The MAGA Doctrine Page 5

  I don’t think it occurs to the Democrats that every time they make new rules, decent people must now scramble to comply with those rules. It pleases me that some Trump appointees have spent more time issuing decrees to their agencies to do a better job of policing themselves internally than they’ve spent issuing new decrees for society at large to follow. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency head, for instance, ordered a drastic reduction in the use of testing on animals at that department. Good news for the animals. Better that than telling 330 million other Americans they have to perform six new tests before using pesticides in their backyard tomato gardens.

  Democrats want to control your healthcare, your air travel, your vehicles, your light bulbs, your food, your straws, and your paycheck. It sometimes seems as if they want to tighten government control over everything in the world except the southern border of the United States (where, as I write this, illegal immigrants are literally creating contests to see who can get around or over the existing border wall the fastest, something that will be much harder to do if Trump is allowed to complete it).

  They are eager to regulate and to censor, though they always seem to calculate how the regulating and censoring will affect their electoral prospects before taking action. I don’t think they’ll be too eager to rein in Google so long as that company and other social media giants lean anti-Trump, for instance. But nearly every other aspect of American life is regarded in the Democrats’ eyes as improved by the loving touch of regulation.

  Ironically, the left have tried to rebrand themselves as “progressives.” The one thing they all seem to agree on is that America is in decline. We are losing cultural influence. We are no longer a moral beacon. Our workers are losing their jobs while Jeff Bezos gets insanely rich, and there is little anyone can do about it. Democrats are no longer optimistic about their country.

  It takes a daring person, a larger-than-life person perhaps, to shrug aside those assumptions, to shrug aside the web of regulations, to shrug aside the guilt-tripping that the left so often now deploys as its main cultural weapon, and say, no, we’re going to do things differently now. Trump appears to be such a person.

  Chapter 4

  America First

  The MAGA Doctrine, far from urging belligerence against other nations, recommends recognizing the limitations of our knowledge of other cultures and thus refraining from trying to control them. The US government can barely run our own country, so it should be very cautious about trying to run others.

  Take the ridiculous case of the Kabul Grand Hotel.

  As NPR’s Rebecca Hersher reported in 2016, some $85 million were spent by the US government and associated financing agencies to build a hotel in Kabul, the capital of war-torn Afghanistan, that was intended to be a showcase of America’s rebuilding of that nation after having toppled its Taliban government in the previous decade.

  If ever there were a project that had symbolic, rather than just practical, significance, this was it.

  If ever there were a branch of the US government that is touted as having a tough-minded regard for making the difficult choices, being efficient, and avoiding rosy optimism, it is the US military, treated with understandable respect even by conservatives who look askance at all other government spending projects.

  If ever there were a time when America was under pressure not to falter on the international stage, this was a project in a bright international spotlight, one that should not, could not, fail.

  And if ever there were an easy location for our troops overseas to monitor, surely it was this hotel’s location: directly across from the US embassy and easily watched from the embassy windows.

  In 2009, US ambassador Karl Eikenberry told a crowd attending a celebration of the hotel project, “The development of this marquee American hotel brand sends a very real message that Afghanistan is open for business.” As is so often the case with big construction projects, governmental or nongovernmental, the hotel was touted not just for its eventual usefulness in accommodating guests but its usefulness in creating jobs, in construction and other fields, in the interim.

  This project would be a winner.

  As a report from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction detailed, the project soon went awry. As could be readily seen from the embassy, the “hotel” was but a shell, a few rooms completed for the sake of use in promotional photos—propaganda both for the local hotel-building company and for the general success of American intervention abroad—with the rest empty for years, even as the US taxpayer–funded coffers of the project emptied to who knows where.

  As NPR’s Hersher concluded:

  The loans went primarily to a development company called Tayl Investors Group, which is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands and run by a Jordanian citizen named Fathi Taher. Taher and his US sponsors submitted the plans for both the hotel and apartments, and his company was the project manager for both buildings.

  As the projects got underway, OPIC [the US government-run Overseas Private Investment Corp.] relied on the Tayl group for updates on the hotel. For the apartment building, the agency hired a Bulgarian company, Gardiner & Theobald, to monitor progress.

  “Ironically,” the report states, “Gardiner & Theobald never visited the apartment project site, and instead relied on information provided by the loan recipients to complete the status reports it provided to OPIC.”

  To add insult to injury, as the Financial Times reported in November 2016, the hotel and an adjacent apartment building both ended up not only abandoned but constantly guarded by US security, since the abandoned shells’ proximity to the US embassy would make them perfect staging areas for terrorist attacks on the embassy.

  In short, US taxpayers spent tens of millions funding empty shells and then more money making sure they wouldn’t be used to attack our embassy—and this is the sort of “marquee” project that our bravest and most self-sacrificing youth are fighting to make possible while they could be back home in the United States engaged in business or charity that would benefit Americans.

  Pointing out the absurdity of this situation is no insult either to American troops or to the long-suffering people of Afghanistan. It is not a chauvinist, snarling insistence that Americans should flourish while distant foreigners suffer. It is a mature recognition that we—or at least government—cannot get things done just by wishing it were so. The market mechanisms that provide constant correction in normal businesses aren’t there when projects are just sinkholes at the end of a giant torrent of government money. That’s true no matter which government we’re talking about, no matter which branch of government, and no matter where the sinkhole is located.

  The problem is compounded, though, when we are arrogant enough to think our government can work miracles in distant foreign locations when it can barely deliver mail back home. The phony miracles that were the Kabul Grand and its partner apartment complex are best off demolished, as are the fantasies of playing global policeman and global hegemon that created them.

  Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky sent one of his top staffers, and my friend, Sergio Gor, to visit the hotel in person in Kabul on a Senate oversight trip. At a subsequent Senate hearing organized by Senator Paul, on spending in Afghanistan, John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR), testified his colleagues have seen “far too many instances of poor planning, sloppy execution, theft, corruption, and a lack of accountability. . . . Some of the most egregious examples SIGAR has identified include [the Department of Defense’s] purchase of nearly a half-billion dollars’ worth of second-hand airplanes from Italy that were unusable and later sold as scrap; the construction of an Afghan security forces training facility that literally melted in the rain; numerous schools, clinics, roads, and other infrastructure built dangerously unsound and with little if any concern for the costs of supplying and sustaining them; and a failed $8.7 billion counter-narcotics effort in a country where poppy cultivation
increased by 63% last year alone.”

  The waste on such projects is not small, sometimes dwarfing even the ridiculous Kabul Grand, such as a $750 million electrification project that, it was belatedly realized, placed electrical towers on land the US project organizers did not own, plus numerous embarrassments like the new Afghan Ministry of the Interior, costing $210 million, that had nonworking air-conditioning and sprinkler systems. Or how about building a compressed natural gas filling station that cost the US taxpayer millions of dollars? Do you know anyone in the United States who drives a car operated on natural gas? I don’t either. And I doubt many in Afghanistan, one of the poorest and least developed nations in the world, have the ability to purchase natural gas–operated cars, even if the US taxpayer is building brand-new facilities for natural gas fuel.

  Out of sight is out of mind, and when you’re spending other people’s money, as the government always is, waste is never in view—not even when the Kabul Grand is just a few hundred yards away from the eyes of thousands of embassy personnel, mocking our pretense of being nation builders. The answer, as with domestic government boondoggles, is not to pour more money in and “this time get it right.” The answer is to stay out of these quagmires in the first place.

  Meanwhile, even important US roadways such as Times Square have potholes, and we slowly become inured to the occasional rural bridge collapse, with resulting driver deaths. Dare to suggest pulling out of foreign military engagements and focus on our own problems, though, and you may well end up called an “isolationist” by both major political parties—and then both those parties will go back to borrowing more money from China, adding to the over $1 trillion we already owe them.

  Is that any way to keep the United States out from under foreign dominance? There’s something completely upside down about the way we’re conducting foreign affairs.

  President Trump has been described by critics both as stubborn and, paradoxically, as having “no fixed views” and thus being too easily swayed by advisors—by whoever spoke to him last, as some naysayers put it. The resolution to this paradox, no real surprise to anyone who has watched him work in the private sector, is that he is always seeking the best advice. Sometimes he knows what needs to be done and how. The rest of the time he values the insights of a soldier who served in Afghanistan as highly as any PhD working in the State Department. If he’s getting the same opinion from all his advisors, he may keep asking people until he hears some dissent, to understand what all the options are.

  No matter how beautiful the speeches of diplomats might be, for instance, and no matter how pretty their words, Trump is still willing to turn around at the end of a meeting and ask someone else—a general, a trusted advisor, a low-level but competent local—“Is that really true?”

  He breaks the spell of elite pretensions the way we’d all like to when we watch the elite bungling.

  Before Trump, the left wanted to change the world through global institutions, and the right wanted to change it through military intervention. Now we know the real choice is between government bureaucracies and the soldiers we endanger for their goals.

  To someone as determined as Trump is to get results that benefit the United States, it will be no consolation if trillions of dollars are lost in Iraq and Afghanistan—and we are talking about trillions over the long haul, not “just” the tens of millions lost on a project such as the Kabul Grand—but pretty speeches are given about hopes for a better tomorrow and a more unified world. Those speeches, and the posh events at which they tend to occur, are what most of the political class live for. The MAGA Doctrine leads to tangible results for the people who have to live with those results. It is rooted in the commonsense cost-benefit analysis intuitive to all businessmen and seemingly obvious to the average person—but completely alien to the way most politicians and government bureaucrats think.

  Congress has even fought in recent decades to prevent simple cost-benefit analyses being a part of legislation. The thinking seems to be: If it’s something that sounds worth doing, we’ll do it even if it’s a money-losing disaster that makes people worse off than they were before and leaves the United States as a whole poorer than it was before.

  Trump knows that doesn’t make sense. It pains him, and that may be the source of his aggressive tone. It’s not hate. It’s the frustration we all feel watching the government flounder or make things worse while it endlessly celebrates its own achievements. People can only stomach so much of that before they seek some way to rebel, and the 2016 election was one result.

  People also sense, even if they are not philosophers and could not explain this intuition in lengthy manifestos that would impress the intelligentsia, that the closer decision-making is to home, the more likely you are to have some control over it. When Trump told his inauguration crowd, “From this day forward, a new vision will govern. . . . It’s going to be only America first, America first,” he was not vowing to attack other countries. He was not vowing to make the people of the world feel like hated outsiders, though there will always be some haters in a crowd. He was assuring the crowd—and they appreciated it—that America itself will decide its destiny, not distant foreign entities we cannot reasonably hope to monitor or control. It’s an orientation rooted more in pragmatism—the decentralized nature of economic decision-making—than in flag-waving triumphalism.

  And with the federal government over $22 trillion in debt, it’s a shift in emphasis that can’t come a moment too soon.

  It is striking that it is not just the American left that dislikes Trump (though he has a few grudging fans on the left, too, a phenomenon we’ll revisit later) but also some of the most supposedly prestigious international organizations: the architects of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the experts of the World Health Organization (a group that once declared North Korea a model for healthcare), the UN, the diplomats behind the Paris Climate Agreement, and, of course, NATO (especially the deadbeats, who probably won’t be too happy if a proposed resolution saying each NATO member must pay exactly one twenty-eighth of the organization’s cost goes into effect, despite all their complaining about the current outsize role of the United States in the group).

  The press and the sorts of politicians who curry favor with the international elite—the Clintons and Obamas but also the John Kerrys and Joe Bidens of the world—naturally see those international groups as a sort of higher authority, rendering the most objective judgment possible on the anomaly that is Trump. But Trump’s nationalist impulse—in a way that is analogous to a libertarian’s impulse to tell regulators to stay off his land—is to say, mind your own business, globalists. And America will mind its own business. You get better decisions that way.

  Further, as Trump has repeatedly made clear, saying “America First” does not for a moment deny to, say, France the right to declare “France First” the basis of its decision-making, or Portugal the right to think “Portugal First.” To a great extent, that’s how countries already think and behave in the international arena. Try predicting their behavior with any other model and see how far it gets you.

  The MAGA Doctrine in foreign policy is just based on the obvious principle that people manage their own affairs better than they manage other people’s affairs, especially against those other people’s will—and no matter how good the intentions behind the managing.

  As with so many about-face complaints the left makes about Trump, contradicting whatever they said just days before 2016 in order to remain in opposition to whatever Trump says, it is very strange to see the modern left expressing so much concern about a US president not wanting to meddle in other countries’ affairs, a president not wanting military action unless necessary (wanting, some insiders think, to get most troops out of Afghanistan in 2020 or so), a president not wanting a more belligerent NATO or more alienated Russia.

  Weren’t these basically the foreign policy hopes and dreams of the left for most of the past seventy years? Were they joking? I would hate to think tha
t which party currently occupies the White House is really the only thing that determines what they praise and what they condemn.

  But there is a deeper, less fickle impulse at work in Trump’s critics—and not just on the left. There has been a “foreign policy consensus,” most of the time, throughout those seventy years. It spans both the major parties’ establishments, right and left, and can fairly be called centrist. It is not simply evil, but it arose in historical circumstances that no longer apply.

  In short, the post–World War II international order, as seen from the perspective of the most powerful country on Earth, the United States, was really an order founded (at least in theory) on generosity. Europe had been decimated by the Nazis, and much of it was now oppressed by the Communists, and so a wealthy and intact United States had a unique opportunity both genuinely to help out its allies in their recovery and to cement their loyalty in the quiet, four-decade struggle against postwar Soviet Communism.

  That means that those international institutions against which nationalists and populists now rebel, groups like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, were to a large degree US or at least Western creations—and aimed at staving off outright socialism, in much the same way Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal economic planning was meant to prevent the adoption of outright socialism at a time when it was percolating throughout the world.

  Just as FDR’s big spending and regulations would over the years lead to a legacy of government bureaucracy, waste, and debt, the international institutions we helped create now foster an expectation of handouts, loans, entangling alliances with attendant (and risky) military responsibilities, and an array of international trade restrictions more ornate than Trump’s focused tariff volleys.