As it Turns Out, Experts Tend to Know Things

Politicians, on the other hand...

Early in the Biden administration, I argued emphatically that withdrawing troops from Afghanistan would be a terrible mistake. I wrote that abandoning what had become, after many years, a relatively inexpensive (though quite effective) peacekeeping mission, would give up hard-fought stability and significant strategic advantages in the region.

I didn’t believe these things because I was a foreign-policy or military expert. I’m neither. I believed them because I listened to what foreign-policy and military experts (including those who worked in the Biden administration) were saying at the time.

But the views of the experts ultimately didn’t matter, not to the American public, and certainly not to Biden and his White House predecessor. The idea of leaving Afghanistan was just too popular. Every poll said so. After 20 years, Americans were simply sick of us being there. Most hadn’t a clue (nor cared) how the mission had evolved over the years, or what the ramifications of leaving would be, because few of our elected leaders bothered to explain it.

People like me, who advocated for staying, were dismissed by both the far-left and far-right as “neocons” who wanted “endless wars,” and Biden and Trump both relished the opportunity to go down in the history books as having ended the war. They didn’t care what their advisors were telling them.

So, we left Afghanistan. And unsurprisingly (at least to those who’d done their homework), all hell broke loose on the ground.

Gunmen rushed into cities. Desperate Afghans flooded airfields, trying to escape the horrors that would soon follow. Some handed their children to U.S. soldiers, praying for their survival. Others desperately clung to the side of departing planes (some of whom fell to their death). The country’s government crumbled, extremists took back over, and citizens who’d experienced — over two decades — the first freedom and opportunity of their lives quickly fell back into a world of torture and oppression.

Americans watched the chaos unfold, unable to grasp what they were seeing. Yet, what they were seeing were the direct, inevitable consequences of a policy most of them had supported.

Could things have been done to make the withdrawal itself less chaotic? Probably. But the end result would have been the same. Biden executed a doomed policy that he ran for office on, and won with — a policy that most Americans said they wanted… right up until they discovered what it actually looked like. Once they did, Biden’s approval rating sank and never recovered.

If all that wasn’t bad enough, Vladimir Putin, having witnessed the profound display of American weakness on the world stage, decided it was time to execute his long-calculated, full-scale invasion of Ukraine (which has lasted for over three years).

If only more people had listened to the experts, and those “endless war” loving “neocons” who echoed their analysis.

On a personal note, writing about complicated political issues can be quite frustrating. Those of us who put in the research, pay attention to the experts, consider the facts, and present what we think are persuasive arguments often end up sitting helplessly by while those arguments are drowned out by the demagoguery of high-profile politicians, media-personalities, and viral memes that better resonate with an intended audience.

I’m not asking for pity; this is the life people like me have chosen. But boy does it suck when the stakes are high.

It may be a lost art, but I still believe that respecting your readers enough to tell them the truth, regardless of which political tribe it may hurt or help, is a good thing.

As Charles Krauthammer famously said, “You're betraying your whole life if you don't say what you think - and you don't say it honestly and bluntly.”

That brings us to tariffs…

I’ve written a lot about them. I’ve covered their long history of economic failure, and illustrated how Trump’s first-term tariffs (and later Biden’s) were a big net-loss for America. In addition to not being a foreign policy or military expert, I’m also not an economist. That’s why I listen to actual economists, roughly 99.8% of whom agree that tariffs hurt economies and drive up prices.

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, I even had one of DC’s most respected economists on my podcast to discuss the draconian tariffs Trump was promising for his second term. They were slated to make his first trade war look like a drop in the ocean.

As with Afghanistan, I believed the policy being promised would prove to be absolutely devastating. And for my efforts, I was naturally called a “RINO”, a “fake conservative”, and a “liberal”… establishing once again that such terms have no tangible meaning in the era of MAGA.

Case in point, I’d love to hear a supporter of Trump’s trade antics tell me exactly what is conservative about protectionism and central planning (which were advocated for by Marxists, socialists, and Bernie Sanders, right up until they became the official trade policy of our current Republican president).

And maybe that same person could then explain to me the modern romanticism for domestic manufacturing that, despite there already being half a million open manufacturing jobs in our country that no one’s applying for, somehow warrants the devastation of millions of retirement funds, vastly higher prices, government subsidies through the roof, and massive layoffs… all for the mere hope (unsupported by data) that the chaos will somehow direct more people toward less safe, less desirable factory-jobs.

Perhaps this guy can debate our vice president over it:

I guess I got ahead of myself. Let’s go back to Afghanistan…

If you thought the Afghanistan withdrawal was a certified shit show — a hairbrained, unforced error of epic proportions that virtually no one with relevant expertise thought was a good idea — just look at what we’ve seen over the last week or so.

When Trump was elected to a second term, he inherited a U.S. economy that had the world’s highest GDP, the world’s strongest currency, low unemployment, high individual wealth, a flexible job market, and industry dominance across many sectors. It was an imperfect economy for sure (and always will be), but it was a strong and accessible one that Trump himself helped grow during his first term. He could have done the same thing the second time around.

Instead, he used emergency powers to single-handedly impose a sweeping, economically illiterate trade policy, constructed with phony numbers and equally phony premises, that he cannot for the life of him explain to anyone, despite having fantasized about the idea since the 1980s. As a result, we’re witnessing a global economic meltdown. Stocks have plummeted across the world, trillions of dollars of wealth have been wiped out, the cost of living is soaring, jobs and livelihoods are disappearing, and top financial firms say we’re now likely headed into a recession.

Why? Because a guy named Donald Trump thought tariffs sounded cool, bucked everyone who insisted they weren’t cool, and surrounded himself with people who would reliably tell him that anything he thinks and says is cool.

The kicker is that Trump’s plans weren’t exactly a secret. He openly campaigned for president on waging another trade war — one that would make his first venture look like a walk in the park. Granted, what Trump implemented last week was quite a bit more expansive than what he talked about on the trail last year, but the mechanics are the same: a trade policy that — again, according to virtually every economist — can only drive up prices for an American public that was sick to death of high prices.

I’d argue that voters didn’t take Trump literally, or seriously, or whatever… but I think it’s less complicated than that. I think they didn’t like the status quo (for understandable reasons), so they voted out the incumbent. The rest was rhetorical, and right now — much like with the Afghanistan withdrawal — Americans are learning the meaning of that rhetoric the hard way, and taking their frustrations out on the president.

The experts don’t always get things right, of course. I can list a number of examples of them being dead wrong. But they have a much better track record than our politicians — especially today’s politicians. It would probably be a good idea, at some point, to start listening to them.