With Russia’s surprise decision to launch airstrikes against Syrian rebels, the Afghan government’s failure to defend Kunduz, and the flood of Syrian refugees in Syria, we’ve entered a surprising moment in American politics where the right answer, contrary to all conventional political wisdom, might be “It’s complicated, stupid.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
In the coming months, every presidential candidate worth their salt might consider creating a winning political message by taking Holmes up on his advice and leaning into complexity. They could promise that they’ll work hard to design intricate policies that mirror the world’s actual challenges. And they could (convincingly) argue that Americans should trust them precisely because of that approach.
Of course, what I’ve just written totally violates campaign orthodoxy. Back in 1996, I participated in a campaign training academy at a hotel in New Brunswick. For a week, we studied political campaigns with the best political consultants in the country. To this day, I remember one adviser scrawling “KISS” in large letters on a blackboard, which stood for “Keep It Simple, Stupid.”
I’ve since worked on many campaigns (including my own), and I can tell you that in politics KISS has the gravitational pull of the Death Star. Resisting is the right thing to do, but it feels impossible and can be fatal.
While KISS particularly dominates today’s Republican field, it hasn’t seemed to bear much fruit for anyone but Donald Trump (more on him in a moment). Last December, Rick Perry (now, out of the race) said of Hillary Clinton, “And this secretary of state, and this president of the United States, both did a miserable job. I would put it in the feckless foreign policy category.” Both Chris Christie and Rand Paul (they of the moribund campaigns) have also criticized Obama as “feckless.”
Here’s the dictionary definition of that word: “having or resulting from a weak character or nature.” The Republican candidates are conflating willful simplicity with good moral character. That sounds appealing in theory, but its hollowness immediately appears when you tap on their Iraq policies, where, as former senior Obama defense official Derek Chollet recently wrote in the Washington Post, there’s virtually no difference between their ideas and what Obama and Clinton have actually done.
“[I]t is seductive to trumpet solutions as ‘tougher’ or ‘stronger,’” Chollet wrote, “but Republicans are finding it is difficult to define a way forward, especially when they must first grapple with the ghosts of their past.”
The reason their policies are bankrupt and that they’re falling back on character attacks is that they don’t know what to do in a world that’s vastly more confusing than ever before.
There has been no more egregious example than Donald Trump, who this week on “60 Minutes” framed our foreign policy choices in Syria and Iraq as so simple they might as well be a game of Risk.
Of ISIS in Syria, he said, “Why aren’t we letting ISIS go and fight Assad and then we pick up the remnants?” Of Syria, he said, “Russia wants to get rid of ISIS. We want to get rid of ISIS. Maybe let Russia do it. Let ‘em get rid of ISIS. What the hell do we care?” And of ISIS in Iraq, he said, “Look with ISIS in Iraq, you gotta knock ’em out. You gotta knock ’em out. You gotta fight ’em. You gotta fight ‘em.”
This was beyond slogans and bumper stickers. It is a foreign policy of bombast alone.
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