First, let’s acknowledge the obvious: just about everyone thinks the government needs to be spending right now. An economy frozen in place is a massive challenge that requires correspondingly massive mitigation measures. During the 2008 economic crisis, the Bush administration swallowed its free-market beliefs and bailed out the big banks, lest the entire financial sector be annihilated. Likewise does the Trump administration now authorize stimulus to households and small businesses. It’s a matter of survival, not ideology or economics.

Still, milestones matter, and we have just hit a grim one. From the Washington Examiner:

On Wednesday, the national debt soared above $25 trillion as Congress continues to approve massive spending projects to alleviate consequences resulting from the coronavirus pandemic.

Less than one month ago, the debt topped over $24 trillion, and on Nov. 1, 2019, that number reached $23 trillion. Over the course of President Trump’s tenure, the national debt has increased more than $5 trillion.

In response has arisen a unified cry: now is not the time to worry about the national debt! And that’s largely true. The problem is that it’s never the time to worry about the national debt. The first three years of Donald Trump’s administration saw an economic boom, yet Congress spent them cutting taxes and bloating the military. Right-wingers refused to countenance even a single dollar plucked from the Pentagon. Left-wingers screamed about “austerity” every time a federal employee used a coupon. Everyone seemed eager to move on from the dreary budget battles of the early 2010s, which had pitted Tea Partiers against President Obama to very little effect.

Those same voices are now assuring us that we can grow our way out of the current debt morass. We did it after World War II, they say, so why shouldn’t we do after the coronavirus? But there’s no guarantee we’ll see the same kind of economic recovery and baby boom that we did then; indeed, many projections point to a prolonged recession, which will dictate even more spending and less revenue. More to the point, we didn’t just pump up GDP following the Second World War. Under Dwight Eisenhower, we slashed the budget, with most of the blade falling on the military-industrial complex. That kind of fiscal rectitude is unimaginable today.

The good news is that we are likely a long way off from any kind of reckoning. Inflation is scant and the 10-year Treasury yield is at an all-time low. The bad news is that, as was supposed to be the Great Recession’s greatest lesson, if it seems too good to be true, then it is. We cannot get away with magical consequence-free borrowing forever. As Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, put it to CNN, “The breaking point is like an invisible dog fence. You don’t know where it is, but if you actually hit it, it’ll be a huge problem.”

When that day comes, all those eloquent and deeply considered expostulations of “But Krugman!!!!” will ring hollow. (Incidentally, even Paul Krugman was fretting about budget deficits at the start of the Trump administration.) The root of the problem, as is so often the case, is cultural. In Washington, leadership has been supplanted by electoral advantage, prudence by decadence, real debate by mindless tag lines. Given all this, why should we believe the government will ever bring its books to order?

It looks like AIPAC, the most influential pro-Israel organization in the U.S., has gotten to Rep Ilhan Omar.

The Muslim-American congresswoman who had been targeted by the lobbying behemoth a year ago for her “anti-Semitic” comments about “dual loyalty” in regards to members of Congress supporting a ban on American’s boycotting Israel businesses (BDS), has now signed onto a typically loaded AIPAC letter calling for the extension of a UN arms embargo against Iran.

The move has her supporters and political observers scratching their heads. The wider sanctions regime against Tehran, by all reports, was crushing the Iranian people long before the COVID virus began spreading through the country. Oil revenues, imports of basic necessities, all have been brought to a grinding halt thanks to the Trump Administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign. Now Iranians are struggling for life-saving equipment and medicines in the wake of a pandemic. 

In a tweet on April 22 she seemed to be of the mind that sanctions are a dead end: 

Sanctions haven’t worked in North Korea.
Sanctions haven’t worked in Iran.
Sanctions haven’t worked in Cuba.

It’s time Congress rethinks the humanitarian, human rights, and geographical impacts of our sanctions. pic.twitter.com/fRPnmvF7Gi

— Rep. Ilhan Omar (@Ilhan) April 22, 2020

Omar’s office released a statement after the AIPAC letter story broke, saying  the congresswoman still opposes wider economic sanctions, but “has consistently, for a long time, supported arms embargoes against human rights abusers.” It is not that she “supports [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo’s tactics or that her position on sanctions has changed, or that she is not in support of the [nuclear deal]. It was just a narrow ask that we couldn’t find anything wrong with.”

So what is this “narrow ask”? AIPAC, which has spent millions of dollars opposing the JCPOA, otherwise known as the “Iran nuclear deal,” wants to make sure a United Nations weapons embargo on Iran does not sunset as proscribed in the agreement, this fall. That will mean whatever is remaining of the deal since the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from it in 2018 will fall apart. That will likely trigger an escalation in the Iranians’ uranium enrichment, which was capped in the deal, and likewise lock all economic sanctions in, this time with the wider support of the other P5+1 countries that originally signed onto it (China, Russia, Germany, the European Union, the UK, and France). 

This is what AIPAC wants. It sent out this letter and got 390 members of Congress to sign it, including Omar. The fact AIPAC was able to get these signatures is a testament to its influence and the hurt that it can bring down on politicians when comes to re-election. Like Omar. A tough Democratic primary candidate has emerged in Antone Melton-Meaux, an African-American attorney and civil rights mediator who said in an April op-edin the Minnesota Star-Tribune that Omar was disconnected from her district, has gotten no legislation passed for Minnesota, and  cut a divisive figure on Capitol Hill. Furthermore, Melton-Meaux said:

Omar has repeatedly made divisive statements that have been hurtful to members of our Jewish community. She creates distraction and drama, not results. That doesn’t work for us.

Rep. Omar believes that sanctions are economic warfare and is a vocal advocate for abolishing them, particularly for Iran. Yet she supports sanctions on Israel. She has repeatedly refused to explain this inconsistency. That doesn’t work for us.

Melton-Meaux is one of three primary challengers, but he has already raised nearly $500,000, more than any of them. He seems to have touched a nerve and is not afraid to use Omar’s reported issues with the pro-Israel crowd to his political advantage. According to a glowing profile in the Jewish Insider, Melton-Meaux already “has the endorsement of “pro-Israel America.” More:

In 2012, during a Jewish Community Relations Council meeting in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Melton-Meaux delivered a Dvar Torah, expounding on the connections between Leviticus 19 and Matthew 26, which calls for all people to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” He added: “If there was ever a time when Jews, Christians, and all people of faith need to be reminded that we share a common bond, the time is now.”

And:

Melton-Meaux alleges that his opponent, who has risen to prominence as a member of “The Squad,” has not worked to find common ground with others, including many of her Jewish constituents.

“Omar has made statements that have been reckless and harmful to the Jewish community,” Melton-Meaux told Jewish Insider. “I have spent time with the Jewish community and have met with Jewish leaders, and there’s a deep sense of betrayal by her actions and displeasure with the way that she has handled herself in the process with regard to the residents in this district.” 

And according to Gateway Pundit, Omar’s top Republican opponent, Lacy Johnson, got a huge boost from donors this week after an endorsement from President Trump.

Omar has been accused of anti-Semitic comments, but a closer look of course reveals a muddier picture. In an all-consuming debate last year on whether banning U.S. companies and citizens from boycotting Israeli businesses for its treatment of Palestinians was an infringement of Constitutional rights, the tweets and public attacks on both sides were flying. Omar made comments about AIPAC “funding” Republican support for Israel and decried its influence operations (which are notorious by the way on Capitol Hill, described by one former Hill staffer and AIPAC as a system of “rewards and retribution”). After this, Omar  was accused by other members of Congress and by AIPAC of promulgating the trope that some Jewish-Americans have “dual loyalty,” and her words were condemned as anti-Semitic. 

She ended up apologizing for a February 2019 tweet saying that support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins.”

“Anti-Semitism is real and I am grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes,” Omar said in a statement released on Twitter, after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the entire Democratic leadership publicly scolded her for engaging in “deeply offensive” anti-Semitic tropes.

“My intention is never to offend my constituents or Jewish Americans as a whole,” Ms. Omar wrote, adding, “I unequivocally apologize.”

But she did not take back her comments about AIPAC. 

Omar’s recent signature on a letter that would have garnered hundreds of her colleagues’ support and made a splash with or without her, is a signal to AIPAC that she knows her seat is at risk, and that she would rather neutralize the feud with the pro-Israel powerhouse than send it flocking to the aid of her opponents. AIPAC spends millions each year lobbying Congress on behalf of its agenda, but does not give directly to candidates. However, its members do, and it works with other pro-Israel groups and individuals who give tons of money each election cycle (more than $12.4 million so far in 2020, compared to $15.5 million in all of 2016). Omar’s comments about “the Benjamins” could come back to bite her, and it will be, all about the Benjamins. That’s how campaigns rise and fall.

So why should we care? Omar says it’s a “narrow ask” to support extending the arms embargo, but it’s clear the Trump Administration is using this embargo to further kill the deal. If the deal is crushed, the hardliners in Iran will blow through uranium enrichment restrictions (in fact they already have, in response to U.S. sanctions). That will ensure that the other embargoes, the ones that affect food, medicine, basic necessities, continue to strangle ordinary Iranians. This is about “maximum pressure” and it’s what AIPAC and the hawks in Congress want. In her own “narrow” way, Omar is supporting their vicious cycle, one that she has already admitted, will not work. 

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is Executive Editor of The American Conservative. Follow her on Twitter @Vlahos_at_TAC

James Howard Kunstler, a longtime journalist and social critic, has joined The American Conservative as a fellow with our New Urbanism initiative.

Kunstler’s 1993 classic book, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, has remained in print for a generation and is widely considered to be part of the canon of urban studies. Kunstler has gone on to publish several more books on urbanist themes, including his most recent title, Living the Long Emergency: Global Crisis, the Failure of the Futurists, and the Early Adapters Who Are Showing Us the Way Forward. He has also written for other leading publications, such as The Atlantic, Slate, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine. Kunstler has been an activist as a charter member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, and one of the most articulate supporters of its principles.

Kunstler not only understands the problems of urban planning, but also often comments on much of the unsustainable architecture that mars the landscape, as well as the fragile state of the American economy. He is a unique voice that is irreplaceable in the public discourse, especially during these turbulent times. TAC‘s Addison Del Mastro explored Kunstler’s background in a 2017 interview that discussed his background and influences that have shaped him.

Some of Kunstler’s writing featured at TAC has included:

• Where Will You Live In The Post Covid-19 Future?
• Why America’s Urban Dreams Went Wrong
• New Urbanist Seaside Paradise Celebrates 25 Years
• Beyond Cynicism: America Fumbles Towards Kafka’s Castle
• The Infinite Suburb Is An Academic Joke

You won’t want to miss Kunstler’s monthly columns, which will appear in our New Urbs section—so bookmark it and follow other related coverage on Twitter at @NewUrbs.

TAC’s New Urbanism initiative is supported by The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.

We are pleased to share that longtime TAC employee, Addison Del Mastro, has been promoted to the position of Assistant Editor & Social Media Manager. In this role, he will direct our social media content and write regular feature stories for the website and print magazine, among other duties.

Over the past year, he has written memorable pieces on how climate change impacts the fishermen of Tangier Island, the history of suburban sprawl in Northern Virginia, and a tribute to the Post Office. We are confident that he will continue to thrive in this new position.

You can follow his work on this site and on Twitter at @ad_mastro.

It’s always fun to see the Washington foreign policy and Nat-Sec establishment get up on its hind legs at their critics. It doesn’t happen often, and when it does it’s usually when someone has touched a raw nerve, penetrating the bubble, if only momentarily. One time that comes to mind is when TAC’s Andrew Bacevich—he’s really good at this—called out elite bubble denizens Peter Feaver and Hal Brands for what he said was “close to being a McCarthyite smear” against realist thinkers in a Commentary piece entitled, “Saving Realism from the So-Called Realists.” 

The two men (Feaver cut his teeth in George W. Bush’s National Security Council during the height of the Iraq War; Brands is an academic with a perch at the neoconservative AEI) implored TAC to publish a response, writing: “The stakes of debates about American grand strategy are high, and so it is entirely proper that these debates be conducted with passion and intensity. But it is equally vital that they be conducted without resort to the sort of baseless ad hominem attacks that impede intellectual discourse rather than encouraging it.”

Hrumph. It is not surprising now that both Feaver and Brands (joined by William Inboden, also in Bush’s wartime NSC), are at it again, this time with a longer treatise in Foreign Affairs, entitled, “In Defense of the Blob.”  The last four years have been rough for the establishment. President Trump, after running on a platform of getting out of endless wars, is a Jacksonian who refuses to hide his contempt for this entrenched policy class and all of their attending courtiers and courtesans, most of whom are leftovers from the Obama, Bush and even Clinton Administrations. Their “accumulated” knowledge means nothing to this president, as he has plowed his own mercurial course in North Korea, Syria, Iran and the Middle East.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Trump’s rip in the Washington Blob’s time-space-continuum has allowed realists and restrainers to quantum leap into the space like no other administration before. Suddenly, conservatives of all stripes are talking TAC’s language. Money is pouring into colleges and think tanks now, all with the goal of pursuing approaches outside the status quo of hyper-militarization and American hegemony. The wars have been largely maligned as failures of the two previous administrations and their “experts.” The Quincy Institute, populated by scholars from both the Right and Left, has risen up to directly challenge the idea of a necessary militarized “liberal world order” to secure peace across the globe. 

“In Defense of the Blob” is filled with so many straw men, lies, and misdirections that the only takeaway is that we must have hit one hell of a nerve this time. The authors’ peculiar attempt to gaslight their critics, suggesting that we are seeing things that aren’t there, is weak. Like: 

Blob theorists view the establishment as a club of like-minded elite insiders who control everything, take care of one another, and brush off challenges to conventional wisdom. In reality, the United States actually has a healthy marketplace of foreign policy ideas. Discussion over American foreign policy is loud, contentious, diverse, and generally pragmatic—and as a result, the nation gets the opportunity to learn from its mistakes, build on its successes, and improve its performance over time.

No, no, and no. As a reporter in this ecosystem for more years than I care to admit, I can say with absolute certainty the reality is the opposite. The major policy think tanks in Washington are rife with three sources of funding: government, private defense companies, and very wealthy neoliberal and neoconservative foundations (think Carnegie on the left, Scaife on the right). The National Security and “Grand Strategy” programs at elite schools are no different. They all have one thing in common: the status quo. As a result, the output is hardly dynamic, it’s little more than dogmatic, conventional thinking about world problems that keep bureaucrats in jobs and always meddling, the military amped up with more hammers and nails to hit, and politicians (and attending administrative class) favorable to either or both of these goals in Washington, preferably in power.

This is a closed club that offers only gradations of diversity just like Democrats and Republicans during the war: No one argued about “liberating” Iraq, only about the tactics. That was why it was so easy for Hillary Clinton’s Nat Sec team in-waiting to create the Center for a New American Security in 2008 and transition to an Obama think tank shop in 2009. Plug and play one for the other, counterinsurgency under Bush? Meh. Under Obama? Let’s do this! They all had a plan for staying in Afghanistan, and they made sure we were, until this day. 

This doesn’t even include the orbit of research centers like RAND and the Center for Naval Analysis, which actually get government funding to churn out reports and white papers, teach officer classes, lead war gaming, and put on conferences. Do you really think they call for less funding, killing programs, eliminating lily pads, or egads, pulling out of entrenched strategic relationships that might not make sense anymore? Never. The same players get the contracts and produce just what the government wants to hear, so they can get more money. If they don’t get contracts they don’t survive. It’s how the swamp works.

As for it being a cabal? This ecosystem—the Blob—is a revolving door of sameness, a multigenerational in-crowd of status-driven groupthink inhabiting a deep state that is both physical and of the mind. It’s a lifestyle, and a class. To get anywhere in it, you not only have to have the right pedigree, but the right way of thinking. Ask anyone who has attempted to break in with the “wrong credentials,” or marched off the reservation in the early years of Iraq only to be flung to the professional margins. Conference panels, sanctioned academic journals, all run by the same crowd. Check the Council on Foreign Relations yearbook, you’ll catch the drift. You can be a neocon, you can be a “humanitarian” interventionist, but a skeptic of American exceptionalism and its role in leading the post-WWII international system? Ghosted.

The worst element of the Feaver/Brands/Inboden protest is not so much their pathetic attempt to suggest that sure, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya “were misconceived and mishandled,” but they were “no worse” than failures in the preceding decades, like the “bloody stalemate in Korea,” or “catastrophic war in Vietnam.” (This completely denies that the same consensus thinking has been leading our global and military policies for the last 75 years, therefore the same people who blundered us into Vietnam were also responsible for backing the contras in Nicaragua, and then blowing up wedding parties in Pakistan three decades later).

No, the worst is the straw man they present when they suggest that “scrapping professionalism for amateurism would be a disaster.” No one has ever suggested that was on offer. If anything, there has been every attempt, by TAC and the aforementioned new movements, to shift new voices—academics, military strategists, politicians, policy wonks and journalists—who represent fresh, outside thinking into the forefront, at the levers of power, to make a difference. People like Andrew Bacevich, Stephen Walt, Doug Macgregor, Chris Preble, Mike Desch, are hardly lightweights, but to the Borg, they are antibodies, therefore amateurs.

But Bacevich, Walt, et. al,  did not keep their mouths shut or try to obfuscate the truth during 18 years of failure in Afghanistan. That was left to the friends and colleagues of our esteemed Feaver, Brands, and Inboden. They cannot deny the Blob’s sins because it’s all in black & white in the Afghanistan Papers. That’s what has really hit a nerve, the raw exposure. Still, they cry, the Blob is “not the problem,” but the “solution.” We think not. And we think they protest too much. 

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is Executive Editor of TAC. Follow her on Twitter @Vlahos_at_TAC

Executive Director and Acting Editor, Johnny Burtka, announced a major addition to the TAC editorial operation this morning. Washington-area writer and author, Helen Andrews, will be joining the team as Senior Editor on May 1^st.

In making the announcement, Burtka said, “With this move, The American Conservative is equipped better than ever before to provide the smartest political and cultural commentary in the right-of-center space. Helen is a longtime friend and alumnus of the publication, having served as an intern at the magazine back in 2009. We couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome her to the team.”

Helen Andrews is the author of a forthcoming book about the Baby Boomers to be published by Sentinel this fall. She has worked at the Washington Examiner and National Review and as a think tank researcher at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, Australia. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies from Yale University. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, First Things, The Claremont Review of Books, Hedgehog Review, and many others.  You can follow her on Twitter at @herandrews.

In her new role, Helen will write regularly for the print and web publication and co-host a new TAC podcast, Right Now, with Arthur Bloom and Ryan Girdusky that’s set to launch in early May.

There was, for many years, a member of the Maine legislature who was an Aroostook nationalist. Henry Joy, a Republican who served as a state representative from 1993 to 2010, wanted Aroostook County, a vast swath of northern Maine larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, to secede and become its own state. Cheekily, Joy suggested that Aroostook retain the name Maine, while the southern bits be called Northern Massachusetts.

Unfortunately, Joy never ran for Congress. But I wish he had, preferably as an independent, and then started a one-man Aroostook secessionist caucus once he was there.

Why not? Parliaments the world over teem with third parties, nationalists, secessionists, greens, libertarians, whatever the UK’s Liberal Democrats think they are these days. Yet in America, we still insist that everyone be assimilated into one of two Borg collectives—either Republicans or Democrats, take your pick. Consequently, in the U.S. House, there’s only one independent member; in the Senate, only two (one of whom, naturally, is from Maine). Out of more than 7,000 state legislators, only 34 are independents or belong to third parties.

Now one of those rare independents is running for president. Yesterday, Justin Amash, the congressman from Michigan who left the GOP last year, announced he’ll be seeking the Libertarian Party nomination. The freakout on Twitter was instant. From progressives and anti-Trump Republicans rose a hue and cry: Amash is the new Ralph Nader! He’s going to reelect Donald Trump!

First, the idea that Nader decisively cost Al Gore the 2000 election is weaker than might be expected (the notion that Ross Perot defeated George H.W. Bush in 1992 is even flimsier). But more generally, are we really so masochistic as to think we deserve only two choices? When Scotland concluded that the British Parliament had lost touch with its interests, it ditched the Labour Party and sent nearly three dozen Scottish Nationalists to Westminster. The Dutch House of Representatives contains four parties in its governing coalition alone, with another nine in opposition plus two independents. When French voters grew tired of their center-left and center-right, they wiped them out, sending Emmanuel Macron to the presidency and his brand new party En Marche to an overwhelming majority in the National Assembly.

Certainly too many parties can result in squabbling dysfunction. That’s why Germany still requires parties to receive 5 percent of the vote nationwide in order to enter the Bundestag, a threshold meant to prevent the kind of parliamentary chaos that prevailed during the Weimar Republic. And it’s also true that America’s presidency is not a parliament: Amash can’t coalition with Biden to deny Trump the White House. Hence the freakout.

Still, when it comes to third parties, America truly is exceptional. Here and only here do we demand that 200 million voters of variegated backgrounds and opinions be crammed into two giant, cynical, self-serving, commercialized, widely despised political conglomerates. The argument for this used to be that it maintained political stability. How’s that working out? In an era of partisan groupthink and gridlock, maybe Republicans and Democrats sitting down with third partiers and independents is exactly what the country needs.

Justin Amash opposes America’s involvement in regime-change wars. He’s backed a constitutional amendment that would cap federal spending. He wants to both secure the border and expand legal immigration. He spearheaded a resolution in 2013 that would have ended the NSA’s blanket collection of phone metadata. A Michigander, he dislikes Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s coronavirus crackdowns. He became an independent because he thought the Republican Party was growing too nationalist and the Democrats too socialist. He voted to impeach President Trump.

Some of that may be to your liking, or none of it. But consider too that, unlike the major-party candidates, Amash has never been credibly accused of sexual assault and has yet to imply that spraying Fantastik into one’s eyeballs could be an effective epidemiological measure. Before we castigate him as a spoiler, maybe we should at least hear him out.

After an investigation, high level Navy investigators are recommending that Capt. Brett Crozier be reinstated as Commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an unprecedented move that is sure to get a rousing endorsement both from his sailors and the civilian community who felt he acted selflessly to get his men and women out harms’ way of the pandemic.

This suggests that a) the charges against him, specifically, that he went out of the chain of command in an email pleading for help, weren’t as cut and dry as the public story conveyed, or b) his superiors are cognizant of the political optics of firing a man who put his neck on the line during a public health crisis that was directly affecting the readiness and welfare of the fleet.

Maybe it was a little of both. There is no denying that this video of his enthusiastic send-off three weeks ago by his own sailors had an affect on public opinion. That Crozier has since tested positive for COVID-19 and has watched as 856 members of the crew (out of  nearly 5000 sailors) have too, with one dead so far, must have played a role as well. 

After Crozier was escorted from the ship, acting Secretary Thomas Modly made comments to the crew saying Crozier’s email pleading for help was either “too naive or too stupid.” His choice of words caused such an uproar among the TR sailors and their families, who by that time had viewed Crozier as their hero, Modly felt pressured to tender his resignation. It was clear where the political winds were blowing, even then.

There have also been stories about Crozier’s superior on the ship, Adm. Stuart Baker, that the men had an ongoing difference of opinion over whether the majority of the crew should be evacuated when the first infections began on the ship in early March. The chief complaint against Crozier’s four-page letter to Navy brass, stating the urgency for the evacuation, is that it should have went to Baker directly, and not in an “unsecured” transmission to 20-30 recipients including seven Navy captains and Baker.  

We may not know the exact details of the investigation. We do know that Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has held up any decision on Crozier’s reinstatement, another move that has raised eyebrows. This too, appears to be out of the “chain of command.” Is it not the Navy’s purview—not civilian masters—who decide who or who doesn’t captain their ships? The drama is largely taking place behind the scenes, but what is clear, is that when it comes down to it, the American people hate the politics, and are siding with the guy they think took it on the chin for his crew. Whether that is “correct” in terms of the rules and regs doesn’t exactly matter in this particular court of public opinion.

UPDATE 4/26: I just had an interesting conversation with a retired admiral about the recent events. He too was surprised that the Pentagon now seems to be taking over the decision to reinstate Crozier. While the buck certainly stops with the civilian chiefs, these personnel decisions “normally” take place within the Navy hierarchy. But nothing about this case is normal, my admiral friend tells me, and it has become too political for the Pentagon to ignore. The game is still on, and the civilian entrance into this signals that they might not be comfortable with deciding the fate of Crozier based on public opinion over protocol, after all.

This also raises the question of where President Trump stands on all of this. After all, he did tell reporters shortly after the captain was fired, “I agree with their decision [to relieve Crozier] 100 percent.” It wasn’t too long ago that he stepped in on another major Navy decision—granting clemency to disgraced Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher earlier this year. Is he behind Esper and Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley staying the recommendation against the Navy’s wishes?