The president sent an unhinged letter to the Speaker of the House today to complain about his impending impeachment. The letter is an embarrassing display of insecurity, whining, and ignorance, and it serves only to underscore how unfit for the presidency Trump has always been. He stands accused of abuse of power, so like a petulant child he accuses everyone else of abusing their power.

The president condemns the House for impeaching him, which is to be expected, but his complaints are so excessive and ridiculous that it is fair to say that the president doth protest too much. He faults the House for its “unprecedented” action when the House has twice before impeached presidents and was very close to doing so on a third occasion before this. He whines that the House’s constitutional remedy for presidential wrongdoing is “unconstitutional.” When Trump declares something to be “unconstitutional,” he just means that it is something he doesn’t like. Impeachment is built into the Constitution, and it is there for occasions just such as these. His letter displays the same contempt for Congress that led him to refuse to cooperate with the House’s investigation.

Trump has never really been held accountable for any of his sketchy, self-serving dealing for his entire life. This may be the first time that he has actually had to answer for what he has done. He is naturally unused to facing consequences for his actions, and so his instinct has been to lash out wildly. The president refuses to take any responsibility, he plays the victim, and moans endlessly about how unfair it is that another branch of government is trying to put his abuse of power in check. The letter is a six-page distillation of the last three years of his Twitter feed in all of its raving lunacy. Trump has put his thoughts “on a permanent and indelible record,” and that record condemns him as a fraud and an oathbreaker.

The letter is a pitiful outburst from a disgraced president, and the president’s sheer shamelessness is proof that he will continue abusing the powers of his office for as long as he has them. Trump does not understand or respect the law, and he has shown again and again that he refuses to be bound by it. If honest members of the House still had any doubts about the necessity of impeachment, this deranged letter should put them to rest.

Spencer Ackerman reviews Joe Biden’s abysmal track record on Iraq. He concludes:

When asked about overthrowing Middle Eastern dictators, he said, “I don’t think we should use force unless it meets certain basic criteria. Is it in the national security interest of the United States, are our interests directly threatened, number one, or our allies? Number two, can we use it efficaciously, will it work? And number three, can it be sustained?”

For someone who has been for decades a pillar of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, Biden’s criteria are notably generic. They are flexible enough that every presidency, including Trump’s, portrays itself as meeting them. It wasn’t so long ago that Biden thought the Iraq war met his tests. It yielded an America far less able to shape the world it wants but unrepentant in its right to do so.

One of Biden’s most important weaknesses on foreign policy is that he has repeatedly gone along with whatever the prevailing consensus at the time happened to be. When it was considered the politically safe and conventional thing to support invasion and regime change in Iraq, that is what Biden did. Biden has acquired a reputation for poor foreign policy judgment in no small part because he has followed the consensus view of the foreign policy establishment more often than not. The former vice president leans on his decades of experience in government and specifically on his foreign policy experience to support his presidential bid, but this is a very shaky foundation on which to build a candidacy.

It was notable that when Biden delivered his first big foreign policy speech as a candidate that he passed over the Iraq war in silence. There isn’t much that Biden can say about the war or his record on Iraq that would reflect very well on him, and so he chooses to ignore it, but he won’t be able to get away with that indefinitely. His vote to authorize the Iraq war remains a liability for him, and he doesn’t know how to overcome it because he still clings to talking points from the mid-2000s that his vote to authorize the war wasn’t actually a vote for war. As incredible as it seems, the mindless Democratic hawkish line of “Bush fooled me” is still the only defense that Biden and his allies can come up with after all these years. What does it say about a presidential candidate that his main defense for one of the worst votes he ever cast is that he was duped by George W. Bush? Nothing good.

Ackerman revisits the arguments that Biden used in the early years of the war, and we can see the dangerous hubris that informed Biden’s support for the war:

Convenient as it is to blame Bush—who, to be clear, bears primary and eternal responsibility for the disaster—Biden embraced the Iraq war for what he portrayed as the result of his foreign policy principles and persisted, most often in error, for the same reasons.

Biden contextualized the war within an assertion that America has the right to enforce its standards of behavior in the name of the international community, even when the international community rejects American intervention.

In practice, this amounts to running roughshod over international law while pretending to be its defender. Assuming that Biden still holds the same assumptions about U.S. power and the U.S. role in the world, his foreign policy judgment can’t be trusted. Biden has built his campaign on nostalgia for the Obama years, but a Biden presidency would be a throwback to an even earlier era of discredited Democratic hawkishness.

This report on the faltering opposition in Venezuela includes a disturbing detail about possible escalation from the Trump administration:

But the Trump administration is weighing new steps — short of boots on the ground — that could further strain harmony. The options, according to two people familiar with U.S. deliberations, include a possible naval blockade of Venezuelan oil destined for Cuba, a key source of revenue for Maduro’s heavily sanctioned government.

Imposing a blockade on Venezuela would be illegal and an act of war. The president obviously has no authorization from Congress to do anything of the kind, but in light of Congress’ abject failure to rein in the president’s other illegal wars that probably won’t stop it from happening. It would be a completely unwarranted and reckless escalation of U.S. interference in Venezuela’s political crisis, and to make matters worse it would come at a time when Guaido and his allies are weaker than ever. Guaido’s support is dwindling, and as 2019 draws to a close he is no closer to taking power than he was almost eleven months ago:

As the year closes out, it has become clear Guaidó did not so much promise as over-promise.

Guaidó and his American allies have underestimated Maduro. The armed forces, whose leaders enjoy lucrative business deals under the current arrangements, still back the 57-year-old socialist.

Instead of considering options for deepening U.S. involvement in the crisis, the failure of the regime change policy should make the U.S. rethink its entire approach. As usual, there is no rethinking going on in the Trump administration:

“Tougher options are being weighed, and some of them will be put into effect,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “There are no debates about the policy — backing Guaidó and pressing for a transition to democracy — but there are discussions about how to make the policy more effective. So steps will be taken, probably after Christmas.”

It does not occur to the administration that the policy itself is fatally flawed, and so they will keep intensifying their efforts without success. For Venezuelans that have to live with the consequences of the U.S. economic war, the failure of U.S. regime change policy is obvious:

Yet some Guiadó supporters blame him for a U.S. policy they believe has failed. U.S. economic sanctions, some argue, are hurting an economy already on life support.

The Trump administration’s economic wars achieve nothing except to deepen the misery and hardship of ordinary people in the targeted countries. The administration’s abusive policies of collective punishment ought to be a scandal, but in Washington their ill effects are barely noticed. Sanctions aren’t driving Maduro from power, and it was never likely that they would, but they are having the predictable effect of making life harder for the civilian population. Venezuela is a clear example of how sanctions don’t work and only serve to make things worse.

The Washington Post editorial board interviewed Pete Buttigieg recently, and his foreign policy answers left a lot to be desired. When he was asked about Iran and the JCPOA, he said this:

As for Iran, it’s unlikely that we could simply resurrect and rejoin the JCPOA in its prior form. But leaving it was a mistake, and agreements to contain Iranian nuclear ambitions remain a good idea. The picture is different. The economic pressures are different. The political scenario is different. And crucially, our relationship with some of the allies that account for — I believe the “J” stands for “Joint” — the allies that account for the coalition that was securing this has obviously changed.

But I also think there remains an opportunity, especially given the economic, if not isolation, certainly vulnerability of the Iranian regime, to achieve something that would help us once again slow or stop the move toward nuclear weapons there.

Buttigieg’s answer is vague and his remarks at the end about “the move toward nuclear weapons” suggest that he accepts a very hawkish framing of this issue without having given it much thought. He begins by saying that it is unlikely that the U.S. could “simply” rejoin the JCPOA as it was. Why is that unlikely? If the next administration is determined to reenter the agreement and lifts the sanctions imposed by Trump, it is not hard to imagine how the agreement might still be restored. Buttigieg doesn’t want to commit to doing this, and so he gestures in the direction of some future agreement that might be made. He is trying to pass off a very underdeveloped position as if it is clever and nuanced, which is par for the course for his presidential campaign.

When Buttigieg turns to talking about the “opportunity” to exploit Iranian economic vulnerability, that is where his answer goes from weak to awful. Trump’s economic war on Iran has strengthened hard-liners politically inside Iran, and it has undermined supporters of engagement with the U.S. so much that a future administration will be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to negotiate as long as the economic war continues. Golnar Motevalli and Arsalan Shahla report:

“By undermining Rouhani’s most important achievement, Trump gravely damaged his presidency and popularity,” said Ali Vaez, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. “What has been fatally damaged in the process is not just pro-engagement Iranian politicians, but the whole concept of engagement with the West.”

If a future administration tries to use more economic coercion after years of Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign, they will find Iran to be just as intransigent as they are now. The damage to supporters of engagement inside Iran has been done and it won’t be easily repaired, but a surefire way to give hard-liners an additional boost is to continue coercive measures aimed at extracting more concessions.

Buttigieg’s line about “the move toward nuclear weapons” shows that he doesn’t understand that the Iranian government isn’t moving toward these weapons and hasn’t been doing that for the last 16 years. He talks about their “nuclear ambitions” without acknowledging that those ambitions don’t include developing and building nuclear weapons. In that respect, he comes off sounding more like a young John Bolton than a Democratic presidential candidate.

The candidate’s understanding of the U.S. role in the world and U.S. interests also warrants a few comments:

The fact that American prestige has been reduced to an SNL mockery of the guy in the lunchroom nobody wants to talk to shows you what’s at stake and something that goes beyond just what’s interesting to foreign policy buffs, but the more basic question of whether America can continue to be regarded as a credible, reliable force for good in the world, something on which our own security depends, because our advantage has always been that our interests have aligned with universal interests or I should say, universal values [bold mine-DL], as well as more specific concerns.

The claim that U.S. interests have always “aligned” with “universal values” is nonsense, and the worrisome part here is that Buttigieg may actually believe it. It is an assumption that has warped the conduct of our foreign policy for a very long time, and it is usually invoked as a pretext to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs and to trample on international law. Buttigieg’s statement suggests that he has a dangerously expansive definition of U.S. interests that is divorced from reality.

Buttigieg’s foreign policy speech earlier in the year was underwhelming, and in the last six months he has become a much more conventional and hawkish candidate. That will undoubtedly satisfy “centrist” hawks and members of the “Blob,” but it doesn’t offer Democratic voters much of an alternative.

One of the most revealing and absurd responses to rejections of forever war is the ridiculous dodge that the U.S. isn’t really at war when it uses force and kills people in multiple foreign countries:

Just like @POTUS, who put a limited op of NE #Syria under heading of “endless war,” this op-ed has “drone strikes & Special Ops raids” in indictment of US-at-war. In fact, those actions are antidote to war. Their misguided critique is insult to real war. https://t.co/DCLS9IDKSw

— Robert Satloff (@robsatloff) December 15, 2019

War has become so normalized over the last twenty years that the constant use of military force gets discounted as something other than “real war.” We have seen this war denialism on display several times in the last year. As more presidential candidates and analysts have started rejecting endless war, the war’s defenders have often chosen to pretend that the U.S. isn’t at war at all. The distinction between “real war” and the constant U.S. involvement in hostilities overseas is a phony one. The war is very real to the civilian bystanders who die in U.S. airstrikes, and it is very real to the soldiers and Marines still getting shot at and blown up in Afghanistan. This is not an “antidote to war,” but rather the routinization of warfare.

The routinization and normalization of endless, unauthorized war is one of the most harmful legacies of the Obama administration. I made this point back in the spring of 2016:

Because Obama is relatively less aggressive and reckless than his hawkish opponents (a very low bar to clear), he is frequently given a pass on these issues, and we are treated to misleading stories about his supposed “realism” and “restraint.” Insofar as he has been a president who normalized and routinized open-ended and unnecessary foreign wars, he has shown that neither of those terms should be used to describe his foreign policy. Even though I know all too well that the president that follows him will be even worse, the next president will have a freer hand to conduct a more aggressive and dangerous foreign policy in part because of illegal wars Obama has waged during his time in office.

The attempt to define war so that it never includes what the U.S. military happens to be doing when it uses force abroad has been going on for quite a while. When the Obama administration wanted political and legal cover for the illegal Libyan war in 2011, they came up with a preposterous claim that U.S. forces weren’t engaged in hostilities because there was no real risk to them from the Libyan government’s forces. According to Harold Koh, who was the one responsible for promoting this nonsense, U.S. forces weren’t engaged in hostilities even when they were carrying out a sustained bombing campaign for months. That lie has served as a basis for redefining what counts as involvement in hostilities so that the president and the Pentagon can pretend that the U.S. military isn’t engaged in hostilities even when it clearly is. When the only thing that gets counted as a “real war” is a major deployment of hundreds of thousands of troops, that allows for a lot of unaccountable warmaking that has been conveniently reinvented as something else.

Quincy Institute president and TAC contributor Andrew Bacevich spoke on the None of the Above podcast last week about U.S foreign policy. The entire conversation is worth listening to, but there is one quote from Bacevich near the end that sums up what the Quincy Institute is for and why an institution dedicated to foreign policy restraint is so important.

Bacevich said this:

Bacevich: "We're against war, because we think war is evil. There are circumstances when war is necessary, but by and large war is evil and therefore it ought to be a primary goal of U.S. foreign policy to avoid war and promote peace." https://t.co/nhpGQCFBFi@QuincyInst

— Daniel Larison (@DanielLarison) December 16, 2019

This statement underscores the point that Wertheim and Moyn were making in their article over the weekend in their rejection of forever war: war has become normalized and peace has been turned into the exception when it should be the other way around. Baecvich’s emphasis on the evil of war here is important because there is usually great reluctance in the U.S. to acknowledge that war is a great evil. Perversely, the moralizing tendency in our foreign policy debates encourages people to endorse wars as vehicles for doing good, and that in turn encourages political leaders and policymakers to tout military options as desirable and even laudable things. When we allow ourselves to forget that war is evil, we do not weigh the consequences of war with sufficient seriousness and gravity, and we treat the decision to unleash death and destruction on other people as just another “option” that is far too easily selected.

One of the most pernicious aspects of our foreign policy debate is the tendency to conflate support for military options with morality. Advocates for war frequently wrap up their appeals in the rhetoric of “values” and seek to cast skeptics of military action as being either amoral or in league with villains. In truth, the burden of proof rests with the advocates of using force, and they are the ones that should be expected to clear a very high bar to justify the destructive course of action they favor. Today there is a tremendous bias in favor of “action,” and that action is more often than not military action. Advocates for restraint need to make Americans understand that war is both a moral and a policy failure, and we need to explain how our current foreign policy makes frequent unnecessary wars much more likely. War is evil and it is very rarely necessary, and the only time when the U.S. should be at war is when it has no other choice. A government that chooses to wage war when it doesn’t have to commits a terrible injustice, and we should strive to keep our government from doing that. Our goal should be to make Americans understand that wars of choice are not only undesirable but also profoundly wrong.

The Trump administration’s North Korea envoy and Deputy Secretary of State Steve Biegun is in Seoul this week, and he has appealed to the North Korean side to “get this done”:

"We are here, and you know how to reach us," US envoy Steve Biegun tells North Korea after arriving in Seoul. pic.twitter.com/1yZ4i5cvmP

— William Gallo (@GalloVOA) December 16, 2019

Biegun’s statement seems well-intentioned as far as it goes, but I fear that it shows how large the gap between the U.S. and North Korea remains. Despite ample evidence that North Korea and the U.S. do not agree about the goal of these negotiations, he maintains that Trump and Kim are committed to the same goal. He says that he has listened to North Korean statements, but it is clear that he and other members of the administration have not really understood them. The North Koreans’ statements have been “so hostile and negative” because the U.S. has so far offered them nothing significant and has shown no sign of understanding North Korea’s minimum requirements. The fact that Biegun finds these statements “unnecessary” doesn’t bode well for a constructive U.S. response. When the two sides don’t agree on what they are trying to achieve, it is pointless to say that they should “get this done.” More than a year and a half after the Singapore summit, there is still no consensus between the two governments on what “this” is, much less how they are supposed to bring “this” about. The North Koreans do know how to reach Biegun, but why are they going to bother if they assume he is just going to repeat the same demands all over again?

Biegun was quoted as saying this:

We have offered any number of creative ways to proceed with feasible steps and flexibility in our negotiations to reach balanced agreements that meet the objectives of both sides.

Perhaps Biegun believes that, but it seems obvious that the North Koreans don’t see much flexibility and whatever Biegun has offered them to date does not meet their objectives.

When our government makes impossible demands of another state, it is useless to scold them for their unpleasant rhetoric and lack of cooperation. The hostile rhetoric and lack of cooperation are products of the unreasonable demands. When you are effectively demanding unilateral surrender, you don’t get to complain that the other side refuses to submit. If the administration were willing to back off from its maximalist position and show real flexibility on sanctions, for example, they would probably find the other side to be open to offering modest concessions of their own. It is at least worth testing that by making North Korea a serious offer of sanctions relief and seeing what the U.S. and our allies can get in return. Unfortunately, the Trump administration remains a prisoner of its own dishonest portrayal of previous negotiations and remains wedded to a fantasy of disarmament that is derailing a realistic diplomatic compromise.

The Trump administration wasted the entire year, and it has refused to take North Korea’s end-of-year deadline seriously. Now the clock is about to run out. It didn’t have to work out this way, but between the foolish photo-op summits that accomplished nothing and the hard-line demands that the administration keeps making there was never much of a chance for constructive diplomacy. There has not been a serious effort at diplomatic engagement. In its place, there has been a show put on to create the illusion of engagement while the administration did none of the necessary work and took none of the risks required to make meaningful progress. A new crisis is coming, and Trump has no one but himself to blame for it.

The infinity war. Stephen Wertheim and Samuel Moyn explain how the “United States has slowly slid away from any plausible claim of standing for peace in the world.”

Don’t mistake the exiled pro-Trump opposition with the Green movement. Maysam Behravesh reports on the significant differences between the “fake opposition” focused on regime change and the real opposition inside Iran.

“Maximum pressure” thwarted the effort to contain the IRGC. Loosineh Markarian shows how reneging on the JCPOA undermined Rouhani and strengthened the IRGC.

Stephen Wertheim and Samuel Moyn dig a bit deeper into why the U.S. remains at war for decades on end:

It is clearer than ever that the problem of American military intervention goes well beyond the proclivities of the current president, or the previous one, or the next. The United States has slowly slid away from any plausible claim of standing for peace in the world. The ideal of peace was one that America long promoted, enshrining it in law and institutions, and the end of the Cold War offered an unparalleled opportunity to advance peace. But U.S. leaders from both parties chose another path. War — from drone strikes and Special Operations raids to protracted occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan — has come to seem inevitable and eternal, in practice and even in aspiration.

The normalization of war and the normalization of empire have gone hand in hand. Presidents don’t seek Congressional or public approval before they launch new wars now, but simply order them to begin on the assumption that no one will be able to stop them. Our government routinely violates the sovereignty of other states and presumes to have the right to carry out attacks wherever it likes. Supporters of the forever war explicitly model it on colonial occupations and frontier conquests and frequently hold the same contemptuous view of the local inhabitants. The U.S. inflicts death and destruction on a regular basis somewhere on the far side of the world, and we justify this by saying that it ostensibly has something to do with protecting ourselves from attack, but as the war approaches the start of its third decade the pretense that we are defending ourselves has worn very thin indeed.

One way that our political leaders have ensured that the U.S. remains constantly at war somewhere is by framing the conflict as abstractly as possible. The “global war on terror” or “long war” has been defined from the outset as something that cannot be concluded because the thing that it is supposedly being fought against cannot be eliminated. In fact, the more that the U.S. uses force to wage our “war on terror,” the more terrorist groups there are that spring up in direct response to it. Any war that has been defined so broadly without achievable objectives is bound to keep consuming lives and money indefinitely until we recognize that the original definition of the conflict was fatally flawed.

Kennan warned against the effects of what he called “moralistic-legalistic” thinking on the conduct of foreign policy, and that kind of thinking has done terrible damage in the last twenty years. The moralism Kennan referred to was the self-righteous tendency to identify ourselves as vanquishers of evil. A passage from Righteous Realists that I have quoted before is relevant here:

What he has opposed is the misuse of morality as a concept and a principle. He has seen to many crusades and causes and too many self-righteous politicians to be taken in by utopian rhetoric. Moralism, Kennan has argued, has too often been used merely to mobilize the public; it has obfuscated more than it has clarified.

War becomes normalized when it is taken for granted that the U.S. is always acting morally even when it engages in aggression and tramples on international law. Instead of seeing resorting to force as the rare exception, it becomes the default response. Peace becomes almost unthinkable because we have become so accustomed to living without it. We haven’t lived in peacetime in more than 18 years, and there are now generations of Americans that cannot remember a time when the U.S. did not have troops fighting in a number of foreign countries. If Americans no longer aspire to peace, it is partly because we have chosen to define the war of the last two decades in such a way that we can no longer define what an America at peace would look like.

Wertheim and Moyn offer an alternative:

The United States would find partners far and wide, in nations great and small, if it put peace first. It could make clear that while spreading democracy or human rights remains worthwhile, values cannot come at the point of a gun or serve as a pretext for war — and that international peace is, in fact, a condition for human flourishing. Every time Washington searches for a monster to destroy, it shows the world’s despots how to abuse the rules and hands demagogues a phantom to inflate. The alternative is not “isolationism” but closer to the opposite: peaceful, lawful international cooperation against the major threats to humanity, including climate change, pandemic disease and widespread deprivation. Those are the enemies worth fighting, and bombs and bullets will not defeat them.

Today the U.S. has a foreign policy that is so excessively militarized and confrontational that it makes new wars more likely and makes it much harder to bring current wars to an end. We can choose a different foreign policy that reflects a commitment to seeking and preserving peace, and that will require upholding the rules of our own constitutional system and learning how to adhere to the constraints of international law. We should follow the advice that Washington gave us in his Farewell Address when he encouraged his fellow citizens to “cultivate peace and harmony with all.”