible to hold any future federal office. I began to think this was a big-brained way of solving the Trump problem. Misuse of classified material may be a relatively minor offense, carrying a maximum sentence of three years in prison, but if it comes with a political death penalty and it is a simple straightforward easy-to-prove case, then why not save the country the trouble of a long complicated trial over seditious conspiracy?

Alas, it appears that qualifications for the presidency spelled out in the Constitution likely supersede any mere statutory restrictions. Trump could only barred from holding lower offices.

Of course, if the FBI found evidence of crimes during their search of Mar-a-Lago, even if completely unrelated to items on the search warrant, they can still use that evidence. It’s fun to speculate on what Trump had in his safe: compromising pictures of Lindsey Graham, proof that the pee tape is real, etc. But, given Trump’s lifelong dedication to crime, it’s a safe bet that there were a few unwholesome items to review.

Still, a fishing expedition doesn’t really add up as an explanation for the raid. Once you take the extreme step of treating an ex-president as the target of a criminal investigation, you better bring charges and win a conviction, and I have to believe that the Department of Justice went into this with a fully formed plan to pursue that path. They couldn’t have gone in on a wing and a prayer just hoping to find something more serious than what the warrant authorized.

A lot of people seemed similarly confused about what just happened and where it’s likely to lead. I’ve seen multiple pundits speculate that there must be someone in Trump’s inner circle who is cooperating with the government and telling them where to find evidence of crimes. Partly this speculation is based on the government’s ability to convince a judge that Mar-a-Lago held evidence of a crime. But, if the search was really about more than classified information, a rat on the inside might explain how a fishing expedition could be more of a slam dunk.

It’s an exciting show to watch, and not a little dangerous. I can’t wait to see where this leads.

President Biden is on an historic winning streak, but there’s still plenty of trepidation on the left.

Indeed, inflation remains the big skunk in the Rose Garden for Mr. Biden, souring the public as prices rise for food, housing and other necessities at the highest rate in four decades. But the White House hopes the public will balance that against the spate of successes of recent weeks, including a surprisingly robust jobs report; falling gas prices; a drone strike that killed Ayman al-Zawahri, the leader of Al Qaeda; the approval of a treaty admitting Finland and Sweden to NATO; and passage of major legislation investing in the domestic semiconductor industry and expanding medical care‌ to military veterans exposed to toxic burn pits.

Biden’s approval numbers went into negative territory in August 2021, and they just trended steadily down from there. That was the month when Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, but it’s also the month that the House and Senate Democrats passed the budget resolution authorizing funding for Biden’s Build Back Better plan. It was a high moment in setting expectations for the left, but by September 2, 2021, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia was already pouring cold water on the plan, stating he wouldn’t support anything over $1.5 trillion in size.

Over the eleven months, Manchin repeatedly thwarted efforts to push forward a budget reconciliation bill on terms at all resembling the left’s August 2021 expectations. At times, it appeared that Manchin would let Biden and the Democrats go into the midterms with no deal at all. That changed in July, and a very substantial bill is now through the Senate and awaiting passage from the House.

We’re now on our third consecutive president who struggles to poll higher than the mid-to-low forties in approval, and it could be that that’s the high-water mark absent some unifying and likely temporary crisis. What’s odd is that Biden would appear to be a far less polarizing figure than Obama and Trump, so we’d expect him to arouse a little less heated disapproval from the right. Part of the problem is that numerous polls confirm that over 70 percent of Republicans don’t think Biden is a legitimate president because they believe The Big Lie that the election was stolen from Trump. That’s a bigger legitimacy problem than Obama faced at the height of the Birther controversy.

Still, Biden has been polling below 40 percent largely because he’s not getting the typical amount of support from his own nominal base. They’ve been disappointed that he hasn’t been able to deliver on so many campaign promises, and perhaps his low profile in office makes it seem like he’s not putting up much of a fight. This is a cost that Manchin’s year-long defiance exacted on the president’s image, and one of the most important political questions for the midterms is to know if the damage is permanent.

If the left’s opinion of Biden’s performance now shifts in light of his string of successes, we should see a bump in his approval numbers even if independents and Republicans remain unimpressed.

The White House and the Democrats will be quite relieved to see Biden’s approval numbers move up to the low-to-mid forties, but they should recall that Obama and Trump both suffered disastrous midterm elections when they were polling in that range.

The dynamics of these midterms are a lot different, however. With both Obama and Trump, there was a sense that their administrations were changing a lot of things very fast, and the electorate basically acted as a brake. But if the perception that Biden is ineffective may have solidified, so too has the perception that he is moving slowly, not creating enough change.

That’s why the right has focused more on so-called “Woke culture,” rather than Biden’s legislative and regulatory moves. They’re seizing on areas where a significant part of the electorate feels the culture is moving swiftly in the wrong direction, but backlash against things like trans-rights aren’t really a reaction to the White House.

Instead, the conservative Supreme Court’s radical rulings, particularly their decision to overrule Roe v. Wade, has made voters more inclined to apply a brake to the Republicans.

With the impending passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, it’s possible that the public will shift gears and look to limit how much change the Democrats can impose, but there isn’t as much natural backlash in the legislative package as we say in the Affordable Care Act, which directly impacted many people’s health insurance. Most of the items in the bill are somewhere between popular and wildly popular.

While disappointment is inevitable, the left should take its victory without grumbling, because what comes now is the sales job. Voters should be happy and they should reward the Democrats, but that’s less likely to happen if Democrats are more focused on grumbling about what should have been.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting a new painting. I will be painting the Hudson River as seen from the rear of FDR’s house. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) It is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

I started my sketch using my usual grind, duplicating the grid I made over a copy of the photo itself. Over this I added some preliminary paint.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Matthew Continetti of the Washington Free Beacon is concerned that the Republican Party just had a disastrous week. Amazingly, in his listing of things that went wrong, he failed to mention that the January 6 committee will soon be perusing several years of Alex Jones’ emails and texts. He forgot about the Republicans’ decision to oppose a bill that helps veterans who have been exposed to toxins only to fold under pressure and pass it. A top concern for Continetti is that the Democrats got their shit together to pass a budget reconciliation bill. In the process, they tricked the Republicans into supporting a semiconductor bill that they should have held hostage.

Senate leader Mitch McConnell pledged that Republicans would block the $280 billion Chips and Science Act of 2022 for as long as Democrats tried to reach agreement among themselves on a big-spending reconciliation bill. Republicans mistakenly assumed that Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia was opposed to reconciliation because of inflation.

This badly misdiagnoses the problem. The Republicans’ chances in November will not hinge on passage of the Chips and Science Act.

But it gets worse.

For Continetti, the failure to change the Kansas Constitution to allow for severe abortion restrictions is the biggest disaster of all, but he’s taking some strange lessons from it. He begins with what is probably an accurate prediction:

Kansas was a defeat for the pro-life movement. It also scared Republican strategists, whose eyes bugged out at the huge Democratic turnout in the middle of the summer. The GOP consultant class was leery of abortion politics to begin with. Now it is all but guaranteed to steer its clients away from a debate over the issue.

On June 24, the day the Supreme Court issued the Dobbs decision overruling Roe v. Wade, the FiveThirtyEight congressional ballot preference average showed a 2.3 percent Republican advantage. Today, that advantage stands at 0.1 percent, and several recent polls show the Democrats with leads as big as six or seven points. The vote in Kansas was the first chance to test how the issue might change assumptions about the midterms. Continetti argues, separately, that “Republicans are enthusiastic, Democrats less so,” about voting, but acknowledges that pro-choice turnout in Kansas was unexpectedly strong.

He also makes another important point.

Voters do not like this economy. They blame President Biden for inflation and supply shortages. The president’s job approval rating is 39 percent in the FiveThirtyEight average of polls…

…[but] the [Republican] party’s Senate candidates are weak, it has no economic message beyond lamenting inflation…

I’d go further and say that most Republican economic ideas are actually unpopular, which is the main reason why they don’t collect them all up and create an economic message. But, the thing is, when the president is polling in the thirties and people hate the economy, you can win simply by attacking the president and the economy. You don’t need to actually provide alternative ideas.

This is why, for example, the FiveThirtyEight forecast for the Senate shows Republican J.D. Vance with a 77 percent chance of winning despite trailing Democrat Tim Ryan in the last five released polls, (including by 11 points in the most recent one from SurveyMonkey). The fundamentals just look too strong for the GOP to be projecting statewide Democratic wins in places where Trump won in 2020.

But it turns out that overturning Roe v. Wade was a big deal, and it didn’t help the Republicans’ chances of having a good midterm elections result.

Now, Continetti believes the Republicans can neutralize this problem by going back to an old strategy.

“Without an answer to the left’s attack, Republicans in extremely winnable races will lose—and badly,” warned social conservative leader Frank Cannon, who urged Republicans to get behind laws banning abortions after the fetus has a heartbeat and after it is capable of feeling pain.

This recommendation is about re-framing the issue of reproductive freedom by using catch phrases that poll well, like “partial-birth”, “fetal pain,” or “fetal heartbeat.” But that is all kind of irrelevant now that the issue is access to reproductive health care without government interference. Promoting more restrictions is unpopular even in states like Kansas, so making these kind of proposals is just going to further alarm people and cause them to get off their asses to organize against you.

Ironically, the best way to actually succeed in passing these abortion restrictions is to talk about the economy. The GOP can win on that issue and then do what they intended to on abortion all along. They’re not going to convince people these changes are good with clever phrasing, but that doesn’t mean they can succeed in making the changes. They just need majorities and the willingness to lose those majorities when the public is repelled by their legislative and judicial product.

The Democrats would hold the Senate if the elections were held today, and if things continue to move in their direction, they might actually hold the House. Abortion is the number one reason why.

Seth Meyers catches us up:

Cheers!

The New York Times editorial board is scolding the Democrats for helping far right Republicans win primary elections against somewhat less far right Republicans. Their reasoning is badly flawed.

The most obvious complaint is that if you help someone like Donald Trump win a primary, he or she might wind up winning the general election, and that’s dangerous. The secondary complaint is that it’s a cynical ploy that undermines the Democrats’ argument that they’re defenders of democracy. A third complaint is echoed by retiring congressman and January 6 committee member Adam Kinzinger:

“It’s disgusting,” Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois said of the Democratic strategy in a recent interview with CNN. Mr. Kinzinger is another Republican who voted for Mr. Trump’s impeachment. “You’re going to have election deniers win” in November. “So while I think a certain number of Democrats truly understand that democracy is threatened, don’t come to me after having spent money supporting an election denier in a primary, and then come to me and say, ‘Where are all the good Republicans?’”

To understand what’s up for debate here, we need to know what the Democrats have actually done. In almost every case under discussion, the Democrats actually spent money attacking the election-denying Trump-endorsed candidate. Here’s an example from a Michigan congressional race:

The basic playbook goes like this: On their face, the ads and mailers — the ad in Michigan reminds voters that Mr. [John] Gibbs was “handpicked” by Mr. Trump — are framed as an attack and a warning. But its messaging, the [Peter] Meijer camp believes, raised Mr. Gibbs’s appeal among the district’s conservative voters and gave him name recognition he could not otherwise afford. Mr. Meijer lost by roughly fewer than 4,000 votes on Tuesday to Mr. Gibbs.

These ads and mailers were trying to raise awareness that John Gibbs is a radical lunatic endorsed by Donald Trump. They accomplished their goal.  Gibbs’ name recognition was increased and voters in his district had a better understanding of his position on important issues. Sadly, this made him more appealing to Republican primary voters. By the logic of the New York Times, the best way to defend democracy would have been to hide Gibbs’ positions and his connection to Trump, even if only by remaining silent.

The argument is that the Democrats knew this would be the result and that it was the plan all along. This is true. But what’s the real problem here? What’s the thing that should really concern us? Isn’t it that Kinzinger can plausibly say that the Democrats “spent money supporting an election denier” by attacking him for being an election denier?

The truth is, Kinzinger and the NYT’s editorial board are engaged in their own form of results-oriented cynicism. They want more Republicans serving in Congress willing to stand up to Trump, like Pete Meijer who voted to impeach the disgraced ex-president.  Kinzinger says the Democrats have lost the right to ask “Where are all the good Republicans?” The editorial board says,

To defeat moderate Republicans will not strengthen the nation. It will mean there is less chance for the emergence of leaders willing to call out and condemn wrongdoing by their own party, as Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger did during the Jan. 6 hearings.

They’re missing the point that Republican primary voters, armed with more and better information, decided to throw Meijer out of office. Only their ignorance of John Gibbs’s positions had any chance of saving Meijer, and so we see these demands that the Democrats be complicit in that ignorance.

The preferences of the Republican base explain why Republicans who have stood up to Trump have mostly resigned rather than seek reelection, and why many of those who have sought reelection have or will (in Liz Cheney’s case) fail. This is also why many “good Republicans” or “moderate Republicans” wind up voting (and often talking) just like bad and radical Republicans. When they do this, they are functionally no different than lunatic alternatives. This is roughly how a pro-choice Republican senator like Susan Collins of Maine wound up ending federally protected reproductive freedom for women. She voted to confirm justices she should have opposed. What’s her worth as a moderate? How is she in any sense “good”?

This is the heart of the problem and the best way of understanding the Democrats’ approach. Whether a radical or moderate Republican wins, the effect is largely the same. This is never more true than when it comes to determining who will control the House and Senate. Rep. Meijer wasn’t casting a vote for a Democratic speaker. The Democrats need his seat to preserve their majority and they have a better chance of winning this blue-tinged district now that their opponent is a Trump-endorsed crazy.

Now, if you want to be real, it was the Republican establishment’s job to protect Meijer. Maybe the Democrats made their task harder, but there’s precious little evidence that the GOP bigwig’s are good or moderate in any sense, or that they’re keen to fill their ranks with more people willing to impeach Trump. They have no love for Meijer and only valued him insofar as they thought he might hold a difficult seat. I also want to note for the record that Meijer voted to impeach Trump but he didn’t volunteer to serve on the January 6 committee. The truth is that the Republican House leadership forbade him from doing so and, unlike Kinzinger and Cheney, he obediently complied. Once again, how much is gained by having this kind of Republican in Congress?

Let’s be clear about one thing, too. The Democratic Party is not in the business of throwing elections to moderate Republicans. They’re in the business of winning the most competitive districts where Republicans are most likely to feign moderation. It’s not unheard of for Democrats to give a “good” Republican a pass, but that’s more a feature of the past than the present, and it was never done when majorities were at stake.

Obviously, it would be nice if the Republicans nominated more reasonable candidates, but the only plausible way the Democrats can influence this is by consistently beating unreasonable candidates. When the Republicans become more worried about losing than being on good terms with Trump, maybe we’ll see a change.

Really, the only strong case the editorial board has is that in potentially helping election deniers win, the Democrats are undermining their argument that our democracy is at risk. But what’s more important? Winning an argument or an election? These are not the same things, and the idea that they are is at the heart of this flawed analysis.

The best way to protect democracy is for the Democrats to maintain their majorities and win as many gubernatorial, attorney general and Secretary of State elections as possible, and neither Kinzinger nor the New York Times even attempts to argue that the Democrats have hurt their chances by successfully intervening in these races.

Instead, they worry that some of these radicals might slip through. That’s true, and it’s only because the Republicans prefer them to non-radicals. And that’s why the non-radicals will act much like radicals, making it hard to see a difference.

The one thing the Democrats, Kinzinger and the editorial board all agree on is that the country is in peril, and that the only force standing in the way of disaster is the Democratic Party. Why, then, do they nitpick efforts that will improve the Democrats’ chances?

Much as I admire, and often agree with Spencer Ackerman, you can count on him to pee in the cereal bowl whenever America has a reason to celebrate a counterterrorism success. That’s his job as an anti-War on Terror gadfly, and I won’t begrudge him the courage of his convictions. But it does highlight one of the persistent weaknesses of his analysis. Good foreign policy and sound national security doesn’t necessarily have to be popular, but it must be politically survivable. Otherwise, it will be reversed with a mandate from the people. Too often, Ackerman, treats this constraint as weakness or hypocrisy rather than the thicket of complications it actually represents to the executors of policy.

There are many ways to react to the death-by-CIA-drone of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Ackerman’s reaction is both astute and depressing. He found it ironic that Zawahiri was found living right in downtown Kabul.

What a bleak epitaph for a miserable, devastating, 20-year war in which people I care about suffered and died. Losing the war made it easier to kill Ayman al-Zawahiri.

If America’s reaction to 9/11 were solely about locating and punishing the perpetrators, maybe it would have been best to have almost no reaction and wait for the organizers to feel safe and reveal themselves. Instead, it took ten years to find bin-Laden and 21 years to find Zawahiri.

Of course, as Ackerman never tires of arguing, the American reaction was always about much more than justice. Abroad, it was about establishing Great Game dominance, and at home it was about using increased surveillance powers and creating a military spending rationale and pipeline to replace what was lost by the end of the Cold War. We can quibble about how much of this was driven by Neo-conservative ideologues like Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and so might have been otherwise with a Gore administration in charge. But there is no doubt that there was precious little resistance from the Democratic establishment, largely because the American voter was in no mood for half-measures of retaliation.

Ackerman believes President Obama made a great error by not using the death of bin-Laden as the occasion to declare a formal end to the War of Terror and many of the associated government powers. Of course, the most insidious thing about launching a war on terror is that you cannot defeat a tactic. Anyone who declares “terror” defeated will look like a fool as soon as the next terror attack occurs. Obama wasn’t that kind of fool.

He also couldn’t announce that al-Qaeda was defeated, in part because Zawahiri was still on the run. Even the settling of accounts was incomplete. And, by that time, we were dealing with new, more dangerous terrorist threats, including the Islamic State. Fighting terrorism in the way we chose to fight it, had spawned more danger, not less. Obama couldn’t argue otherwise, and he wasn’t politically suicidal enough to use the death of bin-Laden as an opportunity to pee in the cereal bowl.

Now Ackerman is upset that President Joe Biden didn’t announce an end to the War on Terror during his public appearance on Monday to announce the death of Zawahiri.

Biden said he hopes the killing of Zawahiri brings 9/11 relatives and survivors “one more measure of closure.” As president of the United States, he could perhaps offer that closure by withdrawing from Iraq, grounding the drones and turning to the congressional work of repealing the Security State’s post-9/11 authorities.

Our limited military presence in Iraq has as little to do with Zawahiri as our original invasion of Iraq had to do with the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks. Moreover, as Ackerman acknowledges, the Biden administration sees the successful drone strike on Zawahiri as proof of concept that we didn’t need a permanent military presence in Afghanistan in order to hunt terrorists there. Why would then they use this occasion to ground the drones?

What Ackerman demands doesn’t comport with reality, and anytime you ask politicians to do unrealistic things, your analysis is going to be based too much in fantasy.

Perhaps one day America will conclude that operations like the cross-border helicopter attack that killed bin-Laden and the drone strike that killed Zawahiri cause more problems than they solve. But successful operations do not immediately argue against the tactics used in successful operations.

I do understand Ackerman’s frustration. He correctly sees the war on terror as something with no logical end, and he desperately wants someone to nonetheless end it. It concerns him that the death of Zawahiri will be used as a justification to perpetuate drone strikes and the surveillance state, when the exact opposite is theoretically conceivable.

Unfortunately, the death of Zawahiri will not be so consequential. It may boost Biden’s poll numbers, at least for a time, but it won’t lesson the threat of terrorism or convince Americans to demand the end of aggressive counterterrorism measures.

At the end of his piece, Ackerman reminds us that Zawahiri was badly tortured in an Egyptian prison after he was arrested in the dragnet following the assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat. America was allied with the Egyptian government at that point, having pried the country out of the hands of the Soviets with the Camp David Accords. So, in some sense, we bear responsibility for radicalizing Zawahiri and turning him into a deadly adversary. And we repeated this in the early years of the War on Terror by directly and indirectly torturing captives.

How much more of this has the United States done, and sponsored, to untold numbers of people across the world, in the name of avenging 9/11? How many more Zawahiris have these American choices created? How many are yet to be born?

This is the gerbil wheel of American foreign policy, and Ackerman is correct to ask if there will ever be a time when we can get off. But asking Biden to make blame America for creating Zawahiri in the first place isn’t connected to any kind of political reality. It’s the kind of thing that gadflies suggest.

And thank god for gadflies. Without them, there would be no hope.

I read Sen. Josh Hawley’s explanation for why he will vote against bringing Sweden and Finland into NATO. It makes me suspicious.

On the surface, it’s a well-written and mostly well-reasoned essay on how best to allocate limited American resources. In Hawley’s opinion, which is widely shared in the Biden administration, China is more of a strategic and military threat than Russia, and our response is under-resourced. For Hawley, if we have to choose, it’s better to add resources to the Far East than to Scandinavia.

The thing is, you can believe this and still honor and support Sweden and Finland’s desire to join NATO. Even if you agree that more money and military resources should be committed to containing and deterring China, it’s not at all clear that this should be paid for by denying Sweden and Finland’s request. So, the heart of Hawley’s argument isn’t really about China at all. It’s about Europe.

Hawley argues more broadly that we’re underprepared in the Far East because we’ve been too focused on the Middle East and “legacy commitments to Europe.”

In the face of this stark reality, we must choose. We must do less in Europe (and elsewhere) in order to prioritize China and Asia.

There are lot of ways we could “do less in Europe.” For Hawley, though, the main way is by keeping the NATO membership status quo. That, of course, wouldn’t result in any cost savings at all so no new money would be available to combat China. What Hawley really wants is for European countries to contribute more of their GDP to defense spending so that America can get savings for Asian reallocation.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has already created political support for more defense spending in NATO countries, so this longstanding American complaint (voiced by several administrations and most stridently and incoherently by Trump) is in the process of being rectified. Theoretically, when Germany doubles its defense spending overnight, the U.S. can spend correspondingly less, although that would defeat the purpose of adding deterrence to Vladimir Putin. Let’s just say, American could spend somewhat less, or take the savings and apply them both to China and to any increased costs for Sweden and Finland.

As to those increased costs, Hawley says this:

As to Sweden and Finland, both nations are advanced economies, with capable militaries. But they haven’t yet made the policy commitments appropriate to their geostrategic positions. Sweden doesn’t spend 2 percent of its GDP on defense and won’t for years to come. And Finland, though it announced a one-time defense spending boost, hasn’t made clear whether it will sustain these levels. In the event of a future conflict in Europe, U.S. forces would almost certainly be called in to defend both countries.

And even absent armed conflict, NATO expansion would almost certainly mean more U.S. forces in Europe for the long haul, more military hardware devoted there, and more dollars spent—to the detriment of our security needs in Asia, to say nothing of needs at home.

This analysis completely dismisses the possibility that Sweden and Finland would improve NATO’s response to any future conflict with Russia in Europe, thereby making victory more likely and less costly. Hawley says Sweden and Finland’s inclusion in NATO would “almost certainly” create more expense, larger American troop commitments, and require more military equipment, but both countries would be adding their manpower and equipment from their “capable militaries,” which would seem to offer the possibility of America needing to commit less of their own. Hawley doesn’t address this scenario at all.

When I add up all of Hawley’s arguments, I come up with a bunch of unconvincing rationales for why he’s going to cast his vote against Sweden and Finland. Denying them entry to NATO cannot be justified by the threat of Chinese aggression alone. Hawley is mainly using this piece to argue that America is too committed to Europe in general, but his ideas for cost savings aren’t well-developed or documented. He advances the idea that NATO members are deadbeats who don’t dedicate enough resources to their own defense, while ignoring that this is rapidly changing. In fact, Sweden and Finland have been the ultimate freeloaders by benefiting from NATO deterrence while not formally joining the alliance. That they now want to make that commitment should be seen as a positive.

If there’s an argument against Sweden and Finland, it’s that their inclusion in NATO might make a military conflict with Russia more, rather than less, likely, and that America would be formally committed to come to their defense. As things stand now, however, it’s hard to envision how Russia could invade Scandinavia without starting a war with NATO. So far, the invasion of non-NATO Ukraine has not resulted in outright war with Russia, but Finnish or Swedish sovereignty would be a bridge too far. In any case, Hawley doesn’t focus much on this threat, saying only that we’d “almost certainly be called in to defend both countries” which could be expensive.

Of course, NATO expansion for Sweden and Finland doesn’t depend on Hawley’s vote, and the people of Missouri are unlikely to see the issue as a top priority in Hawley’s next reelection bid. The audience for this piece is the Trump-supporting MAGA crowd which is now objectively anti-NATO,  anti-China, and pro-Russia.

If Trump raised suspicion by consistently taking the Kremlin line in international affairs, Hawley appears ready to carry that banner forward. And I just want to know why.