The Situation: The BASE Jumping Presidency

The Situation on Monday stood with Anthropic.

Today, let’s consider BASE jumping, which is a sport in which people leap off of buildings or cliffs or other stationary objects and try to parachute down without dying.

But first, let’s consider the nearly-week-old military action against Iran. And specifically, let’s consider the many conflicting ideas one needs to hold in one’s head concurrently in order to understand this week’s events.

For present purposes, let’s focus on ten of them. We’ll get to BASE jumping, I promise:

1. It is well and good and just that the tyrant, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is dead.
2. It is well and good and makes the world safer to destroy Iran’s missiles and the remains of its nuclear program.
3. It is well and good and just to kill large numbers of members of the Iranian leadership, particularly those associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
4. It is well and good and just to destroy Iran’s proxy militias around the region.
5. It is neither smart nor wise nor moral to destabilize a country of 93 million people in a strategically vital region without a crystal clear reason for doing so and set of objectives.
6. It is neither smart nor wise nor moral to attack such a country without a clear plan for its future.
7. It is neither smart nor wise nor moral to attack such a country without a clear-eyed approach to mitigating the many harms that country can loose upon the world in response—both in the short term and in the longer term.
8. Hoping that the Iranian people rise up and change their regime does not count as a plan for Iran’s future or a clear-eyed approach to mitigating the harms Iran can loose upon the world.
9. It is not lawful under any broadly-accepted understanding of either domestic American constitutional law or international law to attack a country absent any imminent threat.
10. Iran did not pose an imminent threat to the United States under any remotely plausible understanding of the concept of imminence.

One gets away with doing reckless, stupid things—like BASE jumping or attacking Iran without a plan—-until the moment one doesn’t. 

Luck matters. Go BASE jumping a few times, and you’re likely to get a thrill, and to get away with it. Do it enough, however, and you’ll eventually kill yourself.

Luck, good and bad, plays a real role in international affairs too.

Sometimes, leaders get lucky. They do reckless, stupid, immoral, and illegal things, yet the stars all align in their direction and they get credited with brilliance—at least for a time.

Sometimes, by contrast, they get unlucky. Reasonable bets come up snake eyes. The CIA famously advised President Obama that the intelligence on what turned out to be Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad was not all that strong; it was actually weaker, leaders later said, than the intelligence suggesting that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in 2003. Obama got lucky. George W. Bush got unlucky.

The thing about luck, however, is that its random nature means that it does not last. Leaders, like BASE jumpers, don’t stay lucky forever. Do stupid, reckless things repeatedly, and they will catch up with you.

Yet leaders often believe in their own brilliance when they are actually just experiencing a run of good luck, or even just the lag in time between their recklessness and the consequences. It’s a real rush invading countries and getting away with it, I hear. And one learns, as a leader, when you do it a few times that everyone around you is hyper-cautious and too quick to tell you why you can’t get away with doing the thing you want to do. And then you do it anyway, and they were all wrong. You do get away with it. And you learn from this experience, which you may repeat several times, that your judgment is infallible, that everyone else is stupid or lacks vision, or is insufficiently committed. And maybe you just don’t notice that you were lucky a few times.

And then you reach Stalingrad. 

The contradictory ideas listed above just may, if the stars all align for President Trump, resolve in the direction of freedom for Iranians, American interests, security for the Middle East region, and stabler, less murderous governance in a country that has been plagued by a murderous government for too long. If this happens, it will be because of luck—those mystical forces that every one in the gods-only-know-how-many times cause the dice to come up eleven many, many times in a row.

But the decision to launch this war won’t be any less stupid or reckless or lawless or immoral for having found its way to a good outcome. It will, rather, be the second-to-last BASE jump, or maybe the third-to-last one or the fourth-to-last.

Because eventually, people who make stupid and reckless decisions—people who go BASE jumping—run out of luck. And leaders who go BASE jumping tend to run out of luck faster than leaders who are, as George H.W. Bush used to be mocked for putting it, “prudent.”

Attacking Iran with no semblance of a plan is a kind of ultimate presidential BASE jump. And I hope very much that Trump gets away with it. I hope this for the people of Iran, who deserve non-murderous government. I hope it for the people of the region, who would uniformly fare better without malign Iranian influence and proxy forces in their countries. I hope it for the U.S. service personnel who will survive the war unhurt if things go well and will die if things go badly. I hope it for the many civilians about whom we can say the same.

But the decision to launch this war was reckless and stupid even if the gods, which is to say luck, end up somehow favoring it with success—however one might ultimately define success. If it happens to work out well, we should all breathe multiple sighs of relief and demand nonetheless that our leadership makes wise, better, more prudent decisions in the future.

Because eventually, governance as an extreme sport ends badly.

The Situation continues tomorrow.