Hans, Hans! Tom Smith

Obama's response to the North Korean missile launch has been pathetic.  The logic of it is a bit elusive as well.  Evil dictatorship run by a madman launches a missile in the general vicinity of Japan and our President says -- this just proves that we must disarm!  Uh, it does?  Normally, there is some position on the left that I think is wrong, but I can at least follow its logic.  Some people can't get medical insurance so the government should take over medical care so everybody can have access to it.  And maybe get equal access which is more important than good medicine for most.  OK, I disagree, but I can at least follow the argument.  But, crazy man threatens neighbors with missiles and nukes, ergo the US had better hurry up and get rid of its nuclear arsenal.  Maybe not all of it, but a lot.  Enough to prove we really are very good bunnies.  I suspect there is some point here, but what it is beats me. Disarmament will become so fashionable that Kim will feel compelled to disarm too so as to be one of the cool nations?  I think the hats their generals wear already proves they don't care about looking cool. I really do think our young President is not ready for the prime time of the international state of nature. Either that, or he really does have very unsound views of what America's role in the world should be.  Countries like Japan and Israel must be reevaluating like mad things right now.

AND this is good.  Is it just me, or is there a quality of fantasy and movie-ness about Obama's actions?It is as if he thinks staged events shape reality more than they do, as if the hard undersurface of facts isn't really there or is highly malleable.  I think this may be attributable to BHO's life experience or lack of it.  Words matter, but they are not magic, alas.

Comments

[Commodore]

Tom-

(Prescript: I might be stating the obvious below, so I hope you'll indulge me.)

When I was in law school, for the first time in my life I became very close friends with a number of pretty committed lefties. Or rather, for the first time in my life I developed close _intellectual_ friendships with committed lefties. After innumerable long discussions over our many policy disagreements, with each side granting the other the benefit of the doubt in matters of being well-informed, reasonably smart and possessed of good faith, we came to the realization that many of our sharply different policy preferences were rooted in sharply divergent assumptions about the way the world works, and especially about human nature and even the definition of what is Good. These assumptions, even if they were not quite a priori with respect to our entire epistemological frameworks, were certainly so basic so as to be essentially unchangeable.

I think that the cause for much of the bewilderment that exists when one looks at the other end of the ideological prism stems from the fact that left and right have radically different assumptions on human nature, the way the economy works, and many other subjects. This is also why there is such a tendency to assume that the other side is acting in bad faith: we think, "what so and so is saying doesn't make any sense at all; therefore they must not really mean it." But maybe they _do_ mean just what they say, and if you swallow their assumptions about the way the world works, maybe what they're saying would make perfect sense.

Might this explain Obama's seemingly insane reasoning on a host of subjects? Might his seeming insanity (or seeming disingenuousness) stem from a worldview that is not just leftist, but radically naive? For example, his public pronouncements that the economy can be fixed only by racking up truly mind-boggling levels of public debt in order to finance leftist dreams initially seems disingenuous in the extreme. It simply makes no sense: state-run healthcare, increased government financing of post-secondary education, and increasing regulation to combat "clime change" in order to force a "green revolution" are hardly a recipe for an improved economy. Same thing with the so-called "stimulus" bill. How could Obama seriously suggest that pushing through a trillion dollars worth of pet projects, all of which have to be financed somehow, would do anything but hurt our economy and the financial health of the United States government? Since he obviously couldn't be that stupid, we are tempted to think that he must be not just a leftist, but a radical seeking to literally destroy the world economy with hyperinflation so that he could build a more "just" world in its place. Scary, scary stuff.

But maybe that's not really what's going on: if you are a kind of hyper-Keynesian--if you truly believe that _all_ government spending, no matter how stupid its object, ultimately does more harm than good (in other words, if you're the let's-pay-one-guy-to-dig-a-hole-and-another-to-fill-it type), maybe you _can_ have your cake and eat it too: in a hyper-Keynesian world, no matter how stupidly you spend your money, the money spent will ultimately be stimulative, the economy will grow, tax revenues will grow along with them, and as a result the deficits will shrink much faster than they would if the economy stood still, so why not spend the money on projects you personally like?

Likewise, perhaps a radically different worldview informs the Obama administration's seeming insanity on nuclear disarmament. Maybe the administration's overarching view of international relations is that it's fundamentally about the ego-laden actors on the international stage jockeying for public love and acclaim, almost like a kind of giant global high school. Under this view, perhaps the only reason that North Korea is "acting out" (i.e., testing ballistic missles) is because it's upset at being so isolated. North Korea's been bullied in the past, and there's a danger that its hurt feelings will explode in taking a gun to school a la Columbine (i.e., use of their limited nuclear arsenal). In order to stave off this threat, we've got to stop picking on poor N.K. and invite it into the group, to be, if not one of the "cool kids," then at least accepted as something more than a pariah.

Under this worldview, tying our own disarmament to North Korea's provocative acts makes perfect sense. If you believe that North Korea is pursuing nuclear weapons not out of a sense of rational regime survival but out of a kind of adolescent instinct to "act out" in the face of an uncaring, mean world, then North Korea's provocative acts only underscore the need to magnanimously show our willingness to reduce our own strength, thereby seeming less threatening, and hopefully, making North Korea feel a little less like they have something to compensate for.

You hinted at this explanation for the administration's views ("will [Kim Jong Il] feel compelled to disarm too so as to be one of the cool nations?"), but seemed to dismiss this possility out of hand. While it may seem incredible, I think that there is a serious possibility Obama and company really do believe somethiing like that. Perhaps the administration is not wicked and is not hell-bent on destroying the United States' power in the world, but simply is hopelessly naive. Unfortunately, that does not make them any less dangerous.

[Tom Smith]

Commodore-- Those are good points and I think you are probably right that Obama and company are acting out of their deeply held beliefs and not in bad faith. You need to allow ample room for self-deception and rationalization. For example, the Krugmans and Larry Summers of the world I'm sure will do everything they can to avoid paying high tax rates on their millions at the same time as they advocate taxing everybody else, including those who can afford it much less than they can, and at the same time not thinking in the least that they are hypocrites. That's my view of human nature. And I have read things by Krugman and DeLong that suggest to me they really do think there is so much "low hanging fruit" that the government could not waste money if it tried. I on the other hand have been deeply impressed with how easy it is to waste money even with the strongest commitment not to. Most money is wasted in spite of the best intentions. By the time you get to government, it is very hard not to waste money. I see most government as parasitic in nature, best understood by analogy to biology.

But on international relations, I don't know what to think. I take your point, and I believe Obama is naive about evil in the world, or think he might be anyway. But could he really be so naive as to think the North Koreans would be moved by displays of good faith and disarmament on our part? I find this hard to square with his hard boiled Chicago style politics. But I don't know what else he could be thinking. I think Kim is evil and mentally ill, a bad combination, and that his regime is profoundly pathological. It's probably best understood as a criminal enterprise like the Mafia. People don't say, oh, the Mafia is just misunderstood. The Mexican narcos are just misunderstood. Why do they assume the North Koreans are so different? But if it is not naivite I don't know what it is. I certainly hope it is not sympathy with a Communist regime. But you know, I have certainly run into people in the academy who seemed like liberals until you got them on the old Soviet Union, and then they get all sympathetic.