Remember those Malcolm Gladwell-style gurus who told us how everything we thought we knew was wrong? That was the kind of hip Madison Avenue thinking which helped Obama and his Washington echo chamber to come through with the absurd Iran deal, argues Lee Smith. Why Everything You Think You Know About Foreign Policy Is Wrong:
A few months after Obama left the White House, people are starting to realize there was some strange stuff happening the last few years on Pennsylvania Avenue. The things that seemed to make sense last year—like exchanging Iranian crooks and spies for ordinary American citizens—now look ridiculous. And it’s clear why the deliberate urgency with which the administration messaged its Iran policy had the feel of an advertising campaign—because it was an advertising campaign, crafted to convince consumers that something you think is bad for you is actually good for you....
The new generation of opiners gladly stepped into the cost-cutting breach. Their model was Malcolm Gladwell, a hugely talented and even more hugely successful writer for The New Yorker who became famous by finding the angle on all other angles: Everything you think you know about the world is wrong.
There are no winners in war, only losers. The most arduous nuclear inspection regime in history involves letting Iran inspect its own nuclear sites. Funding a state at war won’t fill its war chest. Restraining the clerical regime in Iran means relieving sanctions to make billions of dollars. Rewarding a state sponsor of terror for its activities makes that state less likely to sponsor terror. Deterrence doesn’t work.
The logic at work in some of the more popular arguments made by Obama aides and their validators in the press wasn’t dialectical or paradoxical; e.g., if you want peace, prepare for war. It was Gladwellian—what’s really true is the opposite of whatever you think is true. Of course, that’s not journalism, it’s just marketing...
To anyone who had read their Malcolm Gladwell, this was all deeply familiar. In Gladwell’s new-age sociology of marketing, you had the “connectors,” who knew lots of people, and the “mavens,” who knew important things. Most important of all were the “persuaders,” or super-charismatic figures, at the top of the heap. All of which explains why Mad Men was one of the big cultural events of the Obama years: It’s a story about an inner circle of somewhat-hip mavens and connectors working for a visionary king of cool to shape the beliefs of millions of Americans.
Obama’s “echo chamber” was another such story, with the “mavens” (policymakers and experts) and “connectors” (journalists) busily selling the Iran deal for their own king of cool in the White House. Those who wanted to be convinced were pretty easy to convince: Obama had Israel’s back and would never grant a nuclear weapon to a regime that threatens the existence of the Jewish state. Filters make cigarettes better for you! Others were a harder sell, and so the message had to be turned against them: If you don’t support a deal that frees up billions for a regime that threatens war, then you’re a warmonger....
The slogans that the Obama echo chamber used to sell the Iran Deal sound weird now because Obama is no longer in the White House. So what does it mean that “everybody knows” that the deal to rid Bashar al-Assad of his chemical weapons didn’t actually rid him of his chemical weapons, which he uses with regularity to murder civilians, including patients in hospitals? That’s not a paradox, it’s not a Gladwellism, and there is nothing clever about it. What the slogan means now is that they lied, and made America complicit in Assad’s war crimes. It’s no surprise that admission doesn’t sound clever, and that it makes people angry.
The press is responding slowly to the fact that the echo chamber has been unplugged. Major media outlets have confessed they were in bed with executive power the last eight years. Or, as The New York Times gingerly put it, the paper has decided to “rededicate” itself to reporting. After all, as the Washington Post’s new motto has it, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”....
The widely-held fantasy on the left that President Donald Trump was going to be impeached by his own party six or 10 weeks after taking office was a mass temper tantrum by a group of people who believed in the awesome power of their own tweets. And why not? After all, if your bright explanations were a reason why Obama succeeded in pushing his agenda, then why shouldn’t you still be making U.S. foreign policy? Aren’t we in charge of this stuff?
The answer, of course, is that the Explainers were never in charge of anything. They were simply a cost-effective megaphone for the most powerful man in the world. Now that Obama is no longer in power, what remains is their own massive sense of entitlement and the mess that they have helped to make of the American press.
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