Susan Walsh/AP Photo
Elliott Abrams, left, listens during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, September 24, 2020, on Capitol Hill in Washington.
In an article about a recent foreign-policy discussion at a conference sponsored by the sometimes pro-Trump/sometimes anti-Trump National Review magazine, American Conservative writer Declan Leary asks the question: “Who better to present an ‘unsentimental, realistic perspective’ on ‘our nation and our core interests’ than Elliott Abrams?” Well, that’s easy: pretty much anyone. NR’s Jay Nordlinger described him as “‘truly a child prodigy’ for having served in the Reagan administration at the precocious age of 33.” Well, that’s one way of describing Norman Podhoretz’s and the recently deceased Midge Decter’s son-in-law, who I’m sure got his jobs with Pat Moynihan, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, and ultimately the Reagan administration without any help at all.
Post-Afghanistan and Ukraine, neocons have attempted to seize an opportunity to return themselves to the center of foreign-policy debate, now that (maybe) people don’t remember Iraq so well. Abrams, who literally has never met a potential U.S. (or Israeli) military action for which he did not cheerlead (and simultaneously accuse its opponents of lily-livered cowardice), showed up to argue that the nearly 40 percent of world military spending we account for is far too little. America, he fears, has taken a “holiday from history.” He is further concerned with what he considers to be a “particularly pernicious” form of “isolationism,” and he describes it as follows:
It’s the one that, you know, it’s the kind that says, “Who are we to tell other people what to do? Who are we? What are we defending here, this horrible racist society …”
Some neocons have shown a willingness to reconsider their previous errors in light of their politics having led to Trump. Max Boot gets most of the honors in this category. (William Kristol is in a sort of purgatory for acting like he now knows he was wrong about pretty much everything, but would just as soon move on. I wrote a sort of scorecard on this point back in 2009.) But Abrams, perhaps the man who needed to do more than anyone else alive to repudiate his past views, is sticking to his rhetorical (and metaphorical) guns. This would almost be funny in the way that Lindsey Graham or Ted Cruz’s constant brownnosing of Trump is almost funny. Abrams, however, is particularly problematic because he continues to be taken seriously by most of the members of the mainstream media and what remains of the foreign-policy establishment. (He is after all a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, among his other appointments.) Yet not only has he been demonstrably wrong about virtually every major issue since he was a “child prodigy,” but he was also convicted of lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal while holding the very position that Nordlinger thinks ought to recommend him.
Above all, Elliott Abrams used his position to act as a defender and enabler of genocide, and I do not use this word at all casually.
I have written at enormous length about Abrams’s lying on behalf of and defense of the mass murder of hundreds of women and children in El Salvador, as he simultaneously slandered the journalists and human rights workers who sought to expose it. He did the same thing vis-à-vis Guatemala during the period when Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala’s then-dictator, was carrying out what were clearly “acts of genocide”—in the legally binding words of Guatemala’s United Nations–backed Commission for Historical Clarification—against the indigenous people in the Ixil region of the department of Quiché. These are just two of the reasons that no one should consult Abrams about anything. There are many others, all of which have to do with his contempt for truth, democracy, and human life. (See under: “Israel-Palestine” and “Venezuela,” for instance.) I’ve written about these reasons here and here, here, even back so far as 1987, here, and I’m not the only one. My arguments and evidence have been picked up here and there in more mainstream sources. But here’s the thing: Almost no one cares. Journalists still quote him. The Council on Foreign Relations still pays and promotes him. Right-wing Trump-friendly foundations want his name on their boards.
It’s an interesting question as to exactly why this is. Is it because social connections triumph over genocidal ones? Is it because people think lying for murderers to be no big deal at the highest levels of the journalism/think-tank nexus? Is it the fact that Central Americans are not white people that somehow makes it OK to have helped to enable their mass murder? Is it because the Trump team is actually so much worse? Is the soft bigotry of low expectations at work when it comes to Republicans engendering war crimes? Is it because the Jewish right-wing world has embraced Abrams and people understandably prefer not to get on their bad side? And why, especially, are journalists—the very people whom Abrams has slandered for doing their job—so eager to treat him respectfully?
It is certainly some combination of all of the above. But what, again, would be funny were it not so awful is the notion that this person who in any civilized society would have been imprisoned for war crimes himself can go around lecturing people about the “brutality and corruption of the regime and the society from which it is coming,” when his career—second, perhaps, only to Henry Kissinger’s—is the single best example of just those qualities in our own.
While discussing America’s role in the world and the foreign-policy establishment’s crumbling case for engagement, I need to admit that the left has lacked a coherent view of American interests tied to American ideals for decades, save for the (necessary) reaction of seeking to rein in the neocons, and their inheritors, the Trump team. Bill Clinton only toyed with the edges of neocon doctrine, and Barack Obama, however much he hated the “Blob,” rarely went beyond “Don’t do stupid shit.”
Well, it’s been said, not by me, that “where there is no vision, the people perish,” and vision on the left as far as foreign policy has been in decidedly short supply. Fortunately, we now have two prescient pieces in Foreign Affairs by Bernie Sanders’s foreign-policy guru (and Altercation good friend and long-ago American Prospect intern) Matt Duss. Following up on his 2020 piece, “U.S. Foreign Policy Never Recovered From the War on Terror,” Duss’s new contribution lays the groundwork for a policy that is both hard-headed and soft-hearted; providing a framework for the rest of us to think about individual places and issues that elude simple slogans. In the article entitled “The War in Ukraine Calls for a Reset of Biden’s Foreign Policy,” Duss recognizes that Russia’s war against Ukraine requires a “paradigm shift” in our approach to the world, and credits the Biden administration with handling the crisis well so far. But taking us well beyond just holding NATO together (or further expanding it), he seeks to locate how it might be possible to actually apply the principles to which our politicians so frequently pay tribute in rhetoric while ignoring them in practice. I cannot do justice to all, or really any, of Duss’s proposals in this space except to say that if you read these two articles, you will come away with the single best discussion of what’s wrong with U.S. foreign policy and how it might possibly be repaired. If there were any justice in this world—and of course, I say that as most people do, without expecting any—Duss’s should be the most influential article on real-world U.S. foreign policy since this one. At the very least, it ought to—again, I say this knowing it won’t—put Elliott Abrams out of business.
Update: In a victory for hysterical lies and (oh so ironically) disinformation, the DHS has suspended the subject of last week’s Altercation, the Disinformation Governance Board.
Also: I’ll be in conversation with Dr. Yael Sternhell at Tel Aviv University (Gilman 281) on Tuesday, May 24, at 6 p.m. Israel time (11 a.m. Eastern), on “The American Left and Israel.” It will be livestreamed on Zoom and Facebook Live.
Odds and Ends
It’s always a pleasure to sit down with a handsome new Library of America version of a book one has long loved. And the new edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (together with the stories from All the Sad Young Men and other writings produced between 1920 and 1926) requires no reasons other than the stories themselves. Yet as Alec MacGillis reminded me, Fitzgerald had Tom Buchanan blustering about white replacement theory a century ago, in the very first chapter of the book. I’m also listening to Grant Ginder’s Let’s Not Do That Again, and there, too, is the same sort of poison pouring out of a sad, young Frenchman. (He is looking forward to moving to the U.S. and getting his own show on Fox: “All you have to do is bark the loudest and they’ll give you your own television show.”) Whether it’s Tucker Carlson (funded by the immigrant Rupert Murdoch) or the mass murderers such talk inspires, it’s not something that a civilized society can let slide, much less one that owes whatever greatness it enjoys to immigrants (most especially including involuntary immigrants).
Oh, and speaking of National Review, let’s not forget that this hate-monger (William Buckley) was its top editor. (I took a cruise with the guy once upon a time and wrote about it here.)
