Why US foreign policy keeps being bad
Plus: Mindfulness as meaning maker, plants that play non-zero-sum games, cool new newsletter functionality, etc.
Welcome to the second issue of the Nonzero Newsletter! In this week’s issue I (1) explain how the US and Saudi Arabia helped get Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities attacked this week; (2) use Obama administration alumnus Samantha Power as a vehicle for discussing why the American foreign policy establishment is so screwed up; (3) pitilessly rebuke a personal friend who had the gall to say something unflattering about mindfulness meditation (and in the process I explain how mindfulness can turn trouble into meaning); (4) riff on recent evidence that sunflowers play non-zero-sum games (seriously); (5) offer links to background readings on Ram (“Be Here Now”) Dass, Silicon Valley therapy startups, British philosophy’s twentieth-century twist of fate, etc.; and (6) unveil some cool new newsletter functionality that involves clicking on colorful bars!

How Trump and MBS helped get that giant Saudi oil plant blown up
Washington spent the first part of this week trying to figure out who blew up some Saudi oil facilities. Was it Houthi rebels in Yemen, who proudly claimed responsibility? Or was it Iran? Or was it both—an attack conceived and orchestrated by Iran but executed by Iran’s Houthi allies?
There’s an important and underappreciated sense in which the answer doesn’t matter. The moral of the story is the same regardless of how the blame is distributed between Iran and the Houthis. Namely: If you don’t want people to blow stuff up, don’t attack them in the first place!
In the case of the Houthis, the attack has been a military campaign, spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and logistically supported by the US, that has killed thousands of Houthis and other Yemenis (including the occasional schoolbus full of kids) and has created widespread shortages of food and water. The campaign has lasted more than four years and shows no signs of achieving its goals, even though Saudi strategic genius Mohammed Bin (“Bonesaw”) Salman, back when he launched the fiasco, sent Washington reassurances that it would take only six weeks for the Mission Accomplished banner to be unfurled.
In short, this is the kind of attack that could induce a Houthi counterattack.
In the case of Iran, the attack has been a year-long program of sanctions—imposed by Trump with energetic Saudi encouragement—so draconian that calling it “economic strangulation” is no exaggeration. The ultimate aim seems to be regime change.
Ruling regimes have been known to resist regime change. For example, an imperiled regime might decide to signal that if America’s going to shut down its oil exports, maybe exporting oil will become problematic for a nearby American ally as well! It might also signal that if America launches a military attack against it, the region could go up in flames.
What’s so amazing that every once in a while I have to stop and process it anew is this: The campaign to strangle Iran’s economy consists largely of sanctions that had ended as part of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran—and they were reimposed last year by the US not because Iran violated or abandoned the deal but because the US abandoned the deal. It’s kind of like sending victims of crimes to jail instead of the criminals. (Except that in that case at least you’re not, for example, endangering the lives of the victims by depriving them of critical medicine. Plus, no oil facilities get blown up.)
In the young and still-evolving Nonzero Newsletter, the rubric in the colored bar above—NEWSWORTHY—will appear over some pieces that discuss the week’s news. Often these pieces will highlight a story, or a theme in a story, that, IMHO, got less play in mainstream media than it deserved. In other words, under the NEWSWORTHY rubric you’ll typically find something I consider newsworthier than it’s been given credit for, something that I think has been underplayed.
I won’t always be explicit about what exactly it is that’s been underplayed. But in this inaugural version of the feature I might as well spell it out: I think there’s been too little exploration by at least some major media outlets of the likely motivations for the attack on Saudi Arabia, and thus too much implicit acceptance of the Trump administration’s narrative: that Iran is a deeply dangerous, destabilizing country that keeps doing crazy shit without intelligible motivation or discernible provocation. (There actually is a country that has lately been fitting that description, and unfortunately I’m living in it.)
One source of this media bias is a whole Washington infrastructure of think tanks and lobbyists (some of them funded by Saudi Arabia) whose job is to cast all Iranian behavior in the spookiest light possible. In a piece I wrote for The Intercept last year, I explored one example of how this infrastructure had warped some reporting in the New York Times, raising the chances of war with Iran.
But the problem goes beyond the distorting influence of think tanks and lobbyists. It grows partly out of human nature—specifically, out of a cognitive bias known as attribution error. Once a country has been framed as an enemy, we’re naturally inclined to not see ways that its unwelcome behavior might be explained by the circumstances it faces.
This is unfortunate, because successfully playing non-zero-sum games—playing them to win-win outcomes, or at least avoiding lose-lose outcomes—often requires clearly understanding the perspective of the other player. That is, it requires cognitive empathy (not to be confused with the feel-their-pain kind of empathy known as emotional empathy). And the game the US is playing with Iran definitely has non-zero-sum aspects, since, for example, neither player wants to see the Middle East to go up in flames.
One thing this newsletter will try to do from time to time is enrich cognitive empathy by counteracting attribution error. I’m confident that American politicians and journalists will provide lots of opportunities for that.

Samantha and the Power of Denial

Samantha Power—who wrote a Pulitzer prize–winning book about genocide that catapulted her onto President Obama’s foreign policy team, where she was a forceful advocate for humanitarian military intervention—has just published another book. It’s a memoir called The Education of an Idealist.
So far the commentary on the book illustrates a general principle of foreign policy commentary: the more your views depart from the establishment consensus, and the more willing you are to attack credentialed members of that establishment, the smaller the platform you’re allowed to express those views on.
Exhibit A: Daniel Bessner, a young historian, writing in the estimable but relatively small-circulation New Republic, says Power’s book demonstrates “the lethality of good intentions.” Power, for example, argued for the 2011 intervention in Libya, which morphed from a protect-civilians-via-bombing campaign into a regime-change-via-bombing campaign that wound up spreading chaos and weaponry well beyond Libya’s borders.
But Power offers no mea culpa. Bessner writes, “The most startling thing about a book titled The Education of an Idealist is that Power appears not to have learned very much.”
Exhibit B: Meanwhile, over on the massive New York Times platform, Tom Friedman—who, having written that paper’s foreign policy column for a quarter of a century, is himself a pillar of the foreign policy establishment—says that Power, in her “wonderful book,” ponders her track record, good and bad, “with unblinking honesty.”
And so it goes. Members of the foreign policy establishment—the agglomeration of liberal hawks and neocon ultrahawks that have been dubbed “the blob”—scratch each other’s backs and forgive each other for making the same kinds of bad calls they’ve made. So the blob keeps blobbing.
But maybe there’s hope! Over at The New Yorker, Dexter Filkins gives Power a somewhat hard time. That’s notable not just because the New Yorker is, though no New York Times, pretty big and influential, but also because highly emotive New Yorker writers have championed a series of ill-fated military interventions, notably including the Iraq War.
Filkins says much of Power’s book “reads as though it were written by someone campaigning for her next job—one that requires Senate confirmation.” (Over to you, Tom Friedman, who says that, whatever the mistakes of the younger, less experienced Power, now that she has reflected on the kinds of tough choices she had to make, “Every president should want an older Power around to help sort out those choices.”)
The best part of Filkins’s review is when he quotes Power excusing herself for the Libya blunder (“We could hardly expect to have a crystal ball when it came to accurately predicting outcomes in places where the culture was not our own.”) and then adds: “In a certain light, this sounds like an argument for not intervening at all.”
In a certain light, yes. Like this light: Maybe if you’re aware that you lack enough knowledge to confidently predict success, you shouldn’t embark on a venture that involves killing a bunch of people and turning a country that has a government into a country that doesn’t have a government.
Friedman, like Power, depicts past choices to intervene or not intervene as tensions between “idealism” and “realism.” This wouldn’t bother me if it weren’t for the tendency—shared by pretty much everyone in the foreign policy establishment—to act as if idealists are morally serious people whereas realists are cold-hearted cynics. The fact is that both idealists like Power and realists like me believe our favored policies are, in the long run, the most humane policies available. And my own view is that, judged by that standard, the recent track record of realists looks better than the recent track record of idealists.
Note: In the foreign policy world, “realism” is a technical term, designating a particular world view, and I don’t agree with classic realists about everything. I’ve advocated what I call “progressive realism”—a world view I trotted out in a long 2006 New York Times op-ed and recapitulated in a mercifully short piece in the Nation a decade later. In this newsletter, when a piece appears under the PROGRESSIVE REALISM bar, that means I consider it faithful to the spirit of that ideology. It also means that if you click on the bar, you’ll go to the part of our website where all such pieces are archived. And so too with the other colored bars in this Newsletter—click them and you’ll go to a (for now small, but growing) repository of related material. And that includes the bar that says MINDFULNESS:

Meditation as a meaning maker
I’m afraid I must take issue with my friend Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at Columbia University (whom I had the pleasure of talking with on meaningoflife.tv last year).
On his Scientific American blog, Scott recently posted an interesting piece about what kinds of things give people’s lives meaning.
It turns out people say they derive meaning from (among other things) extreme emotional experiences—not just positive ones, but negative ones as well. Which makes sense, when you think about it. The death of a close relative is an intensely negative emotional experience, one you wish you’d been able to avoid—but you certainly wouldn’t call it meaningless.
Scott goes on to write:
These findings also have implications for the mindfulness craze, and provide a much-needed counterpoint to the current trend of viewing calm and tranquil experiences as most conducive to a life well lived. To be sure, mindfulness, meditation, and cultivating inner calm can be beneficial for reducing anxiety, improving depression, and helping us cope with pain. However, the intensity of peak experiences may be more likely to define who we are.
Two points:
1. In my experience, some subjective experiences are much more intense when you’re mindful. I’m thinking particularly of aesthetic experiences—like sensing the beauty around you so powerfully that you feel true awe and wonder.
2. Mindfulness can render some negative experiences, if not more intense, then more vivid and perhaps more meaningful. I’m thinking particularly of feelings of sadness and loss. Even if your goal is to “get over” those feelings, getting over them mindfully involves inspecting them more closely, immersing yourself in them more deeply, than is normal. (What’s normal is to let feelings shape your behavior and thought without really paying much attention to them.)
I once interviewed Shinzen Young, an eclectic meditation teacher with decades of contemplative experience, and he said:
There's no way that we can live this life without experiencing physical discomfort and without experiencing situations that cause us to have emotional discomfort. It's part of life, and there's no way to avoid it, and in fact, we shouldn't avoid it. It's part of the richness of being a human being. However, physical discomfort and emotional discomfort is distinct from suffering. Suffering is pain as a problem. And it turns out that when meditation works, it gives you a skill set that allows you to experience physical and emotional discomfort with a greater poignancy but less problem.
I asked him whether, by “greater poignancy,” he meant that “you actually perceive it more acutely in a sense, but it causes you less trouble?” He said, “Exactly what I mean.”
It’s notable that Scott, sustaining his suggestion that mindfulness is a meaning dampener, also refers to poignancy:
At the end of our lives, will we look back and remember most poignantly all of the calm and tranquil meditation sessions we had, or will we remember the moments that plumbed the depths of our emotional life, that made us feel most alive?
I think Shinzen Young would join me in saying that this is a false dichotomy—that if you want to plumb the depths of your emotional life, meditation can be an asset.

Plant-based game theory
Sunflowers, believe it or not, play non-zero-sum games with one another—and do so with impressive skill! At least, that’s one reading of a study published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
A typical sunflower, not surprisingly, tends to send its roots more profusely into nutrient-rich patches of soil than into nutrient-poor patches. But two researchers—Megan Ljubotina and James Cahill—report that, when there is another sunflower in the neighborhood, this behavior gets recalibrated.
If much closer to the nutrient-rich patch than its neighbor, the sunflower sends its roots into the patch more profusely than when there’s no neighbor around—as if it were rushing to colonize land before a rival gets to it.
But if the nutrient patch is midway between the sunflower and its neighbor, it sends it roots into the patch less profusely than if there’s no neighbor around. Ljubotina and Cahill suggest that this may be a way “to avoid competition in highly contested patches.” Presumably the logic is akin to the logic of neighboring countries that behave with restraint to avoid the lose-lose outcome of mutually costly conflict. It’s an implicit non-aggression pact.
I’m sure there are other explanations. But the main point for our purposes is that the non-aggression pact explanation, whether right are wrong, isn’t crazy. Sunflowers may seem too dim-witted to evince strategic savvy, but organisms don’t have to be smart enough to understand game theory in order for natural selection to incline them to play their games well.
Same goes for us. Sure, we, unlike sunflowers, are smart enough to understand game theory. But that’s not the only thing that leads us to pursue its logic.
Such emotions as gratitude, trust, pride, and moralistic indignation seem to have been built into our perhaps-a-bit-dim-witted ancestors as a way to get them to play social games well—to, for example, reciprocate favors and thus form lasting friendships but to rebuff or even attack people who tried to take advantage of them.
None of this has to involve explicit understanding of why these strategies make sense—that, for example, friendship is the repeated playing of games to a win-win outcome. Chimps don’t spend time pondering game theory, and for all we know they don’t ponder much of anything—but they have trusted allies, presumably because they have the feeling of trust.
Same goes for the psychology of tribalism—the psychology that shapes our interactions with members of our group (national, ethnic, ideological, whatever) and with other such groups: We are under its sway in ways that, and for game theoretical reasons that, we don’t automatically understand. And—to further insulate us from reality—the swaying is done not just by emotions but also by subtle cognitive biases that can warp our view of the other tribe and of members of our own tribe.
This cluelessness would be less problematic if it weren’t for some technological developments that have taken place since natural selection designed this infrastructure of emotional and cognitive guidance. Like the invention of nuclear weapons. And for that matter the invention of rifles. And of social media. And so on.
All of which helps explain why the psychology of tribalism is important enough to be an intermittently recurring rubric in this newsletter (complete with a colored bar that, when clicked, will take you to the “psychology of tribalism” section of our archives). Precisely because we’re not naturally aware of how and when this psychology is warping our perception, and precisely because the stakes are so high, it’s important to keep exploring that psychology and to reflect on it fairly often.

In a post ominously titled “A Middle East One Step Closer to Its ‘1914 Moment’,” the International Crisis Group does a good job of sizing up the implications of the attack on Saudi oil facilities.
The New York Times Magazine interviews Ram Dass, author of the 1971 pop-eastern-philosophy classic Be Here Now, about the ego, the soul, and death—including his own eventual death, which he says is not a very big deal since “the soul is infinite.”
In Prospect Magazine, Ray Monk, a philosopher and Wittgenstein’s biographer, argues that the landscape of modern philosophy might be quite different had it not been for the premature death of the philosopher R.G. Collingwood in 1943—a death that left Gilbert Ryle, a fervent champion of analytic philosophy, with unrivaled power in the British philosophy establishment. (Monk doesn’t get into this, but Ryle became Daniel Dennett’s mentor. And, though Dennett’s writings on the mind-body problem don’t echo his mentor’s writings to the point of saying that consciousness doesn’t exist, I’ve always had trouble seeing the difference between what Dennett does say about consciousness and saying that it doesn’t exist. Some other observers have had the same reaction. Maybe that helps account for the old joke about Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained—that it should have been called Consciousness Explained Away. In any event, Ryle’s book The Concept of Mind was basically an overt attempt to explain consciousness away; he coined the term “ghost in the machine” as a dismissive label.)
If you’ve been waiting for an entertaining writer to spend a whole article playfully ridiculing Silicon Valley startups that are in the psychological therapy business, your ship has come in. Nellie Bowles does the honors in the New York Times.
What I did this summer: During the newsletter’s six-week summer break, as its name was slowly morphing from Mindful Resistance to Nonzero, I had conversations with some interesting people, including: Political scientist Francis Fukuyama on his book Identity; Israeli scholar and politician Yael Tamir on her book Why Nationalism; Ronald Purser on his book McMindfulness; and, last but certainly not least cosmic, political scientist Alexander Wendt on his book Quantum Mind and Social Science. All appeared on either bloggingheads.tv or meaningoflife.tv, and all can be heard on The Wright Show podcast feed, available at a podcast app near you.
OK, that’s it. This issue was longer than I intended; I’ll see if I can exercise more restraint next week. Meanwhile, note the “like” and “share” options below. And note that you can send valued feedback by clicking reply on this email or sending an email to nonzero.news@gmail.