The Social World

Tag: Washington

  • Trump blames Biden for shooting of National Guardsmen

    Trump blames Biden for shooting of National Guardsmen

    In response to the attack on Thanksgiving eve by a suspected Afghan national upon two West Virginia National Guardsmen, President Trump demanded a renewed effort to expel illegal immigrants. During a brief and uncompromising address from West Palm Beach that bore the rhetorical fingerprints of White House advisor Stephen Miller, Trump ripped into illegal immigration and former president Joe Biden.

    The President deemed the influx of refugees from Afghanistan and elsewhere the “single greatest national-security threats” facing America. Biden was a “disastrous president.” Trump reserved special scorn for his detractors who he said purport to protect constitutional liberties but are leaving America exposed to rampant criminality. One big problem for Trump, however, is that although the suspected shooter was “mass paroled” into the country and immigrated here in 2021, he was apparently approved for asylum in April 2025 – by the Trump administration.

    It was Biden, Trump implied, who, more than anyone else, was culpable for the descent of American cities into criminality. To listen to Trump it might have seemed as though Biden had flown in Afghans expressly for the purpose of targeting innocent Americans. Indeed, Trump averred that not only Afghans but also Somalis are pillaging America. He declared, “We must now reexamine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden, and we must take all necessary measures to ensure the removal of any alien from any country who does not belong here, or add benefit to our country.” Trump has already called for the termination of special status for Somalis living in Minnesota, a stance that he is likely to double down on.

    Throughout his speech, Trump’s rhetoric was sweeping. But Trump’s actual response – an additional 500 National Guardsmen to be deployed to the nation’s capital – was not. Trump, for example, could have declared that he intends to terminate Washington’s Home Rule and return to the days of yore when the federal government ran the district. Perhaps he envisions such a prospect.

    Trump’s critics are arguing that the same measures he took to impose law and order are creating the very havoc he decries. New Yorker writer Jane Mayer stated that the Guardsmen should “never have been” in Washington in the first place. The White House responded by calling her a “disgusting ghoul.” But others are voicing their disquiet with the stationing of federal troops in Washington as well.

    Their cautions will surely be portrayed by Trump and his advisers as an exercise in pusillanimity. The shooting took place near Farragut Square. In the center of the square is a prominent statue dedicated to the legendary Admiral David Farragut. Inscribed on the plinth of the statue is his credo, “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” Will Trump follow suit?

  • The devil over Washington

    The devil over Washington

    It is difficult to romanticize the political theater of Washington, DC, when you live so close to it. The absurdity feels routine after a while. You grow desensitized to the Machiavellian scheming, the name-calling, the ceremonial outrage. News outlets blast cinematic plot twists to the American public while quieter forces go unnoticed.

    With September growing late and the humdrum heat and headlines of Washington refusing to break, I turned to film in an attempt to re-enchant myself with the city in which I live. I rewatched two movies which capture its deeper moods. In spite of their tonal differences, both struck me in their portrayal of life just apart from the curtain – Washington not as the center of power, but as a place shadowed by it.

    The Exorcist, released months before the peak of the Watergate scandal in 1973, sees the city as tragic. Burn After Reading, released just before Obama’s first presidential victory in 2008, sees it as farcical. Both movies concern themselves with dramas beyond political life, and together they reveal something essential about the nature of evil and the psyche of Washington today.

    In Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers turn their lens just outside the political core of Washington, looking at the lives of pompous bureaucrats and some gym employees who try to blackmail them. The satire is merciless, holding its characters in no great affection: they’re all too dim-witted to understand the machinery of power, too incompetent to ever truly wield it. The characters barely register meaning or evil at all. Their lives, in effect, are expendable, their frantic attempts to claw their way into power impotent, the evil they mire themselves in banal. The devil over Washington is set loose, free to work under the guise of everyday stupidity, as the authorities shrug and turn a blind eye.

    The devil over Washington is set loose, free to work under the guise of everyday stupidity

    The Exorcist, by contrast, casts Washington not as a city that is too self-serious, but as a city that is not serious enough. In spite of its setting, its backdrop is not political but spiritual – the worldly Jesuits of Georgetown cross paths with actresses and diplomats, while the political class hardly intrudes. Instead, the press of rational, intellectual life in Washington is represented by the medical community as they subject the disturbed young Regan to test after invasive test. Only when every avenue is exhausted do the doctors, almost embarrassed, recommend an exorcism – but even then as a last resort, a kind of placebo treatment dependent on the corresponding irrational belief of the patient.

    For all its blasphemous convulsions, I find The Exorcist strikingly wholesome. Its rejection of cold reason in favor of faith implies a moral order that is weighty enough to withstand even absurd, improbable evil. The doctors – like the bumbling characters in Burn After Reading – are incapable of perceiving great evil and so cannot perceive great love. Their clinical detachment leaves them helpless before Regan’s possession. The Roman rite of exorcism performed by the ailing Father Merrin reaffirms Regan’s identity as a human being made in the image of the divine. Where the doctors offer cold procedure, the exorcism drips with love.

    The Washington I live in feels caught between the moods of both movies, unable to decide whether it is a place of conviction or performance. The ironic detachment of 2008 still lingers, still pulls the spirit toward a desensitization and the impulse to treat every crisis as theater – but the spiritual dread of the 1970s has returned in new forms. Spiritual warfare is overtly present in the public dialogue. Violence is constantly in the background and evil is openly discussed, even as we strain to take moral language seriously.

    Though we are closer to 2008 than 1973, I suspect that we are spinning closer in spirit to the Washington of the Nixon era; spiritual powers and principalities seem to undergird the spectacle, and both absurdity and rationality are thin veneers to stretch over very real darkness. What The Exorcist understood – and what Burn After Reading refused to entertain – is that evil can only be opposed by people who believe someone is worth saving. Washington in 2025 is still deciding which story it belongs to.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • The pace is quickening in DC

    The pace is quickening in DC

    September in DC is the real new year. The heat hasn’t broken, but the air feels heavier. Congress regroups, summer travelers return to the city and the Hill drones descend on the cafés in their blazers and button-ups, sweating through 80-degree weather. A distinct tension hangs in the air, a carryover from late summer.

    Donald Trump’s declaration of a crime emergency last month transferred control of the local police to federal authorities, and now, as I make my way down 14th Street, I regularly shoulder past protesters and pass clusters of National Guard soldiers milling beside the wine bars and coffee shops where my friends and I still meet. Couples walk past without breaking stride, avoiding eye contact. I, too, avert my gaze. I feel part protected, part watched and more than a little wary. It is a surreal juxtaposition. I tell a friend it reminds me of northern Mexico at the height of the cartel wars. The soldiers are meant to prevent violence, but their very presence signals that violence is the rule of the city, not the exception. Maybe that’s more honest. Even if crime rates are down, violence is salient. As I write, there have been three shootings in the past week.

    This is Washington’s particular joke: violence is never just local, it is staged for the national audience

    In early August I attend a party where I don’t know anyone on the list. Young men in dark suits talk among themselves. I eavesdrop and realize they are mostly DoGE staffers. A few journalists are in attendance as well, to my surprise. A man I don’t recognize politely introduces himself and asks me about my work. He looks young and his manner is earnest. He mentions his clearance; I tease him for talking about it. His name is Edward. I meet two other new hires. One insists he is here to improve on the old model, to revive the previous system with a sharper strategy. He is particularly congenial, a head taller and several degrees more telegenic than the rest of the room. I’ve seen him on a reality show before; he tells me he’s had a career change.

    The next morning the headlines say Edward was beaten trying to stop a carjacking in Dupont Circle. A week later, Trump takes over the Metro.

    The day Charlie Kirk is assassinated I attend a philosophy salon at the Aspen Institute. This year’s word is “virtue” and tonight is the kick-off. We drink wine and discuss MacIntyre and Aristotle on the roof as the planes overhead arc toward Reagan. The night is beautiful – warm air, clear sky – and it presses everyone toward conviviality, however dark the news beneath it.

    The attendees are all smart people. Washington wonks, lawyers and journalists, philosophers and academics. A prominent writer opens by noting that murder rates have declined, suggesting society is less violent, maybe even more virtuous. He argues that nothing has a monopoly on virtue anymore, and that no one can define it with certainty. A lawyer counters that virtue today is monopolized – by statistics, rather than God or the church. He says numbers and material outcomes can’t explain why we ought not to kill; they only chart the rise and fall.

    Later, I ask a newcomer what he thinks of the evening. He shrugs, and says these are very smart people, but Americans are so universal. What world are they referencing when they reference the world? Our values? Our virtue? What about Venezuela? What about anywhere else? His tone isn’t hostile, just bemused, as if he has stumbled into a rehearsal for a very niche play. I tell him he should say all that at the next salon. At the end of the night, we check our phones. The shooter has not yet been caught.

    DC is a thin place; a hinge between ideas and their consequences. It is a place where the rule of the city implies something about the rule of the land. A place where principalities and powers convene to materialize ideas you only read about online and push them past the membrane and into reality. This is Washington’s particular joke, sharpened in the second Trump term: violence is never just local – it is staged for the national audience.

    Lately it feels more unsettled, the hinge straining, the spiral tightening, each event ratcheting more quickly into the next, plunging the city – and maybe the nation – toward a feverish finale that never quite arrives. But the pace is quickening all the same.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • How an international community of do-gooders made the US lose the plot in Yemen

    How an international community of do-gooders made the US lose the plot in Yemen

    As British Ambassador to Yemen from 2015 to 2017, and later in counterterrorism roles at the UN, I watched with growing frustration as Washington, despite its early clarity, lost the plot in Yemen – with consequences that are now rippling across the Red Sea and into Israel.

    In 2014, the international community got it right. UN Security Council Resolution 2140 blamed the right culprits: former President Ali Abdullah Saleh and the Houthi leadership. The Houthis, a small sectarian militia allied with Saleh, were trying to hijack Yemen’s democratic transition – and the world recognized that. When President Hadi, the internationally recognized leader, was forced to flee Sanaa, Saudi Arabia launched a military intervention at Hadi’s request, justified under Article 51 of the UN Charter.

    There was no question who the good guys and bad guys in this conflict were; we were on the side of Hadi and the Saudis. We understood the stakes: the Houthis, backed by Iran, were a violent minority trying to impose their rule on Yemen’s majority Sunni population.

    So what went wrong? Essentially the international community was swayed by a number of prejudices and misconceptions, including about the moral sanctity of humanitarian activity.

    Unless you are a Saudi or an Omani, Yemen can seem a long way away, a marginal concern to the West compared with more politically and strategically pressing conflict zones like Iraq, Syria, even Libya. In those circumstances, and particularly before Donald Trump challenged the thinking, Western countries would default to seeing crises like that in Yemen through an almost exclusively humanitarian lens.

    The Department for International Development had more resource and more influence to bring to bear on the UK’s Yemen policy than the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Anything that interfered with humanitarian delivery was by definition a bad thing and the Saudi and Emirati-backed efforts of the IRG to retake its territory from the Houthis fell into that category.

    The international community of do-gooders is more cohesive and effective at lobbying than many people realise. It is a community that has a number of overwhelming prejudices which are broadly anti-Western and specifically hostile to Israel and Saudi Arabia.

    Pressure groups like Oxfam and Amnesty teamed up with the human rights community and reinforced the humanitarian lobby, which was led by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Every time the Houthis succeeded in drawing Saudi airstrikes onto a civilian target (much like Hamas in Gaza now), Western officials like me were subjected to ever shriller lobbying about the iniquities of the Saudis. None of these groups seemed to care about the Houthis arresting, torturing and murdering ordinary Yemenis (any more than they do about Hamas doing the same to ordinary Palestinians).

    This potent mix of humanitarian absolutism and anti-Saudi sentiment in Western Europe made it harder and harder for the US and the UK to hold their original line on why we should back the Saudis and the IRG. This ultimately led to US Secretary of State John Kerry, heavily influenced by Oman, taking an increasingly anti-Saudi line and seeking peace at any price. By the time of the Kuwait peace talks in 2016, only just over a year after the Saudis entered the war, the international consensus was that the Houthis should be given whatever they demanded to stop the war.

    The result? The talks collapsed because the emboldened Houthis demanded total victory.

    Worse still was the Stockholm Agreement of December 2018. The Saudis were on the brink of taking Hodeida, the key Red Sea port supplying the Houthis. But the murder of Jamal Khashoggi caused international outrage, playing into existing Western hostility and making it impossible for President Trump to shield the Saudis from international opposition to their campaign in Yemen.

    The UN, backed by humanitarian lobbies, led demands that nothing be done that might interrupt the passage of humanitarian supplies through Hodeida. In theory, the Stockholm Agreement was supposed to ensure that the Houthis did not control Hodeida, but no attempt was made to monitor or enforce it, and the Houthis ignored it from day one.

    Houthi recklessness and aggression in the Red Sea throughout 2024 show how foolish it was to imagine that they could ever be trusted to settle into a responsible, governing role in Yemen.

    Now, even the UN has lost its appetite for defending the Houthis, whose arrogance and brutality is such that they have been kidnapping and abusing humanitarians, including UN staff, as well as making the Red Sea unsafe for humanitarian delivery operations.

    But there appears to be uncertainty in the Trump administration about how to harmonize the various strands of Middle East policy: is it possible to be pro-Israeli and pro-Qatari at the same time? Can it contain the Houthis while courting Iran for a new nuclear deal?

    The surest guarantee of an end to the Houthi threat to freedom of navigation in international waters is to drive them back from the Red Sea coast altogether. In other words, to tear up the Stockholm Agreement and take Hodeida and the coast between there and the Saudi border as should have been done in 2019.

    What is unclear is whether the Saudis have the appetite for this, given their desire to extricate themselves from the Yemeni civil war. Only the US, and specifically President Trump, can reassure them of the reliability of support for them against the Houthis. Only the US can assemble the necessary international coalition to underpin this overhaul of international policy towards the Houthis.

    This is a unique opportunity to coerce a change in Iran. If not regime change (which is possible given the current weakness of the Islamic Republic), then the abandoning or destruction of all of Iran’s aggressive programs: nuclear enrichment, ballistic missile development, asymmetric warfare via the Houthis, Hezbollah, the Iraqi proxy militias and the other components of the Axis.

    This will require determination and probably force. We must be prepared to confront both Iran and the Houthis, with the Houthis only likely to give up their aggressive agenda if they face defeat in the Yemeni civil war.

    The US cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of Stockholm. The longer it waits to confront Iran and its proxies, the higher the price will be – not just for the Middle East, but for global security.

  • I was censored from talking about Chinese influence in Latin America

    I was censored from talking about Chinese influence in Latin America

    I represented the United States at the sixth Youth and Democracy in the Americas Summit at the Organization of American States, or OAS, last month. Most Latin Americans know this organization well, though most here in the US don’t. It is the premier regional political forum, the region’s European Union, a sort of mini-UN. When tyrants steal elections and jail journalists, the OAS becomes the center of the spectacle. 

    It has a reputation for defending liberty. But when it comes to China, matters get murky. So much so that the organization is willing to censor American voices that tell the truth about China’s regional ambitions.

    The appointment of Florida senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state may augur a new era of US focus on its hemispheric neighbors. Still, for those who haven’t noticed that extra-regional actors have replaced US leadership in the Americas (building military bases and mining billions of dollars in critical minerals), my experience should elucidate how bad things have gotten.

    Leading up to the event, I was instructed to send in a speech on the topics of hemispheric security and democracy.

    “Where have the defenders of sovereignty gone when Russians build bases on their lands, when the Chinese mine billions of dollars of critical minerals from their grounds, when Iranian-backed terrorists roam freely in their lands?” my speech read. “Does Beijing, thousands of miles away, with their secretive deals and sky-high demands care? If things go wrong, how does it hurt them? Someone please, enlighten me.”

    Soon after the draft was sent, I was informed that it was rejected. The only one rejected, in fact. “It’s too ideological,” I was told by Eva Sierra, one of the summit’s organizers, who told me that the OAS wouldn’t let me speak. “[Member countries] don’t have [these] official positions on China,” she explained. I was told to produce a different one, critiquing the US’s state of democracy and refraining from mentioning China. “If that isn’t resolved today, you risk not being able to participate,” I was told by another of the organizers. “I will write your speech,” she added. 

    Disturbed but interested in the opportunity, I drafted a new version, plastered with platitudes. “We recognize that issues, ranging from migration to organized crime, are deeply interconnected and cannot be resolved in isolation,” it read.

    What happened to the defense of free expression? The OAS sells itself as the stalwart of freedom, but suddenly a twenty-something talking about “hemispheric security” is menacing to them?

    Those who perceive what’s behind the fog know that, since 2015, the organization has been led by the soon-departing former Uruguayan ambassador to China, Secretary-General Luis Almagro. The man is a hero to many, but his defense of democracy stops when the nurturing role of the Chinese Communist Party comes up. This is how an organization that is vastly funded by the United States feels comfortable shutting down American speech. It is institutional capture — and it is big down south. 

    When the time came, to avoid getting the mic cut off, I decided to follow the rules. China went unmentioned, as they ordered. I did however keep things metaphorical — alluding to a dragon, a donkey and an eagle. It got rave reviews. Yet days after the event, I was told that the cameras decided to stop working when it was my time to speak. There is no official clip apparently — though I saw the cameraman and viewed myself on a screen while I was addressing the audience. What a coincidence. 

    Part of me wishes I could have delivered the full speech. It was not ideological. It was truthful. In what world could the US talk about hemispheric security and not mention the extra-regional actors operating in its neighborhood? 

    Despite the inconveniences, in their attempt to shut me down, the message of the speech was vindicated. Hopefully, this case helps bring attention to what should be a priority. Specifically, as the organization prepares itself for new leadership, it is time for Washington to start placing conditions. Why should the US be a primary funder of an organization that is so preoccupied with keeping China out of people’s mouths?

    The US will be hoping that the next person to lead the OAS is going to full-throatedly defend its principles. So far, there is a man that appears to fit that mold — Paraguayan foreign minister Rubén Ramírez Lezcano, from the only South American country that still maintains relations with Taiwan. The election of Almagro’s successor is in March, and Suriname’s foreign minister Albert Ramdin, who China would prefer for the role, seems optimistic about his prospects.

    It’s early to make predictions and others are expected to join the race. Still, the US will be thinking ahead. A push for an institutionalist that puts the OAS’s mission first should be its priority. If unsuccessful, the US may start to consider openly talking about institutional capture, and depending on the pick, potentially entertain the threat of defunding. In an era of great power competition, if China cares so deeply about Latin America, why wouldn’t the United States?

  • Why Joe Biden is no George Washington

    Why Joe Biden is no George Washington

    George Clooney last week praised Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 election as “the most selfless thing that anybody has done since George Washington.” We heard this idea echoing throughout Democratic circles even before Biden stood down in late July — that he was nobly standing aside, in the manner of America’s first president, relinquishing power to save democracy for the greater good. Step forward the twenty-first century answer to John Adams: Kamala Harris. 

    It’s all such obvious BS. George Washington wanted to retire (for the third time) to Mount Vernon after his first term but was persuaded to run again in 1792 by Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison and others. In 1796, he published his Farewell Address, which spelled out that he would not stand for a third term and urged Americans to put aside political differences for the sake of the Republic (not democracy, per se). Washington finally left office aged sixty-five in 1797. His departure set the two-term-limit precedent for presidents, which has only ever been broken by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who won four elections. (In 1951, the two-term limit was added to the Constitution through the Twenty-Second Amendment.)   

    Contrary to Washington, Biden wanted to carry on — in spite of his obvious and accelerating infirmity

    Biden, by contrast, will only serve one term. Contrary to Washington, he wanted to carry on — in spite of his obvious and accelerating infirmity — and it took a number of senior Democrats to pressure him to go. Rather than focusing on putting the nation’s finances in order, as Washington did, Biden will leave office with America some $35 trillion in debt. His leadership has essentially been an exercise in make-believe, as his advisors and cabinet spent almost four years insisting that he was firing on all cylinders when the truth was plainly the opposite.  

    After announcing that he would not be seeking re-election, Biden has come as close to vanishing as a serving president can. He is still in theory the leader of the free world for another 133 days. He tearfully vowed in his valedictory speech at the Democratic Convention in Chicago to “work like hell,” then slipped off for a week to a rich friend’s holiday pad in Southern California before taking another week at his beach house in Delaware. 

    It would be churlish to begrudge an old man some down time, especially after the summer Biden has had, and he did reportedly keep himself busy behind the scenes, dealing with the hostage killings in Israel and other matters. But his behavior is hardly selfless. 

    He’s back at work this week, or at least in Michigan speaking, and he must also be preoccupied with the fact his son Hunter has just pleaded guilty to federal tax charges. The White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Friday that Biden père would not pardon or commute any sentence given to his only living fils. We’ll have to see if that position holds until he leaves office in January. But what we can say is that Joe Biden may be a lot of things, but he is no George Washington.    

    This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.

  • The moment I became a friend of Richard Nixon

    The moment I became a friend of Richard Nixon

    American politics seem particularly febrile in 2024. The sitting president has withdrawn from the election, days after his predecessor was shot campaigning at a rally in Pennsylvania.

    But American democracy is by nature restless and tumultuous. It’s worth remembering that fifty years ago this week, Washington was in turmoil over the question of whether Richard Nixon was going to resign.

    Those early days of August 1974 seem like yesterday to those of us who became swept up in them. At the time I was a thirty-one-year-old member of parliament in the UK, five months into my first parliamentary term as an opposition backbencher. My summer recess took me to the home of a hospitable Anglophile hostess in Georgetown. In her basement lived two presidential aides who helped to give me a ringside seat to the resignation melodrama. At its peak I was invited by them to lunch in the White House Mess, where the press secretary, Ron Ziegler, persuaded me to write a letter to the soon-to-depart president. This correspondence started a relationship which eventually led to me becoming Nixon’s biographer.

    My lunch in the White House Mess took place in the days before the president resigned

    The countdown to the president’s resignation began on July 16, 1973, during the Watergate hearings of the House Judiciary Committee (“the greatest show on Earth,” according to the historian Theodore H. White) when a staffer, Alexander Butterfield, unexpectedly disclosed that Nixon’s Oval Office contained a voice-activated taping system. This caused a sensation. “NIXON BUGS HIMSELF,” screamed the headlines. They triggered a legal battle which ended with a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that the tapes were not covered by executive privilege and must be handed over to the judiciary committee.

    One of the subpoenaed tapes recorded on June 23, 1972 became known as the “smoking gun.” It showed that Nixon had discussed ordering the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation into the Watergate break-in. This attempted cover-up seemed to prove that he could be found guilty of obstructing justice if he were impeached for this criminal offense in a trial before the Senate.

    At the beginning of August 1974, only a small group of insiders were aware that the smoking gun tape was a bomb waiting to explode. Nixon himself knew it. He tried desperately to find escape routes that might save his presidency, reaching out to friendly Republican and southern Democrat senators who might vote against his impeachment. These overtures failed.

    In his hours of pre-resignation agony, Nixon the realist was sometimes supplanted by Nixon the fantasist. His daughters begged him not to throw in the towel (just as, reportedly, Joe Biden’s son Hunter and wife Jill did in the first days of last month). For a while, Nixon seemed to be swayed by their pleas: “End career as a fighter,” he scribbled defiantly on his notepad one sleepless night.

    My lunch in the White House Mess took place shortly before the fighting president became the resigning president. My hosts were Frank Gannon Jnr and Diane Sawyer — who was later to become a presenter for CBS. In August 1974 they were junior staffers working in the office headed by Ziegler.

    “Sorry, it’s like a morgue in here right now,” said Frank, as we ate our Caesar salads in an almost empty dining-room. Ziegler had joined us at our table. As one of Nixon’s closest confidants, he should have known what was going to happen, but evidently he did not, and he asked me a surprising question: “If the president were to resign, what do you think his future would be in the eyes of the world?”

    Hesitatingly, I replied: “I believe the day will come when Mr. Nixon will again speak out on foreign policy issues and be listened to, with respect, by audiences across the world.”

    “How profound!” said Ziegler.

    After lunch he drew me aside: “That profound reflection of yours,” he said. “Would you mind writing it down? I would like to give it to the president.”

    I was vain enough in those days to travel with my newly minted parliamentary notepaper. So I wrote a short letter of sympathy to President Nixon containing the thought I had just expressed.

    Outside the White House, hatred rather than sympathy for the thirty-seventh president prevailed as the crowds kept chanting: “Jail to the chief!” Inside the Oval Office, it was becoming clear that the game was up.

    On August 9, Nixon gave a rambling emotional resignation address to his White House staff before boarding the helicopter that would take him to exile in California.

    I watched the live broadcast of this exit in my hostess Kay Halle’s crowded drawing–room. Her mansion, 3001 Dent Place, was known to many Brits as the Halle Hilton. Her Anglophilia dated back to the 1930s, when she was engaged to Randolph Churchill, and made her home a port of call for many English journalists, who that day included Alistair Cooke and Henry Fairlie. But her drawing room that morning was mainly packed with notable US congressmen, columnists, former Kennedy aides and prominent Democrats. Few of them could contain their enmity towards Nixon. It was an angry scene, typical of its time.

    Some months later, when Ziegler was visiting London, he called to say he had something for me. I invited him to lunch in the House of Commons. “I gave the boss your letter when we were flying back on Air Force One to California on that day,” he told me. “He wasn’t getting much in the way of fan mail, so he was really pleased. Here’s his reply.”

    Nixon’s response included this sentence: “If you are ever passing through San Clemente, do come and see me.” It was too good an invitation to refuse. I stayed in the compound of what was once called the Western White House, again with Diane and Frank, who had gone into exile with the ex-president to help with his memoirs.

    My meeting with Nixon lasted more than two hours, and a friendship began. Fifty years on I cherish my memories of this extraordinary, talented statesman who — warts and all — is now climbing up the approval ratings of history. I doubt we will say the same about President Biden half a century from now.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.

  • Still, the Global War on Terrorism goes on

    Still, the Global War on Terrorism goes on

    I can think of only a single positive thing to say about World War One: it ended. Yet in addition to precluding any further waste of lives, the Armistice of November 1918 and the ensuing Paris Peace Conference did something else. It allowed historians and other writers to begin taking stock of this ghastly episode, which had caused death and destruction on an unprecedented scale.

    Making sense of the so-called Great War exceeded the limits of human capacity. Yet however imperfectly, at least it might be understood. Why had the war happened? Why had it lasted so long? What had motivated the belligerents? What did this horrendous cataclysm signify, both politically and morally? Finally, how could the recurrence of such a debacle be averted?

    These were among the questions that gripped European and American intellectuals during the 1920s and 1930s. At least initially, efforts to find answers, which centered on apportioning blame, produced more heat than light. But with the passage of time, answers based on reason and the weighing of evidence rather than nationalistic passions took hold. Today, more than a century later, unanimity of opinion remains elusive, but something akin to a consensus has formed. Learning has therefore become possible.

    The same cannot be said to the Global War on Terrorism, which may well stand in relation to the 21st century as the Great War does to the 20th. Here, with the crusade that George W. Bush launched in response to 9/11, is where the American imperium — or in Washingtonspeak, American global leadership — came a cropper. So, I believe, future generations are likely to conclude.

    Yet it may take a while for scholars to reach that conclusion because unlike the Great War, the GWOT (gee-whot) refuses to end. The military undertaking that President Bush inaugurated nearly 20 years ago still meanders aimlessly along.

    US troops today are still out there fighting terrorism in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and various other places. For their efforts, they still receive the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal and the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal even as the relationship between their service and sacrifice, on the one hand, and the actual security and well-being of the American people, on the other, has become almost impossible to discern.

    Barack Obama obliquely and Donald Trump bluntly promised to terminate the wars to which the GWOT gave rise. Neither one has fulfilled that promise. Shame on them. Yet politicians failing to make good on things they vowed to do is not exactly news, whether in the United States or elsewhere.

    What is more interesting and more telling is the fact that the entire American political class has seemingly concluded that ending the war on terrorism does not qualify as a particular priority. With no expectations of the conflict coming to a conclusion, there is little incentive to expend energy trying to understand it. So all those first order questions to which the Great War was subjected, the GWOT simply evades.

    To a striking extent, members of the American national security establishment have moved on, turning their attention to new ‘threats’, with China presently receiving the lion’s share of attention. In hawkish quarters — the same ones that had urged the United States to embark upon a global offensive in response to 9/11 — the prospect of the United States getting tough on China, with toughness having an important military dimension, now receives enthusiastic support.

    That China is an adversary engaged in what is likely to be a long-term competition with the United States is undoubtedly the case. It should be the aim of US policy to manage the competition, not to exacerbate it.

    Considered in that light, the prospect of that competition leading directly to a new Cold War, with Beijing standing in for Moscow, should give Americans pause. A new Cold War will necessarily risk real war, potentially resulting in armed conflict on a scale that will make the GWOT look like a skirmish. Even if direct hostilities between China and the United States are avoided, such a strategy will perpetuate the influence of the military-industrial complex, with domestic needs shelved or ignored, and it will deflect attention from threats such as climate change that oblige Washington to collaborate with Beijing. Like it or not, given that restoring a semblance of prosperity after the coronavirus pandemic will require some level of Sino-American mutual accommodation, a new Cold War will delay or prevent economic recovery.

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