In an editorial in the print edition of Reason, Matt Welch takes me to task for “celebrating” the candidacy of Donald Trump, who he calls a “false prophet of anti-interventionism.” Reason’s editor cites one of my more hopeful predictions about the beneficial consequences of the Trump Effect on American politics:
“’If Trump gets the Republican nomination the neocons are through as a viable political force on the Right,’ Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo enthused at the end of February. ‘And if Trump actually wins the White House, the military-industrial complex is finished, along with the globalists who dominate foreign policy circles in Washington.’”
Welch goes on to cite similar expressions of deep satisfaction at the sight of the neocons’ hysterical panic coming from former Reagan administration budget director David Stockman and my old friend Pat Buchanan. And he even professes to see how “it’s not hard to see how the paleo crowd wound up here,” pointing to Trump’s evisceration of the Brothers Bush and his delightfully true description of how George W. Bush and his neocon advisors lied us into war. And then there’s this:
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“Foreign policy, militarism, and even tear-jerking paeans to politicians who govern during crises – in other words, about 90 percent of the content at the 2004 Republican National Convention – were no longer safe political spaces for the GOP. Donald Trump is taking a battering ram to one of the Republican Party’s core identities, and not a moment too soon.”
Welch continues making my case for me by pointing out that the GOP elite’s counterattack – an “open letter” from the same foreign policy “experts” who gave us the Iraq and Libyan disasters – was eminently unconvincing. “The jokes almost wrote themselves” chortles Welch “after the neoconservative commentator Max Boot told The New York Times, ‘I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump.’”
“So you could see why longtime critics of American empire were talking themselves into enthusiasm about the Trump phenomenon,” says Welch. But of course, I didn’t have to talk myself into anything. Unburdened by the cultural prejudices that forbid modal libertarians from recognizing the virtues of someone with bright orange hair and a distaste for political correctness, I was ready for someone who – as Welch puts it – is “saying things about foreign policy that few Republicans dared previously to utter.”
And so after detailing all the perfectly valid reasons why one could conceivably root for Trump, Welch asks the obvious question: “What’s not to like?”
His answer is as follows:
“The same candidate being cheered on by anti-war commentators is an open advocate of committing more war crimes. He favors deliberately targeting the family members of suspected terrorists (‘I would be very, very firm with families,’ he vowed at the December 15 debate in Las Vegas).”
It’s not clear what Trump is saying here: does he mean going after the family members of the San Bernardino shooters? Or does he mean taking out Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s mother-in-law? If the former, this is a separate issue from the question of intervening abroad, as is Trump’s advocacy of expanding the use of torture. These issues are usually brought up in the context of “What would you do if a terrorist had planted a nuclear device somewhere in an American city?” Would we torture him in order to find out where it’s hidden? While I’m not prepared to launch into a disquisition on the proper libertarian position on this question, the issue has nothing to do with whether or not America should be the policeman of the world.
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Welch writes that “Trump’s troops will not only be ‘defeating ISIS big league’ but also seizing its oil.” This is more problematic, but I’ll note that Trump also says he wouldn’t put troops on the ground, and that he’d force the Saudis and the Gulf emirates to take up that task under the threat of refusing to buy their oil. This sounds remarkably like Rand Paul’s position, minus the threat to boycott Riyadh – and yet we didn’t hear any objections from the Reason crowd when he gave voice to it. Why is that?
Describing Trump’s domestic program, Welch descends into hyperbole, declaring that the real estate mogul would erect “an unprecedented police state.” What will this dystopia look like? Well, there’s that idea of his that we can somehow deport 11 million illegal immigrants “and their 4 million or so legal children.” [Emphasis in original.] To begin with, that will never happen: the courts will stop it, and even if they didn’t the sheer costs would make the task impossible. Secondly, those “legal” children of illegal immigrants will never be deported either, but while we’re on the subject: as Ron Paul points out, the idea of “birthright citizenship” is by no means part of the libertarian canon.
Nor is the idea of open borders. Welch is appalled by The Donald’s declaration that we must have a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what’s going on.” To begin with, this is unenforceable: how can one know for certain whether or not a person trying to enter the United States is a Muslim? Wouldn’t a prospective terrorist simply lie? Not that this has stopped a certain “libertarian-ish” politician from keeping Muslims out: Rand Paul introduced a bill in Congress freezing refugee visas from countries where terrorism is rife. Welch is aghast that Trump calls Edward Snowden a “spy” and says “we should get him back,” but when Sen. Paul said – in an interview with Reason – that Snowden should be jailed for some length of time we didn’t hear a peep out of Reason’s editor.
Funny how that works.
What Welch concludes from all this – “Trump’s policies, then, are anything but anti-interventionist” – has got to be the nonsequiter of the year. Most of his objections to Trumpismo have nothing whatsoever to do with foreign policy: one can oppose open borders, think Muslims in the US are a threat, hold that Snowden is a “spy” and still advocate policies that represent a radical break from the bipartisan interventionist consensus.
