The ‘NATO is great’ assumption

OPINION:

I used to find media reporting puerile. Media reporting — that is, reporters covering reporters — seemed the height of self-indulgence in a profession reviled by the American people.

But in the age of President Donald Trump, where cable news and other media organs (such as Breitbart) serve as AAA ball clubs for this White House (John Bolton, Lawrence Kudlow) and then back again (Stephen K. Bannon, Sebastian Gorka), reporting on the media doesn’t seem so trivial anymore.

An ambitious linguistic study should be undertaken by our nation’s great and idle academics on the power of language in preserving our ultra-militarist, but eventually self-defeating, foreign policy consensus.

Even as Washington continues to rack up the largest deficits in the history of man, and the United States looks, day by day, closer to a failed state than the country that, less than a lifetime ago, voluntarily and peaceably rebuilt Europe and conquered the heavens, the nation’s “meritocratic” mandarins remain hopelessly addicted to a counterproductive American foreign policy of attempting to remake the world in our image, often by military force.

Part of that story has to be language. The greatest exemplar of this is the president himself who, while undertaking a potentially courageous pullout of Afghanistan and Syria, and re-evaluating unflinching U.S. support of Cold War national security architecture, still feels the need to explain that he’s, you know, like, a really tough guy.

“By the way, I think I am probably more hawkish than anybody. Nobody’s more hawkish than me,” Mr. Trump said in December in Iraq, comparing himself to his national security adviser, John R. Bolton.

And, unfortunately, top-tier media can fall prey to this phenomenon more calamitously than most.

“There are few things that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia desires more than the weakening of NATO, the military alliance among the United States, Europe and Canada that has deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years,” Julian E. Barnes and Helene Cooper breathlessly “reported” in The New York Times this week.

Notably, the duo then proceeded to only quote James Stavridis, who establishment eminence grise Hillary Clinton considered for vice president, and Michele Flournoy, the previously odds-on favorite to be Mrs. Clinton’s secretary of Defense. James Mattis originally wanted Ms. Flournoy as deputy before he left his post as Defense secretary in a huff.

In a complete rejection of George Washington’s farewell address, warning against the dangers of permanent alliances, Mr. Mattis conflated means (alliances) with ends (U.S. security, prosperity, and our liberties) on his way out the door. “Hold fast, alongside our allies, aligned against our foes,” Mr. Mattis instructed his subordinates on his way out the door. The implication was clear: Donald Trump — who helms, if you just judge by policy, the most anti-Russia administration since Reagan — is a material threat to America’s allies.

Where NYT, and many others, fail is in their obligation to their readers. Foreign policy generally has high learning curve for layman, many of whom are in the U.S. Congress. On NATO, for example, preeminent scholars — such as Barry Posen, Joshua Shifrinson, Michael Desch, Stephen Walt and others — could offer balanced commentary on substance instead of political commentary on the current commander in chief.

A failure to report in a balanced fashion will eventually drive readers elsewhere, to far less responsible organs, as faith in traditional American institutions continues to flag.

The brain trust that reacts in uniform horror at a president who would consider pulling the United States out of Syria, or Afghanistan, or NATO, shows itself as attenuated from the populace’s preferences as feared.

In truth, there is a wealth of experts and thinkers who disagree with Ms. Flournoy and Adm. Stavridis, including some who correctly predicted that NATO expansion would fuel not falter a revanchist Russia. In my lifetime, The Times ran such voices, and even reporters who disagreed with them supplied them space in their columns.

“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” the late, legendary George F. Kennan told neoconservative NYT reporter Thomas Friedman in 1998. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.”

Sound familiar?

• Curt Mills is foreign affairs reporter at The National Interest and a Robert Novak Journalism fellow.