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@JonahNRO Given Trump’s reference to Romney’s desire for SecState role, bringing up his views on the matter was relevant. This was my criticism in 2012, long before Trump. In a SecState I prefer to have someone who wasn’t invested in the predictable failures of the Arab Spring, Libya, etc
@JonahNRO I know you’d like to make this about Trump, and I’ll oblige: for the last 15 years, we’d had GOP and Dems who believed in destructive fantasies about the Middle East. Only Cruz (who I supported in 2016) and Trump didn’t come from that swamp—which is and was refreshing.
@JonahNRO It didn’t take a genius to know that the 2011 Arab Spring would be a disaster—and to do a lunatic Libya War in the middle of those uprisings, as if they didn’t exist—was foreign affairs malpractice on an epic scale. Nearly all of GOP Estab didn’t see it.
@JonahNRO They didn’t see it because the conservative intellectual ecosystem was so ideologically calcified, it could no longer see reality. The voters—not wedded to predictions and reputations to safeguard—saw, however. And, with Trump, they rejected all of it. Quite reasonably, too.
@JonahNRO Put Trump aside for a moment, if possible: On issue after issue, the conservative intellectual ecosystem of think tanks, publications and pundits were spectacularly wrong. And there was no admission of mistakes or attempt to change course...
@JonahNRO In my little corner of expertise, it was as crazy as it was nonsensical. After the fall of Mubarak, Kristol and Krauthammer told Fox News viewers it was a win for the Bush Freedom Agenda. A year later, TWS pushed for Libya using the same insane logic.
@JonahNRO To be most generous, there wasn’t really any thinking going on; it was either reputational ass-covering or it was ideological auto-pilot. Either way, it’s a sign of a decrepit intellectual movement. That needed to change. With Trump’s rise, it was shaken up.
@JonahNRO It became clear to me that what was required to force some badly needed new life into the GOP’s foreign affairs approach was a more explicitly transactional posture, which Trump has. Naturally, that collides with the calcified ideological approach of the establishment.
@JonahNRO Sometimes he errs in that direction—but I would say he errs less frequently than Bush or Obama did, at least on the consequential issues. Trump didn’t put Hamas into power like Bush did, or Morsi into power like Obama. He didn’t hand Iraq over to Iran.
