Happy New Year, Puppet Masters

This morning I came across a tweet from Blake Hounshell, the managing editor of Foreign Policy Magazine, that read, in its entirety: "Oy." This "oy" was followed by a link to today's column by Maureen Dowd, in which she claims that "neocon" puppet masters are manipulating Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan into saying things they don't believe in defense of, among other things, Benjamin Netanyahu:

Ryan bemoaned "the slaughter of brave dissidents in Syria. Mobs storming American embassies and consulates. Iran four years closer to gaining a nuclear weapon. Israel, our best ally in the region, treated with indifference bordering on contempt by the Obama administration." American foreign policy, he said, "needs moral clarity and firmness of purpose."

Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor. The hawkish Romney adviser has been secunded to manage the running mate and graft a Manichaean worldview onto the foreign affairs neophyte."

"Oy" is right. Maureen may not know this, but she is peddling an old stereotype, that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews. (Later, Hounshell wrote, "(A)mazing that apparently nobody sat her down and said, this is not OK.")

This sinister stereotype became a major theme in the discussion of the Iraq war, when critics charged that Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, among other Jewish neoconservatives, were actually in charge of Bush Administration foreign policy. This charge relegated George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Stephen Hadley and the other Christians who actually set policy to the status of puppets.

There are other issues with the column, including the fact that Senor was actually associated with Paul Bremer, who was despised by the neocons during the Iraq mess, as Ira Stoll points out. And there's this questionable statement: "Senor got out over his skis before Romney's speech in Jerusalem, telling reporters that Mitt would say he respected Israel's right to make a pre-emptive, unilateral attack on Iran's nuclear facilities." But Obama and Biden have both said that Israel, as a sovereign country, has the right to take measures in its self-defense it deems necessary. Romney wasn't actually veering wildly at all from the bipartisan consensus on this question.

And there's also this: "If President Romney acceded to Netanyahu's outrageous demand for clear red lines on Iran, this global confrontation would be a tiny foretaste of the conflagration to come."

Why is this an outrageous demand? The White House doesn't think this is outrageous. The President and his aides understand why Netanyahu would seek red lines. They would like to keep their red lines hidden from the Iranians (the smart move, obviously), but it is not "outrageous," in the course of Netanyahu's conversations with President Obama, for him to want to know precisely what might spark the U.S. into action? Certainly the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have also asked the same question of the President.

It's not outrageous, by the way, for President Obama to say in response, "Thanks, but no thanks, I'm not laying out our red lines for you." There is a separate question here, which has to do with Netanyahu's incompetent management of the U.S.-Israel relationship (if you want to find out red lines, don't mouth off about the President and the secretary of state two months before an election), but privately, he should bring up whatever issue he wants to bring up.

And one more thing. Maureen believes that Romney would lead us more quickly to war. But Obama is actually more likely than Romney to launch an attack on Iran. (I explain why here.)

More later.

About the Author

Jeffrey Goldberg is the editor in chief of The Atlantic and a recipient of the National Magazine Award for Reporting. He is the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror.

Americans don’t realize how fast the country is moving toward becoming a better version of itself.

I have seen the future, and it is in the United States.

After a several-year immersion in parts of the country that make the news mainly after a natural disaster or a shooting, or for follow-up stories on how the Donald Trump voters of 2016 now feel about Trump, I have a journalistic impulse similar to the one that dominated my years of living in China. That is the desire to tell people how much more is going on, in places they had barely thought about or even heard of, than they might have imagined.

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In the case of China, that impulse matched the mood of the times. In the years before and after the world financial crisis of 2008, everyone knew that China was on the way up; reporters like me were just filling in the details. In the case of the modern United States, I am well aware that this message runs so counter to prevailing emotions and ideas as to seem preposterous. Everyone knows how genuinely troubled the United States is at the level of national politics and governance. It is natural to assume that these disorders must reflect a deeper rot across the country. And indeed, you can’t travel extensively through today’s America, as my wife, Deb, and I have been doing in recent years, without being exposed to signs of rot, from opioid addiction to calcifying class barriers.