When you've been a teacher that had to deal with the
emotional difficulties confronting teenagers and young adults, and when you've
made it your hobby to study the behavior exhibited by the higher primates, you
discover a striking similarity between the conduct of the two.
You come to realize that even the most ferocious of bullies
fear getting into a fight against an opponent no matter how small and weak he
may appear. In fact, most bullies prefer to stage threatening theatrics hoping
to intimidate the opponent and scare him enough that he'll go away, thus avoid
having a fight.
After reading a number of articles written by Matthew
Continetti, you become aware of the reality that he is a young adult whose mindset
is still rooted in his adolescent years. This reality has revealed itself once
again in the article he wrote under the title: “So Long to the Iran Deal,”
published on March 18, 2018 in National Review Online.
What you'll discover in that article is a mentally active
young man named Matthew. He is looking at the antics of a grown man, Donald
Trump, that happens to be President of the United States ; an individual whose
life story and ascendance to the highest office in the land have been unusual.
Unable to see deep into the President's domestic or foreign game plans, young
Matthew interprets the man’s outward behavior in accordance with the principles
that used to motivate him and the schoolboys he used to hang around with not
long ago.
And like the bully who would rather intimidate than fight an
opponent, Matthew Continetti has kept another trait from his adolescent years.
It is that he worships every role model he dreams of emulating someday. Right
now, he views Donald Trump as the omnipotent bully that makes his opponents
cower and submit, or run away each time that he raises his voice and roars. As
it happens, this is the cartoon-like, superficial image of Donald Trump that
Continetti has painted in his article.
Euphoric about President Trump firing the dovish Rex
Tillerson as Secretary of State, replacing him with the apparently hawkish Mike
Pompeo, the boyish-at-heart Matthew Continetti jubilantly declared that “the Iran deal may
not last much longer than Tillerson.” Mixing irrelevant information already in
the public domain with fantasy he fabricated in his own mind, Continetti
reached the conclusion that, “Pompeo will give Iran 's rulers plenty of reasons to
worry. They already have plenty to worry about … inflation, a banking crisis,
additional sanctions and the threat of military action, will make their
problems worse,” he went on to say.
This being his interpretation of what he believes he is
seeing, the boy Matthew switched to the speculative mode and attributed to
himself the qualities he imagines characterize the Trump-Pompeo team. Thus,
speaking about himself using the pseudonym Pompeo, the boy started to design a
strategy in his own mind; one that will take on America 's enemies and beat them.
The first that he decreed was this: “What [Matthew] Pompeo can do is shift the
conflict into terrain of OUR choosing, and decide it on OUR terms”.
He went on to explain his strategy as follows: “Deterrence
is based on fear of reprisal. We have seen this process at work in the Korean
peninsula, where OUR threats of fire and fury have backed Kim Jong Un into an
apparent willingness to negotiate … What is amazing to ME is that so many
Americans seem not to understand the basic concept underlying deterrence that has
guided American foreign policy for decades”.
And this is where Matthew proved himself to be as wet as a
baby whose nanny forgot to put him in diaper. The fact is that the North
Koreans were not deterred in the 1950s, the North Vietnamese were not in the
1960s, the Soviets were not in the 1970s, the Iranians were not in the 1980s,
the Serbians were not in the 1990s, the Iraqis were not in the 2000s and the
Syrians were not in the 2010s.
Continetti went on to speculate that because “Iranian fast
boats that have plagued traffic in the Persian Gulf
stopped their provocations,” meant that the Iranians were anxious about what
Trump and Mattis might do to them. He went on to fantasize, “might not the
presence at the table of Pompeo spook the Iranians even further?”
No, the Iranians were not spooked today anymore than they
were by Ronald Reagan when he quietly negotiated the release of American
embassy hostages in return for weapons. And neither has Kim Jong Un been
spooked into negotiating the way that the boy Matthew believes he did.