Moron Risk Premiums
Is an evil moron less dangerous than an evil genius?
In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, I recall a colleague who was working on “day after” planning. There was a team in the US State Department that was in contact with equivalent teams in those countries that (foolishly) were planning to join the US in its invasion. There was a sense of unreality in these discussions. It appeared that the team in State wasn’t across the detail of the military plans, unable to co-ordinate with allies that were desperate to see some real plans on the table. This, it turned out, was because the team in State was to be supplanted by a second team at the DoD, seen as more politically aligned with the illegal war plans and more closely aligned with the war criminals running the Pentagon. The original intended post-war administrator Jay Garner was replaced by Paul Bremer, whose performance as imperial viceroy in Iraq was a litany of disasters, causing untold human suffering and destruction. Paul is now a ski instructor in Vermont, so that’s nice for him.
This is not to suggest that Jay Garner’s team would have successfully transitioned Iraq from hollowed out klepto-autocracy to flourishing democracy. That was almost certain to fail as an objective for a long list of reasons. The point here is that, for political and ideological reasons, the post-war planning for Iraq was almost deliberately weak. But there were plans. The Coalition Provisional Authority existed, attempted all kinds of reforms and adjustments to Iraq, attempted a restructuring of its politics, attempted a retraining of the security forces and so on. In Iran today, there are none. MAGA’s aversion to nation-building means an enthusiasm for nation-destroying.
Most of the Iraq plans failed of course, a lesson taken to heart by GOP politicians such as JD Vance and Pete Kegseth, both of whom served in Iraq. To the limited extent that Donald Trump learns lessons, he was also opposed to foreign wars, particularly the concept of “nation-building” which was seen to have failed both in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Libya). In the America First worldview, the US military existed to protect America, not to change regimes in faraway countries.
We’ve clearly come a long way from that original idea. It’s not just the case that Trump has used the US military to change two regimes (Iran and Venezuela). But in both cases, he appears to have no plans at all. In Venezuela, it was clear that his senior officials had no idea that the US was “running” the country. In Iran, there is no agreement on why the US is at war, what the objectives are, how long this might take, what US citizens in the region should do about it and what the legal framework might be (it’s clearly the case that the US and Israel were not responding to an “immediate threat”).
But the lack of a plan goes further back: as was widely reported, Trump’s regime was in negotiations with the Islamic Republic. His negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, knew nothing of the subject they were negotiating. According to credible reporting, they had no idea of the ways that the international nuclear inspections regime works or how to bind Iran into a framework that would keep guardrails on their nuclear programme. The Iranians offered to dispose of their entire stockpile of highly-enriched uranium. This was, apparently, not enough. Of course, the State Department has numerous Iran experts, including people that had successfully negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran. But those people weren’t involved in the process. Instead, you have Steve Witkoff, a man who believed that Iran was “two weeks away” from having a nuclear bomb. (It wasn’t.)
So America finds itself in a war against a country of nearly 100 million, run by an eschatological regime that embraces and glorifies martyrdom. It does so with no idea of why it is doing this and what it might achieve from it. It is widely thought that Trump, a man whom the KGB recognised as easy to manipulate as far back as the 1980s, has been led into this disaster by Benjamin Netanyahu who has been wanting to tip Iran into chaos for all of his political career. Netanyahu has been welcomed into the Oval Office seven times since Trump’s second inauguration. Of course, Netanyahu asked every single one of Trump’s predecessors back to George W Bush to bomb Iran. They were smart enough to say no. Trump wasn’t.
And this takes us to an important truth. It can be reductive to judge someone as stupid, thick or moronic. But it can also be true. It is clear that the overriding feature of Trump is his stupidity. Yes, he’s a sociopath, a child rapist, corrupt, vain, cruel and superficial. But most importantly, he’s an idiot. He doesn’t read, he doesn’t listen to people that know things, he doesn’t understand fairly simple concepts. An A-level politics student would be able to tell you that a war with Iran risks attacks on the GCC countries and a closure of the Straits of Hormuz. This is so widely talked about it would be almost impossible not to know. (It is just possible, if you are a moron who can’t listen.) Believing that a population will “rise up” with no weapons or structures against a bloodthirsty regime that killed tens of thousands of them only a few weeks ago takes a special kind of stupidity. Believing that you obliterated a nuclear programme a year ago, but also that it is now only days away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon requires a deep moronism, a level of cognitive confusion that is barely comprehensible.
It’s often said that, given the choice between a fascistic moron president such as Trump, or a fascistic intellect such as JD Vance, you’d rather the moron. The genius will have better plans, be more organised about staying in power, more ruthless and calculating. All of this is true. But the genius will not be so easily gulled by manipulators such as Putin and Netanyahu. Under Liz Truss, the UK economy developed a ‘moron risk premium’, a cost to its borrowing that related directly to having a clearly unintelligent Prime Minister making stupid economic policy. With Trump in the White House, the moron risk premium is now a threat of world war.