Barbara Tuchman wrote a book called The March of Folly about three historical decisions that were widely understood by credible people to be stupid decisions at the time but were made anyway. She focused on the Renaissance Popes, British mercantile policy towards America and the decision to enter the Vietnam War. Folly is something that is apparent at the time, not just from the benefit of hindsight.
The decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was folly. There were ample voices saying that we should not attack and occupy a country that had not attacked us and posed no threat to us and that we poorly understood. This was a bad idea in February, 2003. In fact, it was understood to be a bad idea in 1991. I'm reading Rick Atkinson's Crusade about the first Gulf War. It was written in 1993, and it laid out the thinking among senior policy makers about why an assault on Baghdad was a bad idea. Ironically, two of the figures who understood this - Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz - were knee deep in the 2003 decision.
The Trump Adminstration is the apotheosis of folly. As Hair Furor has stripped his national security cabinet of every plausibly reasonable voice, he descends further into folly and poor decision making. The withdrawal from the Iran deal - unless it is salvaged by Europe and Iran - makes it more likely that Iran develops an atomic bomb, which either results in an invasion of Iran or a nuclear armed regime in Teheran. Those are objectively horrifying outcomes.
The decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem provoked the most easily predictable response from Palestinians. This has led to the Trump Administration doubling down on its alliance with the Likud Party and the entirely predictable increased isolation of the US from the rest of the world. This has certainly happened before, but in the past, we had a credible foreign policy establishment and provided a critical role in world affairs. Trump is working to make America no longer the "indispensible nation." That will further isolate us.
Finally, in a move that surprised exactly zero Korean experts, Kim has withdrawn from the summit that was supposed to lead to a nuclear-free Korea. First, John Bolton's rhetoric over the year and his comparison to Libya as a successful model for what the US would accept makes it obvious why Pyongyang would balk. And then there is the decision to withdraw from JCPOA, which basically means that you can't trust the US to follow through on its treaty obligations.
In the past week, Trump cheerleaders were actually pushing his name forward for the Nobel Peace Prize, no doubt to appease his vanity, because Obama won one, so he wants to win a better one. Before the echoes of laughter from this suggestion died away, Trump has already made a nuclear arms race in the Middle East substantially more likely, endorsed the slaughter of Palestinian protesters and screwed up the negotiations between Pyongyang and Seoul.
If this surprises anyone, they haven't been paying attention.
UPDATE: Jesus, no sooner than I post this then I catch this doozy. The idea that we would eliminate the person responsible for protecting us from our singl biggest vulnerability is just mindblowingly stupid.
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