Beware the Flamboyant Candidates With No Experience

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Culture Misunderstanding the Odyssey Nolan’s Odyssey is neither Homer’s material nor a modern morality play. No character study of Odysseus comes closer to perfection than Tennyson’s:  And tho’  We are not now that strength which in old days  Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;  One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will  To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. The Ulysses of Tennyson—and for that matter, of Alexander Pope—is a cunning and amoral man in rebellion against fate and time. Cleverest and wittiest of all heroes, he surpasses even the Olympians in arrogance and ego, and in consequence is disfavored and punished by them all (excepting only gray-eyed Athena). The Odysseus of Homer, when recognized by his dying, feeble dog, stifles his tears and walks away. The Odysseus of Homer avenges the disloyalty of his maids by executing them all without mercy. The archetype of a flawed, spiritually pagan hero, resigned to the machinations of fate and cruel gods, he would be instantly recognizable in Sergio Corbucci’s Django or Gregory Peck’s Captain Mallory in The Guns of Navarone.  Christopher Nolan’s Odysseus, however, is a latently Christian patrician and soldier. He is concerned about the end of civilization resulting from both normative and structural factors, such as a breakdown of civility and propriety, open thuggery from temporary migrants who in the absence of order abuse hospitality, and wars over “trade routes.” His instincts are conservative. He suffers from the trauma of a brutal war and the guilt of middle age, from two decades of destroying castles in the sand and decapitating women next to godforsaken ruins.  Nolan’s Circe is a frumpy peasant witch who looks like a British TERF and quite literally turns dumb, innocent men into pigs in a heavy-handed #MeToo metaphor; she is calmed only by the presence of Odysseus, who carries on his shoulders the emotional burden of all errant men. Nolan’s sirens are barely visible in the fog. His Calypso is a statuesque compassionate blonde who knows when to “let go.” His Penelope is a Bulwark-reading Hillary Clinton voter from Northern Virginia, who derides power-hungry men and is tired of holding the throne without acknowledgement.  Like many in our times, Nolan is obsessed with the enemies of civilization; in his Batman trilogy, he shows us the full range, from terrorists (Al-Ghul) to anarchists (Joker) to communists (Bane). The obsession continued with Oppenheimer (technology and the promethean spirit) and now The Odyssey.  The pre-screening backlash over an African Helen or a transgender Sinon is not entirely undeserved. While there is historical evidence of intermixing between civilized cultures in antiquity, from Indo-Scythian-Greeks intermarriage to mentions of the matchless Aethiopeans, a sense of proportion is a virtue almost entirely absent in contemporary art. Not everything needs to look like the cantina of Mos Eisley, especially when it is chronicled that Helen of Troy had “fair arms.” But it is also the most pedestrian of all concerns. No one cared about Denzel Washington in Macbeth, or Tom Baker in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. The concept of racial purity as we know it is a product of scientific modernity. And if today’s theatergoers are reluctant to explore the inclinations towards transgenderism or hebephilia among ancients, then I am afraid the discipline of classics has failed us moderns. Far more serious are the thematic divergences from the original poem. Nolan’s Odysseus is linguistically limited, no doubt to draw a younger audience that would find complex puns (Οὔτις, for example) and magniloquent vocabulary incomprehensible. And the Odysseus of the film is not so conceited as to incur the wrath of Poseidon by naming himself in front of the Cyclops, nor do Nolan’s viewers get to witness his hero’s penitence, wisdom, and caution on display later with the gift of Aeolus, as both incidents were left on the cutting room floor.  In one memorable scene, Odysseus tells his crew that “the gods help those who help themselves”—a line that, while somewhat similar to Virgil’s audentes Fortuna iuvat (“fortune favors the bold”), is by its modern connotations rather alien to the mind of antiquity. The pagan gods are cruel, unforgiving, and whimsical. That’s why they are gods. The concept of a complex, hierarchical set of relationships between gods, demigods, immortals, heroes, priests, virgins, nobles, peasants, and all the rest is entrenched in the pagan worldview, finding expression in works of literature from the Mahabharata to the Iliad. Laesa majestas is a greater sin than a simple sacrilege. One can be saved from the latter by the intervention of another god, or by cunning, wisdom, or penitence: the retribution for the former is inglorious death.  It is understandable why the Augustans and the Romantics of the 18th and 19th centuries had such a feel for the original text. Both Enlightenment liberalism and the concomitant Philhellenist movement were, in important respects, sympathetic to the pagan ethos. The Odyssey is a text of pagan morality. The idea that Odysseus would be “tormented” by anything is comical. Nolan cannot afford to be faithful to the original material and show what Odysseus did and enjoyed, because it would destroy him and his audience with guilt. It would require a different, more elevated, and amoral emotional register to appreciate the classics on their own terms; that register is now lost, perhaps to be rediscovered by future generations.  What is ironic, then, is the outcry from the online commentariat about Nolan’s reinterpretation. Many of the commentators most livid with Nolan seem to have a simplistic view of Western civilization as a single, monolithic, and continuous tradition, unchanged by two millennia of history or constant contact with other parts of the world. This is a view which sees no fundamental differences between, say, the era of the Crusades and the Renaissance, or between the cultures of the Mediterranean and those of the Germanic north. It results in a reflexive aversion to any reimagination of a classic, which has the ultimate effect of limiting its holders’ ability to appreciate or influence culture and the arts. But one assumes that if they were to reimagine the Odyssey from a modern civilizational lens, they would end up with Nolan’s manichaean vision—which confuses their philosophy and rhetoric and infuriates them, like Caliban seeing his own face in the mirror.  The post Misunderstanding the Odyssey appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs The Lesson Trump Can Take From Herodotus’ Paradox Strength is best manifested in cooption, not force. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images “If you cross the Halys River and attack the Persians, you will destroy a great empire.” According to Herodotus, when Lydia’s King Croesus asked the Oracle at Delphi whether to make war on Cyrus the Great, he heard only what he wanted to hear, crossed the river and lost. The empire he destroyed was his own. Today’s oracles are far less discerning. When pastors gathered in the Oval Office this past March to lay hands on the president and pray for war, not one paused to warn him of the cost. Yet this modern hubris was not born in a vacuum. The crisis was a decade in the making. The first Trump Administration’s 2018 withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement all but guaranteed that Tehran would accelerate the stockpiling of highly enriched uranium. The military strikes in 2025 ended what little on-the-ground monitoring remained, and the war launched this year has given the Iranian regime every reason to finish the bomb. The Six-Day War of 1967 offers a lesson worth remembering. It is nearly impossible to know exactly when a covert nuclear program produces a usable weapon, especially when a state perceives an existential threat and political pressure distorts the intelligence. Robert McNamara called the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis the most dangerous moment of his seven years as secretary of defense, and unprecedented in human history. It is not widely known that he explicitly coupled Cuba with two other historical events that also brought the world within a “hairsbreadth,” as he put it, of nuclear war: the 1961 Berlin Crisis and the 1967 War. During that latter conflict, Washington and Moscow both came close to a nuclear confrontation. Egypt, having previously deployed chemical weapons in Yemen, possessed a rocket program aided by scientists from Nazi Germany. Additionally, prominent Nazis had relocated to Egypt and Syria through networks the CIA-backed Gehlen group quietly facilitated. Meanwhile, entirely outside the awareness of much of the American security establishment, Israel had secretly crossed the nuclear threshold and stood ready to detonate a device in the Sinai. The proposed delivery system was by helicopter. This historical context helps us to understand the possible hidden dangers lurking below the surface. In addition to its highly enriched uranium stockpile and deeply fortified centrifuges, Iran controls a geopolitical lever of almost equal consequence in the Strait of Hormuz, a kill switch for the global economy. Now that there is an active war again, Iranian leadership is making it clear that any further strikes will provoke eye-for-an-eye attacks on American military installations and their host nations. If the crucial oil terminal at Kharg Island is destroyed, Tehran will simply go after Gulf petroleum infrastructure in kind, triggering an exchange that would send the global economy into a tailspin. If the U.S. goes after critical civilian infrastructure, Iran will do the same, as was demonstrated last week by the attack on a Kuwaiti desalination plant. While the Houthis have fired ballistic missiles at Saudi Arabia as a warning and declared an anti-Saudi “maritime blockade,” they have yet fully to close the aptly named Bab el-Mandeb, or Gate of Tears, which would sever the maritime route to the Suez Canal. The Iranians still have not played this card. A threshold nuclear program, a conventional arsenal buried deep in mountain tunnels built for this exact contingency, and two maritime chokepoints capable of strangling global shipping create a crisis of historic proportions. Excluding the 28-day ceasefire, the 2026 Iran War has now run roughly as long as the Spanish-American War, the nineteenth-century conflict that forged America into a global power. That conflict marked a beginning. This one looks more like an ending. It signals the death of the Carter Doctrine and the collapse of a half century of American primacy in the Middle East. As the military exhausts itself trying to reopen a strait Iran has proven it can close, surging energy prices are squeezing American consumers while China quietly exports its green energy revolution across the globe. The same voices across Israel, the Gulf, and Washington that pushed the president into this fight are now demanding escalation. They want American ground troops to force the strait open, a move that would make the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan look mild by comparison. Yet Mr. Trump still has the chance to choose a better and indeed a bolder path. Here is what is required. First, any real solution starts with a hard truth. The road to Tehran runs through Jerusalem. Americans tend to trace their enmity to the 1979 hostage crisis, while Iranians point to the 1953 CIA-backed coup. Without question, the unresolved Israeli–Palestinian conflict has long been the primary fuel for Iranian-backed extremism. Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and the Iranian Revolution itself all legitimize themselves as resistance movements against Israel. An Arab League–endorsed two-state settlement, along the lines Ehud Olmert proposed and Mahmoud Abbas considered in 2008, would not suddenly end Iran’s regional ambitions. But it would strip away the language of resistance Tehran uses to justify decades of bloodshed. Furthermore, it would halt incendiary settlements and lawlessness in the occupied territories. Second, Iran needs a seat at the regional table. A country approaching one hundred million people, sitting on some of the most strategically important real estate on earth, cannot simply be fenced out forever. Since 1979, every attempt to isolate Tehran has only bred more instability, obscuring genuine opportunities to engage on shared threats like severe droughts and the explosion of noncommunicable diseases, the region’s greatest killer. (Twenty-five million people in the Middle East are projected to die from NCDs over the next decade.) Third, the Strait of Hormuz itself should be internationalized, not managed through fragile bilateral memorandums between Washington and Tehran that assume the rest of the world has no stake in the outcome. China, Pakistan, and India, in particular, depend on the strait remaining open and exercise tremendous military and economic leverage over Iran. All belong formally in whatever arrangement eventually governs it. Those same three nuclear powers should also be brought into a broader regional nonproliferation framework, one honest enough to finally acknowledge Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal, which has quietly shaped the politics of the Middle East for over half a century. Croesus attacked Persia believing war would make his empire stronger, only to lose everything to Cyrus the Great. Yet Cyrus is remembered as more than a conqueror. Through the policies reflected in the Cyrus Cylinder, he promoted the restoration of displaced peoples and religious institutions, actions that many later generations have viewed as an important antecedent to ideas of religious tolerance and minority protection. His most revealing act, however, occurred after the battlefield fell silent. Rather than executing the defeated Lydian king, Cyrus spared him and, according to Herodotus, welcomed him into his court as a trusted adviser. In doing so, Cyrus transformed a sworn enemy into a valued counselor, demonstrating that durable power could rest as much on magnanimity as on military prowess. Trump would be wise to remember the ancient wisdom captured in Herodotus’ paradox. The mightiest of the mighty turns an enemy into a friend. The post The Lesson Trump Can Take From Herodotus’ Paradox appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The Fight Inside Trump’s State Department Is About Power—Not Expertise The president needs diplomats willing to advance his America First agenda. Photo by STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images At last count, President Donald Trump had named only nine career Foreign Service officers (FSOs) as ambassadors. Six had been confirmed, while three remained waiting for Senate confirmation. That strikingly small number has predictably put the Foreign Service establishment inside the State Department on the warpath. Under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the breakdown was roughly 70 percent career diplomats to 30 percent political appointees. Under Joe Biden, it was about 60–40. Even during the first Trump administration, the split was approximately 55–45. But the second Trump administration is taking a markedly different approach, closely screening each potential career nominee. This has considerably slowed the nomination process, but Trump-friendly State Department insiders say FSO nominees, aligned with administration goals, are in fact being identified. Meanwhile, each embassy without a Senate-confirmed ambassador is being led by an FSO chargé d’affaires.  From the outset, the administration has had two broad foreign-affairs objectives: to integrate national-interest priorities into America’s global engagement and to retool the State Department’s bureaucratic machinery. The fight over the ambassador nominees has to do with both goals. Trump is willing to nominate career ambassadors, but the White House is no longer automatically rubber-stamping and sending the Senate the names produced by the State Department’s traditional internal FSO selection process. Rumors abound inside Foggy Bottom, but the explanation appears straightforward: Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the White House have little confidence in a process too heavily influenced by the Foreign Service old guard. They have no interest in elevating career FSOs who are fundamentally out of step with the administration on foreign assistance, international organizations, visa policy, and other key issues. Many Trump-friendly insiders see the new approach as a necessary step toward breaking the old guard’s grip on Foggy Bottom. It is a strategy for forging a new Foreign Service—one not captured by the globalist and woke values that dominate professional diplomatic services across much of the developed world. The career diplomatic corps in countries like France, Germany, and Britain appear hopelessly lost, but the administration is trying to salvage the U.S. Foreign Service.  In response, the old guard argues that the State Department’s traditional in-house selection process produces ambassadors with invaluable country expertise, extensive international experience, and the judgment to set aside their anti-Trump biases to represent the president faithfully. Tampering with that system, its defenders contend, means passing over seasoned diplomats for less-experienced candidates and replacing professionalism with partisanship. It is a set of clever arguments that contains some elements of truth. But in the current national moment, the principal purpose of these arguments is to block Trump’s international priorities and frustrate badly needed reform of the foreign-affairs bureaucracy. The dispute concerns far more than ambassadorial appointments. It is about who runs foreign policy. The old guard is far too savvy to deny openly that presidents—even Donald Trump—constitutionally direct U.S. foreign policy. Its fallback position is subtler: preserve the State Department’s entrenched and self-interested bureaucracy in the hope that things will return to “normal” after Trump leaves office. The Foreign Service’s country expertise, professionalism, and on-the-ground experience are unquestionably valuable assets. But nothing in the Trump-Rubio approach to find reliable FSO candidates, aligned with administration priorities, gainsays those qualities. It would be foolish for any White House not to consider whether an officer is willing to implement the president’s decisions fully and faithfully. The public record suggests that reluctance to do so is widespread among senior FSOs, making many of them poor candidates to serve as Trump’s personal representatives in foreign capitals. Foreign Service old-guard leaders condemn Trump’s approach as “partisan.” But their definition of partisanship is notably fuzzy. It has nothing to do with the Hatch Act, which forbids political electioneering, but largely rests on the assertion that a president has no right to evaluate whether FSOs, based on their past professional performance, are a good fit for senior positions. What triggers the old guard’s charge of “partisanship” is actually a fight about policy; the tactic is a sly attack on the president’s constitutional authority to name the officials who exercise his executive power. In this debate, the old guard refuses to acknowledge an obvious fact of human nature: Veteran diplomats, some with decades of experience, inevitably develop deeply ingrained convictions about America’s core foreign-policy priorities and its mission in the world. Expecting officers who privately (or sometimes publicly) consider Trump fundamentally unfit for office to become his most effective advocates would reveal remarkably poor judgment on the part of the White House. That happened in Trump’s first term. For example, some 1,000 officers formally dissented from the president’s 2017 executive order pausing certain visa processing. Those dissenting officers placed themselves on the State Department’s internal record as opposing one of Trump’s signature campaign policies. In the same manner, large numbers of FSOs have also condemned administration policies on other initiatives, such as the abolition of USAID. Nevertheless, Rubio has permitted some Trump-hostile officers to remain in key positions because they have demonstrated they can perform their duties. But based partly on the resistance Trump encountered during his first administration, the president has concluded that he has a right to expect something better from those chosen to serve as his representatives abroad. To be sure, a significant minority of FSOs welcome the Trump-Rubio initiatives and consider the old guard’s opposition to the administration excessive. That is particularly true when the old guard compares the administration’s State Department reforms to the specter of Joseph McCarthy. In a recent article, former ambassador Bill Burns, a veteran FSO and ardent defender of Foggy Bottom’s ancien régime, made his case: “Things are quite bad,” says Bill Burns, who served in the U.S. foreign service for 32 years including as ambassador to Russia and deputy secretary of state before heading the CIA under President Joe Biden. Burns argues that Trump’s policies are doing even more damage to the department than the Joseph McCarthy era in the 1950s, when the then senator’s Red Scare campaign led to a loss of expertise on China. “That was on one relatively specific set of issues, and it cost the United States in significant ways for the next 15 years or so until the Nixon-Kissinger breakthrough with China,” he says. “But this cuts across the board. It’s not just about one region or one set of expertise.” Invoking McCarthyism, even indirectly, is usually a cheap shot. It certainly is here. The implication of Burns’s argument is that inexperienced White House political appointees, if they must serve as senior presidential envoys, should defer to the experts. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff may be easy targets for Burns and his ilk, but their fury over Trump blinds them to contrary historical examples that should give them context. Kushner and Witkoff, for instance, have more international experience than Woodrow Wilson’s Colonel Edward House, who exerted enormous influence over the 1919 Versailles settlement despite holding no elected office, possessing no formal diplomatic rank, and never having served in the professional diplomatic corps. Harry Hopkins had never held a post in the State Department when Franklin Roosevelt dispatched him to London in 1941 as the president’s principal envoy to Winston Churchill and later Joseph Stalin. House and Hopkins both left extensive diplomatic records. Both often disregarded expert advice. The State Department survived. What really bothers Burns and the old guard is not that State Department experts are being ignored. That happens in every administration. In fact, Burns no doubt remembers well when the George W. Bush administration ignored his own advice from Moscow on the red-line dangers of pulling Ukraine too far into the West’s orbit. No, what bothers them is that the Trump administration is attempting to make lasting changes inside the State Department’s bureaucratic machinery. Rubio and his leadership team understand that serving as an ambassador is a crucial credential for FSOs seeking promotion, career advancement, and greater responsibility. Change the composition of the senior ranks, by elevating conservative FSOs focused on America’s national interests, and over time you can remake the institution itself. It is a smart strategy. Recruiting a new generation of junior FSOs while minting a different cohort of senior officers offers a path toward forging a new mindset, culture, and leadership cadre within America’s diplomatic corps. Such an approach can save the Foreign Service by bringing it into step with the nation it represents abroad. The issue is not “partisanship” but values. For decades, the State Department’s machinery has reflexively favored the globalist or internationalist FSO over the America-First officer. Now an administration is trying to rebalance the institution. That this is even a fight demonstrates the power of the foreign-affairs bureaucracy. Its leading representatives—whose role in the constitutional order is simply to carry out the work of the national executive, nothing more—are so entrenched, media-connected, and politically sophisticated that they can mount a domestic ideological campaign against a sitting president and his secretary of state. The old guard understands that accepting Trump’s approach would mean surrendering much of its power to shape foreign policy. That is why its members defended the corrupt and dysfunctional USAID dinosaur to the end—and continue to do so. They echo the dire pronouncements of international institutions and multilateral organizations resisting reforms that would end Washington’s subsidization of their budgets and drastically curtail their prerogatives. This is a fight about Washington power, not diplomatic expertise. As one Trump official observed rhetorically: “What is the State Department’s function? It likes to think it’s the foreign policy center. That’s not true. Its job is to represent the president’s foreign policy, not to make it.” That is precisely the issue. The post The Fight Inside Trump’s State Department Is About Power—Not Expertise appeared first on The American Conservative.