Reihan follows up on his column and explains what he was trying to do:

My column was uncharacteristically intemperate, and I fear my argument has been misunderstood. Rather than single out the Obama administration for blame, I was speaking to a human tendency to vilify outsiders. I get the impression that BP has been doing an impressively bad job of managing environmental as well as health and safety risks for a long time. But now, when this view is universally shared, I’m suspicious of get-tough tactics that short-circuit a deliberative process. This is all very abstract — more abstract than I’d like to be or than I ought to be.

Now that I have had some more time to think about it and have read his clarifications, I’m actually very sympathetic to what Reihan was trying to do. It is very similar to many of the foreign policy arguments I make on a regular basis, which are likewise contrarian and frequently misunderstood. It seems to me that the BP fund was a poor example to use in making what I see to be a very important point, which is that outrage is no substitute for good judgment and critical thinking and that the impulse to score quick, emotionally satisfying victories at expense of unsympathetic, relatively weaker parties frequently leads to terrible abuses and errors. That is something that should be kept in mind in every debate. It would certainly be very valuable when thinking about international relations and assessing the existence and significance of perceived threats.

There is also a need for arguments that challenge what everyone readily assumes to be true, and there should be much more caution against automatically agreeing with what “everyone knows.” As we have seen many times in the past, consensus views often enjoy broad support not because they are true or persuasive but because they are comforting and convenient. For example, there seems to be a broad consensus in the U.S. that Turkey has become a destabilizing or dangerous actor in the Near East, which seems entirely unreasonable and unfounded to me, and we are hearing a lot of wild talk about the revival of the Ottoman Empire that is just as crazy as all of the “neo-Soviet” alarmism of the last few years was. In the past, I have usually been more critical of the Turkish government than most, and I am hardly unaware of the flaws and abuses of the current government, but like Reihan in this discussion I have reacted sharply against the suddenly unanimous (and painfully incorrect) certainty that Turkey has been the villain responsible for wrecking relations with Israel and “abandoning” the West. So I definitely don’t want to discourage skepticism and criticism of consensus views that rely on the vilification of outsiders and “others.” Reihan’s argument does not hold up that well in this case, but his instinct to challenge the prevailing view and not jump on the bandwagon remains a sound one.