When Conventional Wisdom Gets Downright Dangerous By Victor Davis Hanson
T he problem with conventional wisdom is not that it is always wrong. The rub is that the majority of “experts” unthinkingly and habitually mouth its validity until they ensure that it becomes static, unchanging, and immune from reexamination and dissent — an intolerant religious orthodoxy that finally become dangerous.
The recent Middle East breakthroughs are a perfect example. Both the Obama and Trump administrations sought quite different ways of navigating through the nearly 75-year-old “Middle East problem,” usually framed as the Israeli–“Palestinian” question.
Obama, in radical fashion, sought to empower and elevate Iran. The so-called Iran deal, the dropping of sanctions, the nocturnal infusions of cash, the exemptions for clear violations of the deal’s protocols, the nefarious work of Hezbollah — all that and more was excused on the theory that a growing Persian Shiite Iranian nexus from Tehran to the Mediterranean was inevitable and would “balance” both Israel and the so-called moderate Sunni Arab states. That realignment might prevent a Middle East war and end the leverage of America’s former Arab allies and Israel over us.
What destroyed the fantasy was not just its sheer idiocy — ensuring that a revolutionary, anti-Western theocracy would soon get nuclear weapons and become “moderate” while empowering its terrorist minions in their destructive agendas in Syria, Lebanon, and the Gulf states, as well as Europe and Latin America.
Instead, we see the futility of embracing Iran in its corollary — the old saw that the Palestinians were still central to the Obama administration’s gambit. That is, an empowered Iran, as the self-described revolutionary and chief patron of the Palestinians, would use its new clout to pressure Israel to offer concessions to the Palestinians, without any corresponding recognition of the Jewish state or reduction in Palestinians’ anti-Zionist bellicosity.
The Arab world then would be forced to rival Iran to regain its anti-Israel credentials, further bolstering the power-broking ability of the much-courted Palestinians. Eventually, Israel would concede and usher in a defiant and completely autonomous West Bank nation. Palestine Inc. would then reciprocate Israeli magnanimity by concluding peace with the Jewish state now confined within its 1967 borders. And so Middle East peace would reign.
The policy was an utter failure on all fronts. Iran saw magnanimity as weakness to be manipulated. The Palestinians usually treated concessions as a sign of enervation to be exploited in expectation of even more concessions. And our own former friends in the Arab world concluded that in extremis they were not really our friends, at least in comparison with America’s newfound friendly former enemies.
The Trump administration’s success thus far was predicated on blowing up such ignorance.
Contrary to conventional opinion, Iran was not ascendant, but more likely a failed state led by fossilized has-been apparatchiks and corrupt theocrats — and dependent on hobbled foreign patrons for weapons and income, whether China, North Korea, or Russia.
Oil sanctions, the growing global ostracism of China, the overreach of Putin in the Middle East, and an embargo of North Korea rendered Iran’s patrons increasingly suspect.
COVID-19, a gift from Iran’s Chinese benefactor, the recession, American oil and gas production, and crushing sanctions destroyed Tehran’s oil income and, with it, its economy. The hit on terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani exposed Iran as weak in the eyes of the Middle East. The terror strategist was not just another wannabe Islamist idol, but an irreplaceable evil genius in the arts of Iranian-style destruction and chaos. In other words, Iran’s theocracy was not so much to be feared but revealed as spent, its rhetoric more and more unhinged as its ability to inflict harm eroded.
By the same token, Trump realized that Obama’s failures were his own pathway to success. Fear of Iran solidified the Arab world and led it to confess that Israel was a far less preemptory nuclear danger than Iran would be in just a few years.
The Palestinians were seen variously as Iranian lackeys, Arab turncoats, and hostage-takers holding the entire Arab world at the mercy of Iran while refusing lucrative offers to make peace with Israel.
The U.S., as the world’s greatest producer of gas and oil (and determined to produce even more fossil fuels), was immune from the old Arab oil pressures. Oddly, the Arab world saw newfound fellow oil exporter America as now acting more on principle, rather than only from narrow self-interested desperation to avoid gas lines and oil-fed recessions.
Trump’s apparent quirkiness and unpredictability — taking out Soleimani, bombing ISIS into dispersion, trading insults with Iran — for good or evil, were probably interpreted by the Arab world as not merely a change from past American administrations but a new development that was better to be aligned with than opposed to.
In short, much of the Arab world saw Israel as increasingly benign, if not useful, and the Palestinians and their allies as dangerous liabilities and threats to their own security — and not just in the old-fashioned manner of prompting a war with Israel that others traditionally paid for with their own blood and treasure.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Trump grasped that the conventional idea of the Palestinians as critical to peace in geostrategic terms was a fossilized concept, given that the fate of millions of Arabs rested on the containment of Iran, an end to losing wars with Israel on behalf of the West Bank, and the goodwill of an increasingly self-sufficient and resolved U.S.
We know this is true from the mute silence of the bipartisan establishment to developments since 2017. In 2020, do we hear calls to remove the U.S. Embassy back to Tel Aviv? To promise that the Golan Heights will someday be Syrian again? Does Joe Biden perhaps oppose the rapprochement between Israel and the Arab world? Would he begin funneling money via the U.N. to radical Palestinians again, or delivering more cash to Iran as part of a new Iran deal? Perhaps not.
China atop the World
There are other recent examples of ossified conventional wisdom. For 30 years, our best and brightest in deterministic fashion declared that China was “ascending” to world mastery. A parlor game for the bipartisan Washington establishment was to translate Communist Party boasts of world hegemony into calibrations of inevitable domination in 2025, or 20230, or 2040.
China’s task was to become an “enlightened” hegemon; ours was to “manage decline.” China would take over policing the world; we would attend to more important matters such as solar panels, global warming, and diversity.
In response to such a fate, we were told, more joint corporate ventures, more outsourcing, more NBA- type fusions, more Chinese students, more patience with Chinese mercantilism and destruction of world-trade protocols, even more silence about the origins of COVID-19, and more contextualization of the reeducation camps, the destruction of Hong Kong democracy, the Trotskyization of a once independent Tibet, and the bullying of Taiwan, Australia, and Japan — all this would reassure the Chinese that the West accepted its newfound exalted station. In response, Beijing would gradually “democratize” as hundreds of millions of its Westernized elites preferred smartphones and Netflix to Mao’s shopworn adages and executed dissidents.
There was no historical evidence that functional capitalism always evolves out of crony-state-managed capitalism, or that capitalism is the natural twin of democracy. There was little likelihood that a racist, chauvinistic, and autocratic — but now affluent — China would suddenly prefer Western liberality to its own proud antidemocratic traditions.
But so many of our elites were invested in Beijing — financially, politically, and psychologically — that anyone who dared talk of a supposedly gloriously robed emperor China as embarrassingly buck-naked was written off as a proverbial silly boy blind to the obvious power and grandeur of China.
Saint NATO
NATO and Germany offer more examples of calcified consensus. Conventional wisdom dictated that American presidents must assume that NATO has remained essentially the same since the 1950s, that a still-traumatized Europe is incapable of defending itself, and that Germany is rarely to be questioned. To suggest otherwise was to return, like a Neanderthal, to 1930s isolationism, appeasement, and nativism.
Yet, for some silly reason, the world kept changing. Europe become the EU, wealthy, and — now sensing few existential enemies — increasingly anti-American. The Cold War ended. China rose; Russia weakened. And a now-united Germany began to issue virtual ultimatums to its neighbors. Yet the taboo about questioning NATO’s relevance remained.
The result was an abstraction of an alliance, with little military capability other than that of the American military — akin to the ancient calcified notion that a hollowed-out Constantinople in the 15th century still remained the majestic 1,000-year bulwark of Christendom in the East.
The European members of NATO resented their patron, increasingly in proportion to their own dependence on the Pentagon. And the now-familiar German bullying grew overt. Germany hectored Eastern Europe on immigration, southern Europe on debt repayment, the United Kingdom on Brexit, and the U.S. on its request to NATO countries that they honor their defense investment promises.
Again, all NATO mirages were predicated on myths that the Germans were always indebted to the U.S. and loved Americans (Germany had long ago become the most anti-American country in Europe); that the U.S. didn’t mind playing out its simplistic Roman hang-ups by protecting enlightened European Athenians (the American public resented European dependence); and that, owing to two previous European-wide wars, Germany was to be dealt with delicately (it had lost both and had a propensity to unite its alienated and often terrified neighbors while respecting the U.S. more when it seemed resolute and capable).
The Trump administration in hit-and-miss fashion grasped all that.
NATO is now spending far more money on its own defense. America is unafraid to jawbone Germany on its surreal deals with Putin, given that opposition to his autocratic Russia was ostensibly one good reason why NATO was supposed to still exist. The supposed master of EU leaders, the time-tried Angela Merkel, will soon leave office. Her legacy is a disastrous immigration policy that has alienated Eastern Europe, and Germany is disliked in southern Europe for its heavy-handed repayment dictates; it proved unable to bully the U.K. into ceasing Brexit, and it lost its NATO clout by refusing to meet its defense obligations.
It was not Trump’s radical unorthodoxy in dealing with NATO that had nearly destroyed the transatlantic alliance, but the earlier blinkered conventional wisdom of past administrations, determined to see no criticism, hear no criticism, and speak no criticism about NATO — and thus never seek any needed alterations and updates.
When conventional wisdom turns into orthodox ignorance, it become deadly. And it so often does because its near-religious dictates can stand no apostates, no one who pulls back the curtain on the projectors of the great and powerful Oz, no empirical observers who insist that the parading and richly robed emperor is quite naked.
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