PARK MACDOUGAL: Obamaism From the Right.

We’ll simply observe that what [Jeffrey] Sachs is doing [during his Tucker Carlson interview] is recognizable as a genre of Obama-faction messaging that Tablet’s Tony Badran dubbed the “striptease” nearly a decade ago. To put it as simply as possible: The administration adopts a policy, such as guaranteeing Assad’s survival to the Iranians in order to buy goodwill for nuclear diplomacy, that it doesn’t think the American public (or U.S. allies) is ready for. In its public statements, it pretends to be doing something else (such as attempting to topple Assad). Then, handpicked experts launder a description of the real, current policy as a “critique” of the pretend policy (the “fan” that obscures the naked truth, in the striptease analogy).

Prior to the election, one saw this dynamic often with Biden’s Israel policy. In reality, as Scroll readers will be aware, the Biden administration was exerting whatever leverage it had to oust Netanyahu and press-gang the Israelis into a cease-fire deal. Yet the Biden administration, no doubt aware that Americans and U.S. allies would respond poorly to this policy, pretended it was offering “iron-clad support” to Israel, to use one of the administration’s signature phrases. Surrogates outside the government then pretended the rhetoric was reality and recommended that the administration “change” to a policy of … ousting Netanyahu and press-ganging the Israelis into a cease-fire. In an essay published earlier this month in Foreign Affairs, for instance, Obama’s top foreign-policy guru Ben Rhodes wrote that “Biden’s most prominent foreign policy initiative during his final year in office was unconditional support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s destruction of Gaza and his military escalation in Lebanon.” What’s more, he wrote it with a straight face.

Thus, we get Sachs’ offering: essentially a point-by-point description of the Obama-Biden foreign policy—détente with Iran, decoupling from Israel, dovish but transactional relations with Moscow and Beijing, all rationalized by hyperbolic threats of “all-out war” if the United States dares to assert its interests against its rivals—as a critique of a fictional “neocon” Obama-Biden policy, which in reality better describes the “Peace Through Strength” position of Donald Trump. To defeat the Obama-Biden “neocons” and avoid “World War III,” Sachs counsels, Trump must reject Trumpism and embrace Obamaism—now rebranded, with Carlson’s assistance, as “America First.” As The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, the Carlson-Obama faction has exerted at least some influence over personnel, via Donald Trump Jr. According to the report, Carlson and Don Jr. successfully blocked former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from a job after outlining “what they said were the dangers of bringing neoconservatives into the administration.”

That’s the bad news. The good news, as Badran observed in an excellent thread on Trump’s Monday comments praising Turkey’s “unfriendly takeover” of a hostile state in Syria, is that Trump does not appear to be fooled by the striptease—or by the fools in his own camp.

“Peace through strength” has a nice ring to it.

And here’s the conclusion to Tony Badran’s X thread linked to in the excerpt: “Trump’s outlook is not sectarian (unlike Obama, or, for that matter, his own VP). He identifies and understands the structural realities of the region and its geopolitics. His instincts are quintessentially American—maybe he’s the last of the Mohicans in that respect.”