Random Friday: Afghanistan withdrawal, Dow Jones in 2018, Max Boot

News Story of the Day: President Donald Trump first announce he was pulling 2,000 troops out of Syria. Now there are reports that Trump will make a “significant” troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, the country the U.S. has occupied for nearly 20 years.

From The Wall Street Journal:

“More than 7,000 American troops will begin to return home from Afghanistan in the coming weeks, a U.S. official said. The move will come as the first stage of a phased drawdown and the start of a conclusion to the 17-year war that officials say could take at least many months.”

As expected, the left and the neoconservatives are dead set against both moves.

Question: When did former Vice President Dick Cheney purchase MSNBC and CNN?

Chart of the Day: With the year coming to an end, it would be appropriate to see how the stock market performed.

Here is what the Dow Jones looks like (at the time of this writing):

Illustration of the Day: Oh, Max Boot. He tries.

Quote of the Day: Nick Gillespie is out with a superb op-ed in Reason today. Here’s an excerpt:

A few deep breaths are in order. Yes, Trump is what Jeb Bush called him in a Republican primary debate that took place what seems like 100 years ago (actually, December 2015): a “chaos candidate” who would be a “chaos president.” He’s thin-skinned, too: “One of the things he’s most vulnerable to is mockery and mockery by his own supporters,” an anti-immigration activist told the Post.

That is nothing worth celebrating in a teenager, much less a president, but the current end-of-worldism is a bit much. Trump is doing pretty much exactly what he promised he would do: Shrink our military footprint around the world, insist on a border wall, act impulsively and childlishly. Critics are right to chastise Trump for not following any sort of coherent process in arriving at or announcing his Syria decision, but it’s still the right decision. It’s always ugly and disturbing when the United States pulls out of occupied countries (remember Saigon?), but are we supposed to stay in Syria and Afghanistan forever?

In this case, Trump isn’t the problem. The problem is American foreign policy, which has been a virtually unmitigated disaster for the entire 21st century (and really, can we talk about Yemen at some point?). It needs a reboot, partly because our Ozymandias-like endeavors (nation-building! region-building!) were so misguided and partly because the world has changed. America can’t be everywhere and shouldn’t try. That recognition stings, burns, humbles perhaps even the least-interventionist folks among us. In so many places and despite our intentions, Washington has made the world a worse place, a less stable place. Power, especially military power, isn’t what it used to be.

If the markets are tanking and a recession is looming, well, of course. What have we done since the Great Recession other than recreate the exact conditions that led to it? We’ve increased government spending and debt in a way that predictably leads to low growth, a stifling of innovation, and, eventually, a bad labor market (federal spending has been above 20 percent of GDP, a historically high level, since 2008 and shows no signs of reducing). Again, Trump isn’t the cause per se of this; he’s just the latest in an apostolic succession of presidents who helped to light the path. His trade wars aren’t helping, for sure, but that’s not the biggest problem facing us right now when it comes to long-term economic growth. Congress, which abdicated its responsibility for foreign policy a few years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, is now doing the same thing with many of its other functions (when’s the last time a real budget was enacted?). Parties end, bills come due. Not a good time. The same thing is happening in other parts of the world, especially Europe.

It’s easy to focus on Donald Trump, who “single-handedly” propels the government, the media, the world into crisis on an almost hourly basis. But though he is very different in the way he presents himself and is treated by the media, his actions are not so very different from those of recent presidents, all of whom crossed lines that should never have been crossed “when it came to foreign policy, domestic surveillance, governmental overreach, the drug war, deportations, and so much more.” What Trump ultimately represents or embodies is the twilight of postwar America, of a consensus forged for a very different world and very different circumstances. He too will pass from the scene, and then many, if not all, of the same problems will remain—until we reach a new consensus for a government that no longer tries to be all things to all people, both here and abroad.

Tweet of the Day: Ultimately, if neoconservatives and leftists are upset about the same thing, you know it was the right thing to do. Case in point, Syria. Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), the smarter version of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had this to say:

The hysterical reaction to the decision to withdraw troops from Syria is astonishing & shows just how attached to war some are. Lindsey Graham & others want us to continue our regime change war in Syria and to go to war with Iran. That’s why they’re so upset.

— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) December 21, 2018

Video of the Day: As the market rout intensifies, recession talk is all the rage. But what’s usually absent in the conversation is just how manipulated the bull market has been because of the Federal Reserve’s low-rate, money-printing policies of the last decade. Peter Schiff talks about how next year’s recession will mean socialism in the falling year.