Dear President Trump: Islamic Extremists Are Playing You Like A Fiddle

Don’t Let Them Pull the Strings Or America Loses

On Leverage

Dear President Trump,

Given your decades of real estate experience and Houdini-esque ability to flirt with bankruptcy and escape unscathed, I know you are well acquainted with the concept of leverage.

Leverage can exist in different forms. There is physical leverage, as in a literal lever that moves weight. There is financial leverage, which lets you magnify risk so you can win big and lose bigger if the cards fall the wrong way. Technology writ large is the story of leverage, the ability to do and be more with less. And then there is the leverage of ideas. There is the leverage of manipulating a far more powerful actor into believing what you want them to believe and acting as you want them to act.

You see, President Trump, your executive order on immigration represents the culmination of one of the most effective grand strategies since containment and the Marshall Plan — but it is not your strategy that merits this praise. Quite the opposite: your actions are a vindication of Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, of al-Baghdadi and Assad and the state actors (hello, Putin) who sat back and watched the dismal play unfold, hoping against hope that America would take the bait.

You took the bait.

On Strategy

Let’s consider things from a different perspective:

The definition of strategy is taking the measure of the means at your disposal and matching them with the set of goals you want to achieve. If you were a leader of a loose coalition of nihilistic zealots — consisting of some dozen major groups, depending on which splinter organizations, political parties, and militias you include in your count — and you were bent on humbling the most powerful and admired country in the world: how would you do it?

Well, you would want to attack the things that made America special. You would want to chip away at the pillars of our exceptionalism until the whole edifice collapsed under the weight of its expectations.

You’d want to attack our economic might, our productivity and innovation, the engines that have propelled us to the zenith of science, technology, and living standards (of course, we have a long way to go, but on a relative basis it is still better to live in America than most anywhere else).

You’d want to attack the institutions and the values that form the bedrock of our social contract. Even a structure rendered from a perfect blueprint — our Constitution — will rot if termites are allowed free reign (read: immigration policies that impinge on freedom of religion, fantastic assertions that threaten our independent and free press).

You’d want to attack our alliances. You’d want to rend America from the allies who have looked up to us and followed our lead for the past seventy years. You would want us to hoof it alone.

You’d want to attack our unity. America is an alloy, a mix of elements that is stronger when forged and quenched than any pure ore. But you would divide us, turn us against each other, such that we were disinclined to contribute to common causes that will benefit us all in time, like healthcare and education and infrastructure, because in the moment it felt better to think of ourselves.

Having identified your targets, you would identify the means at your disposal. You have a corps of zealots, not many, who are devoted to the delusions you preach and lonely enough to die for them. You have money, sourced from wealthy patrons and state sponsors of terror who seek to destabilize the United States even as our diplomats tolerate them because the alternative would allegedly be worse. You have the element of surprise.

Compared to the overwhelming might of America, you don’t have all that much. But when wielded with maximum leverage, the tools you have might be enough. Given these means and ends, how would you plot to hurt us?

You’d want more followers for your cause, but because most people just want to raise families and live happy lives, you would find it hard to recruit. That doesn’t matter. You’d settle, at first, for the perception of numbers. You would shroud yourselves in the banner of a far larger group — a religion, perhaps one perceived by the West as a historical rival — such that your actions will be viewed as the opening salvo in a clash of civilizations and not what they truly are: the isolated atrocities of a handful of maniacs.

Having raised a crescent banner — even as the vast majority of those who bear the same banner protest strongly that you are not one of them — you would try to incite violence in America. This is because terror is a visceral emotion that elicits a visceral response in the minds and hearts of those who experience it: fight or flight.

You would do terrible things and innocent people would die, and you would expect, correctly, that America would fight. But you would worry that we would do the smart, hard thing, which is to lie in wait with the cold patience of a sharpshooter, armed with the knowledge that you posed as much threat to America as a gnat to a tiger if we didn’t make an unforced error.

But in your wildest dreams you’d hope that America would overreact, that we’d leap at you, the gnat, and in doing so fall off a cliff. You would hope that America would start wars that would cost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, running up an impossible tab and hampering us from investing in ourselves. You would hope that Americans would turn against each other, accusing their own neighbors of being fools and traitors.

You would hope that America would crack down on immigrants, depriving itself of entrepreneurs who create billions of dollars in economic value, scientists who win Nobel Prizes, comedians who make us laugh.

This is how you would employ the means at your disposal to destroy America. You wouldn’t expect to succeed, of course, because you’d expect Americans to know better than to play into such an obvious deceit. And even if Americans were understandably terrified at the prospect of a young brown man leaping up in a Starbucks with a gun in his hand, at least America’s leaders would be the better angels of their nature. They would know better than to enact symbolic policy that made a plurality constituents feel slightly, guiltily better without actually doing anything to make them safer.

On Leadership

Here are the facts: since September 11th, exactly zero Americans have been killed in a terrorist attack perpetrated by anyone who emigrated, or whose parents emigrated, from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. The odds of any refugee killing someone on U.S soil is lower than the odds of being struck by lightening. Existing policy already calls for migrants from hot zones to be vetted by multiple government agencies.

What you have given our enemies, in plain terms, is clear and present confirmation of their rallying cry: America hates Muslims. You also gave them the gift of rejecting scientists, businessmen and artists who are valuable contributors to our economy and society. This is the crescendo of a rhetoric of divisiveness and paranoia that has already caused tremendous damage. It is right to assume that you had the best of intentions, but it is also right to bluntly assess the impact of those intentions: in trying to defend America, you have given our enemies more leverage to destroy us.

By and large, America’s issues are structural in nature. Immigrants didn’t cause the shift from a manufacturing economy to an information economy and the resulting increase in inequality. Extremists didn’t cause global warming, which is responsible for storms and famines and droughts around the world that contribute to an unstable geopolitical landscape. But they sure know how to light a tinder box when they see one.

Immigration is not a clear-cut issue. The balance between defending our long-term interests and preserving safety in the short-term is not trivial to define. But it seems clear, Mr. President, that you’ve been had. You’re the victim of the biggest con in modern history, perpetrated by a band of fanatics who figured out how to push just the right buttons to drive this country to disaster.

I know you believe that many in our country underestimate you. I’m asking you to prove us wrong. Your ban will expire in four months. Ideally you’d remove it right away; at the very least, don’t renew it. I am afraid there will be many other occasions over the next four years when this advice will be relevant: if you want to beat Islamic extremists, don’t play by their rules. Snap their levers and show them that Americans can’t be cowed into abandoning our values.

America can’t be destroyed from the outside. Extremists will never be powerful enough to destroy the pillars of our democracy. But we are powerful enough to destroy them ourselves.

PS: If you are reading this and you are not President Trump, donate to the ACLU or the IRC if you have anything to spare. There are lots of folks who are willing to match your donations.