Politics

Kash Patel and Dan Bongino have this week found out the painful way that running the Federal Bureau of Investigation is a lot harder than podcasting. Having spent years on endless shows suggesting that the "Epstein Files" could reveal the Deep State’s darkest secrets, the now Director and Deputy Director of the FBI find themselves insisting that, contrary to what they may have said, Jeffrey Epstein did, in fact, kill himself; that he did not have a list of blackmailable clients; and that he sexually abused more than 1,000 girls pretty much all by himself.Nobody believes that, of course, and Donald Trump’s angry reaction on Tuesday to a reporter who dared to ask about the most famous sex offender of all time, has done nothing to put the conspiracy theories to rest.

Anyone who has perambulated through the groves of academe has encountered dumb smart people. They are clever, intellectually nimble, but they lack what Aristotle called φρόνησις and what the rest of us call “street smarts” or “practical wisdom.” In academia, dumb smart people often appear to be merely quaint or eccentric. In the realm of politics, they appear first as an exciting novelty, then as a destructive if naive force, cynically manipulated by the very people they hoped to replace.  In 1992, the billionaire Ross Perot epitomized the dumb smart political actor when he ran as an Independent candidate against George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He pretended to provide an alternative to both Bush and Clinton. In reality, Perot guaranteed Clinton’s victory.

When Donald Trump called on Iran’s Ayatollah to “surrender” during Israel’s recent war the word struck many as jarring – almost antiquated. No major global leader has used that language publicly since the unconditional surrenders of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945.But Trump’s invocation, intentional or not and soon abandoned by his call for a “ceasefire,” points to a deeper issue: Are the rules that governed mid-20th century warfare still relevant in the 21st century? Why has “surrender” disappeared from the language of modern warfare? And what, exactly, do today’s ever-growing humanitarian laws offer nation-states forced to operate under them, in a world that looks nothing like the one left smoldering in 1945?