He’s every poker player’s dream: boisterous, talkative, inattentive, ingratiating, a drinker, thinks he’s smart, sure he’s the best player at the table, and best of all, loaded with cash. By the end of the night he’s tapped out, like the week before and the week before that, but the safest bet of the evening is that he’ll show up the following week. At global poker, the US has been the chump for almost a century and that’s not going to change; it’s as close as you can get to a sure thing.
Theodore Roosevelt, his visage now inexplicably carved on Mt. Rushmore, envied the British empire and wanted one for the US. It wasn’t enough that the Industrial Revolution had made the US the world’s richest country. There was no glory in business and prosperity; what mattered was war, conquest, and battlefield heroics. With the charge up San Juan Hill in the splendid little war he had pressed President McKinley so hard to fight, Roosevelt got what he craved: heroics and the beginnings of empire. Spain relinquished Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the US.
Roosevelt was the second noteworthy big government Republican president (Lincoln was the first), which is why so many of today’s big government Republicans think he belongs up on Mt. Rushmore with Honest Abe. After he became president, he took a page from Great Britain’s book, built up the navy, and sent the Great White Fleet, 16 brand new destroyers, around the world, announcing that the US had pulled up a seat for global poker. However, it’s an expensive game. Roosevelt realized the puny federal government couldn’t even afford the ante, and championed an income tax and central bank. (Would someone please explain, in the comments section below, why he is on Mt. Rushmore?) Those “innovations” didn’t come until two presidencies later.
World War I for the US was what gamblers call a “heart,” not a “head” bet. The few atrocities and provocations that got the public stirred up never amounted to a threat, but the British and French got our military and industrial might, which was significant and perhaps decisive. For our troubles we got more troubles. During the war he had promised to keep us out of, President Wilson jacked up the top rate on the brand new income tax to 77 percent, instituted a draft (the men who would actually do the fighting weren’t quite as enthused as the rest of the populace), and threw opponents in jail. Our allies had assured Wilson they shared his desire to make the world safe for democracy, but after the war they cut up the Middle East and parts of Africa for their own benefit. The Peace Treaty of Versailles was so harshly punitive that Marshal Foch, the French commander-in-chief of the allied armies, presciently noted: “This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.” The US had made its bets, but the British and French split the pot.
Foch was wrong by only 65 days, but dead right that World War II would be a continuation of World War I. Again, with the possible exception of the fear that Germany might develop an atomic bomb (a long shot, as we knew, since most of its top scientists had emigrated to the US), our opponents posed an existential threat to our allies, but not to us. (If the Germans couldn’t defeat the British across the British Channel, they surely couldn’t have crossed the Atlantic and defeated the US. And the Japanese crossing the Pacific to defeat what their own Admiral Yamamoto called “a sleeping giant”? Forget it.) Again, for our troubles we got more troubles. The USSR ended up with most of Eastern Europe. Our ally stole our atomic secrets, detonating its own bomb four years after war’s end. We underwrote the economic recovery of both friends and foes, and picked up most of the tab for defending those European countries the USSR had not annexed or “invited” into the Warsaw Pact. Freed from defense spending, our protectees funded lavish cradle-to-grave welfare states, their youth later protesting US militarism.
After the war, the US had the biggest stake and strongest hand, which we overplayed. Savvy players realized the US would throw money and armaments their way if they professed anticommunism, even if their regimes were just as tyrannical as the communist ones they claimed to oppose. The South Vietnamese government played this game. The US bet big after the French folded, and lost. Fighting guerrillas on their home turf had become a long-odds wager. Costs were shifting in favor of the defense; relatively inexpensive artillery could take out multimillion dollar aircraft. The Vietcong knew the territory and had the support of a significant number of South Vietnamese, who regarded the US as the latest in a line of imperial occupiers. The North Vietnamese were in it to win it, and were willing to take staggering losses until US public opinion turned against the war, which it did.
Winning poker requires recognizing other players’ weak hands. The US had ginned up its military-industrial complex during the Vietnam war and doubled down during the Reagan years, although we were not then at war. Because of its inherent contradictions and flaws, communism couldn’t beat a pair of twos (a fact Reagan and Margaret Thatcher—but not most of the intelligentsia—recognized). The Soviet Union’s repression and command economy put it deep in the hole, and it begged, borrowed, and stole to keep itself in the game until, tapped out, it collapsed in 1991.
This posed some awkward dilemmas for America’s elite. Notwithstanding, occasional rhetoric to the contrary, the elite fervently believe in collectivism and statism. Their welfare-regulatory state has been less harsh than the Soviet totalitarian state, but like the Soviet version it insidiously undermines economic performance and is fiscally unsound. The elite had folded on the winning hand—free market capitalism—long ago, and it was discomfiting to see the Soviets go down the tubes. A harbinger, perhaps, of the fate of other, albeit “less harsh,” collectivist-statist systems? And what to do with that military-industrial complex?
Fortunately, there’s always a game going somewhere. Unfortunately, the game the US bought into—the Middle East—is the roughest one in town, filled with cutthroats (literally!), card sharps, and thieves. The savvier players stay on the periphery or stay away entirely. Some—Great Britain, France, and Russia—because they’ve already played and lost. And some—China—because they’ve learned from others and know they can’t win.
The US, on the other hand, goes all in. Good players rub their hands in predatory delight when a rube shoves his ante into the pot and asks, “How do you play?” The US government blustered into the Middle East without recognizing that to the average denizen, clan, tribe, and religion are far more important than country, which is nothing more than lines drawn on a map by Europeans almost a century ago. It has been almost willfully blind to the centrality of the Sunni-Shiite schism that has waxed and waned (now waxing) for over a thousand years. We keep looking for players that have our best interests at heart, and are surprised when the ones we line up with take our chips.
The strongest players at the table—Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran—want to take each other to the cleaners. For their own reasons, they are both happy the US joined the game. In the hand being played, the Saudi’s have joined our half-hearted effort against Sunni Islamic State. It has made noises about invading Saudi Arabia, so the Saudis play the old trick: get the US to fight your war. There’s another angle. If the US makes a heavier commitment, perhaps while they’re in the area they can be induced to take out not just the Islamic State, but it, and Saudi Arabia’s enemy, Syria’s Shiite leader, Bashar Assad. Another one of our good buddies—Sunni Turkey—has a similar motivation. There’s no telling what kind of stupid bets bad players will make. So the Saudis and Turks press for not just a heavier US commitment, but for a war against Assad before the one against the Islamic State. Meanwhile, our friends the Saudis are driving our oil producers out of business; good players are ruthless.
At least we recognize that Iran does not have our best interests at heart. It split the pot with Russia and China after Afghanistan and Iraq, the last two hands in the Middle East. All three won big—by not playing—as the US squandered soldiers’ lives, armaments, and over a trillion dollars in Afghanistan. Iran was the big winner in Iraq. There was the Afghanistan-sized waste of lives and resources, plus the US drove Saddam Hussein out of power and installed an Iran-friendly Shiite government. Iraq is well on its way to becoming an Iranian satellite. The final démarche will come when the US leaves for good.
Iran does not want a Sunni state in the middle of Iraq and Syria, which is Iran’s Shiite ally. Iran is not as reticent as Turkey and Saudi Arabia about getting its hands dirty. Its air force has bombed Islamic State positions, it has trained and armed Shiite Iraqi militias, and sent its own troops to fight. Those Iraqi militias, fighting for their religion, have been far more effective than US-trained Iraqi army units, fighting for their country. However, the US worries that the militias may be violating someone’s human rights, proving that after numerous losing hands it still doesn’t know how the game is played. It’s an understatement to say the Islamic State does not protect human rights. The US is wary of Iran, although it welcomes their current involvement—as long as they don’t violate anyone’s human rights and don’t fight for sectarian reasons, which they most assuredly are. Further Iranian involvement would make obvious to all the absurdity of the US position: we are fighting two bitter enemies’ wars for them, placing ourselves on both sides of the long-running Sunni-Shiite sectarian war.
Eventually we’ll lose another big pot in the Middle East. We have to watch out—we’re no longer flush and we’ve had to tap our credit lines. Middle Eastern sharpies are licking their chops at the 2016 US election. Regardless of who wins—Hillary or the Republican nominee—on present rhetoric they are assured the US won’t walk away from the table. As they stack their chips and the cards are shuffled for the next hand, they know the US will reach for its wallet. They’ll hear what’s music to their ears, the ever-optimistic chirp of the perpetual loser: “Deal me in!”
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