The Wall Street Journal - 19.10.2019 - 20.10.2019

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president; Nancy Pelosi, the speaker

of the House, standing and pointing

at him; and the head of Gen. Mark

Milley, the new chairman of the Joint

Chiefs of Staff, bowed in—embarrass-

ment? Horror? His was not the only

bowed head.

The president soon tweeted about

a constitutional officer of the U.S.

House, who is third in line for the

presidency: “Nancy Pelosi needs help

fast! There is either something wrong

with her ‘upstairs’ or she just plain

doesn’t like our great Country. She

had a total meltdown in the White

House today. It was very sad to

watch. Pray for her, she is a very sick

person!”

As the Democratic leaders de-

parted, he reportedly called out, “See

you at the polls.” Mr. Trump is confi-

dent that he holds the cards here—

he’s got the Senate, and the base of

the party says all these issues should

be worked out in the 2020 election.

But he is seriously weakening his

hand by how he acts.

That meeting will only fortify Mrs.

Pelosi’s determination to impeach

him.

The president tweeted out the pic-

ture of that meeting just as the White

House made public the Erdogan let-

ter—because they think it made the

president look good. Which under-

scored the sense that he has no

heavyweight advisers around him—

the generals are gone, the competent

fled, he’s careening around sur-

rounded by second raters, opportun-

ists, naifs and demoralized midlevel

people who can’t believe what they’re

seeing.

Again, everything depends on the

quality and seriousness of the House

hearings. Polling on impeachment

has been fairly consistent, with Gal-

lup reporting Thursday 52% support-

ing the president’s impeachment and

removal.

Serious and dramatic hearings

would move the needle on public

opinion, tripping it into seriously

negative territory for the president.

And if the needle moves, the Sen-

ate will move in the same direction.

But the subject matter will proba-

bly have to be bigger than the

Ukraine phone call, which is not, as

some have said, too complicated for

the American people to understand,

but easy to understand. An American

ally needed money, and its new

leader needed a meeting with the

American president to bolster his po-

sition back home. It was made clear

that the money and the meeting were

contingent on the launching of a

The Impeachment Needle May Soon Move

The second is that the Republican

leader of the Senate, Mitch McCon-

nell, told his caucus this week to be

prepared for a trial that will go six

days a week and could last six to

eight weeks. In September there had

been talk the Senate might receive

articles of impeachment and execute

a quick, brief response—a short trial,

or maybe a motion to dismiss. Mr.

McConnell told CNBC then that the

Senate would have “no choice” but

to take up impeachment, but “how

long you are on it is a different mat-

ter.” Now he sees the need for a ma-

jor and lengthy undertaking. Part of

the reason would be practical: He is

blunting attack lines that the Repub-

licans arrogantly refused to give im-

peachment the time it deserves. But

his decision also gives room for the

unexpected—big and serious charges

that sweep public opinion and

change senators’ votes. “There is a

mood change in terms of how much

they can tolerate,” said a former

high Senate staffer. Senators never

know day to day how bad things will

get.

The third reason is the number of

foreign-policy professionals who are

not ducking testimony in the House

but plan to testify or have already.

Suppressed opposition to President

Trump among foreign-service offi-

cers and others is busting out.

The president is daily eroding his

position. His Syria decision was fol-

lowed by wholly predictable tragedy;

it may or may not have been eased by

the announcement Thursday of a

five-day cease-fire. Before that the

House voted 354-60, including 129

Republicans, to rebuke the president.

There was the crazy letter to Turkish

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan,

which was alternately pleading (“You

canmakeagreatdeal....Iwillcall

you later”) and threatening (“I don’t

want to be responsible for destroying

the Turkish economy—and I will”).

There was the Cabinet Room

meeting with congressional leaders,

the insults hurled and the wildness of

the photo that said it all—the angry

probe politically advantageous to Mr.

Trump and disadvantageous to a pos-

sible 2020 rival.

Everyone gets it, most everyone

believes it happened, no one ap-

proves of it—but it probably isn’t

enough. People have absorbed it and

know how they feel: It was Mr.

Trump being gross. No news there.

Truly decisive testimony and in-

formation would have to be broader

and deeper, bigger. Rudy Giuliani’s

dealings with Ukraine? That seems an

outgrowth of the original whistle-

blower charges, a screwy story with

a cast of characters—Lev Parnas and

Igor Fruman, natives of Ukraine and

Belarus, respectively, who make you

think of Sen. Howard Baker’s ques-

tion to the Watergate bagman Tony

Ulasewicz: “Who thought you up?”

More important will be a text or

subtext of serious and consistent for-

eign-policy malfeasance that the pub-

lic comes to believe is an actual

threat to national security. Some-

thing they experience as alarming.

It cannot be merely that the presi-

dent holds different views and pro-

ceeds in different ways than the

elites of both parties. It can’t look

like “the blob” fighting back—fancy-

pants establishment types, whose

feathers have been ruffled by a

muddy-booted Jacksonian, getting

their revenge. It can’t look like the

Deep State striking back at a presi-

dent who threatened their corrupt

ways.

It will have to be serious and sin-

cere professionals who testify believ-

ably that the administration is cor-

rupt and its corruption has harmed

the country. The witnesses will have

to seem motivated by a sense of duty

to institutions and protectiveness to-

ward their country.

And the hearings had better start

to come across as an honest, good-

faith effort in which Republican

members of Congress are treated

squarely and in line with previous

protocols and traditions.

With all that the needle moves.

Without it, it does not.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell

CAROLINE BREHMAN/CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY VIA ZUMA PRESS

T

hings are more fluid than
they seem. That’s my im-
pression of Washington
right now. There’s some-
thing quiet going on, a
mood shift.
Impeachment of course will hap-
pen. The House will support what-
ever charges are ultimately intro-
duced because most Democrats think
the president is not fully sane and at
least somewhat criminal. Also they’re
Democrats and he’s a Republican. The
charges will involve some level of for-
eign-policy malfeasance.

The ultimate outcome depends on
the Senate. It takes 67 votes to con-
vict. Republicans control the Senate
53-47, and it is unlikely 20 of them
will agree to remove a president of
their own party. An acquittal is likely
but not fated, because we live in the
age of the unexpected.
Here are three reasons to think the
situation is more fluid than we real-
ize.
First, the president, confident of
acquittal, has chosen this moment to
let his inner crazy flourish daily and
dramatically—the fights and melt-
downs, the insults, the Erdogan letter.
Just when the president needs to be
enacting a certain stability he enacts
its opposite. It is possible he doesn’t
appreciate the jeopardy he’s in with
impeachment bearing down; it is pos-
sible he knows and what behavioral
discipline he has is wearing down.

The mood has shifted

against Trump, but the

House has to show good

faith and seriousness.

DECLARATIONS

By Peggy Noonan

OPINION

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How Steam and Chips Remade the World

N

ot all inventions are equal.
While the wheeled suitcase
was a great idea, it didn’t
change the world. But invent a tech-
nology that causes the price of a
fundamental economic input to col-
lapse, and civilization changes fun-
damentally and quickly. Someone
born 250 years ago arrived in a
world that, technologically, hadn’t
changed much in centuries. But if
he had lived a long life, he would
have seen a new world.

For millennia there had been
only four sources of energy, all ex-
pensive and limited: human muscle,
animal muscle, moving water and
air. Thomas Newcomen invented the
steam engine in 1712, but its prodi-
gious fuel consumption severely
limited its utility. Then in 1769
James Watt greatly improved it,
making the engine four times as
fuel-efficient. In 1781 he patented
the rotary steam engine, which
could turn a shaft and thus power
machinery.
The steam engine could be scaled
up almost without limit. The price
of energy began a steep decline that
continues to this day.
As factories came to be powered
by steam, the price of goods fell,
sending demand to the sky. When
the steam engine was mounted on
rails, overland transportation of
people and goods became cheap and
quick for the first time in history.
Andrew Jackson needed nearly a
month to get from Nashville, Tenn.,
to Washington by carriage for his
inauguration in 1829. By 1860 the

trip took two days.

Quick overland transportation

made national markets possible.

Businesses seized the opportunity

and benefited from economies of

scale, sending demand up even

more as prices declined further. The

collapsing cost of wire and pipes al-

lowed such miracles as the tele-

graph, indoor plumbing and gas

lighting to become commonplace.

Enormous new fortunes came into

being.

The age dominated by cheap en-

ergy lasted until the mid-20th cen-

tury. Steam had been supplanted by

electricity and the internal combus-

tion engine, but someone from 1860

would have mostly recognized the

technology of 1960, however daz-

zling its improvement. Then an-

other world-changing technology

emerged.

Before the 1940s the word “com-

puter” referred to people, usually

women, who calculated such things

as the trajectories of artillery shells.

The first programmable computer,

Eniac, was powered up for work on

Dec. 10, 1945. It was 2,352 cubic

feet, the size of a large school bus,

with 20,000 vacuum tubes that

sucked up 150 kilowatts of power.

But it was 1,000 times as fast as

any electromechanical calculator

and could calculate almost any-

thing.

Transistors soon replaced vac-

uum tubes, shrinking the size and

power requirements of computers

dramatically. But there was still a

big problem. The power of a com-

puter depends not only on the num-

ber of transistors, but also the num-

ber of connections among them.

Two transistors require only one

connection, six require 15, and so

on.

While transistors could be manu-

factured, the connections had to be

made by hand. Eniac had no fewer

than five million hand-soldered con-

nections. Until the “tyranny of num-

bers” could be overcome, computers

would, like Newcomen’s steam en-

gine, remain very expensive and

thus of limited utility.

Had every computer on earth

suddenly stopped working in 1969,

the average man would not have no-

ticed anything amiss. Today civili-

zation would collapse in seconds.

Nothing more complex than a pencil

would work, perhaps not even your

toothbrush.

What happened? In 1969 the mi-

croprocessor—a computer on a sili-

con chip—was developed. That

overcame the tyranny of numbers

by creating the transistors and the

connections at the same time. Soon

the price of storing, retrieving and

manipulating information began a

precipitous decline, as the price of

energy had two centuries earlier.

Computing power that cost $1,

in the 1950s costs a fraction of a

cent today.

The first commercial micropro-

cessor—the Intel 4004, introduced

in 1971—had 2,250 transistors. To-

day some microprocessors have a

million times as many, making them

a million times as powerful but only

marginally more expensive.

Microprocessors began to appear

everywhere. Today’s cars have doz-

ens of them, controlling everything

from timing fuel injection to warn-

ing when you stray out of your lane.

Even money is now mostly a plastic

card with an embedded micropro-

cessor.

As the railroad was for the steam

engine, the internet is the micro-

processor’s most significant subsid-

iary invention. It revolutionized re-

tailing, news distribution,

entertainment, communication and

much more.

Like cheap energy, cheap infor-

mation has created enormous new

fortunes, ineluctably increasing

wealth inequality. But also like

cheap energy, the source of those

fortunes has given nearly everybody

a far higher standard of living.

To understand how profound the

microprocessor revolution has been,

consider this. The great science

writer Arthur Clarke once noted

that any sufficiently advanced tech-

nology is indistinguishable from

magic. A man from half a century

ago would surely regard the now-

ubiquitous smartphone as magic.

Mr. Gordon is author of “An Em-

pire of Wealth: The Epic History of

American Economic Power.”

By John Steele Gordon

Cheap energy powered an

economic revolution in the

18th century, and cheap

information in the 20th.

Trump Chooses to Fight at Home

The United States

abandoned half of

Europe to the So-

viets, which in-

cluded abandoning

the Free Poles who

fought by our side

in World War II.

We let South Viet-

nam go down the

drain in a fit of

Watergate pique.

George H.W. Bush called on the

Iraqi people to remove Saddam

Hussein and then allowed them to

be massacred without U.S. assis-

tance. The U.S. set matters right

with the 2007 surge in Iraq where-

upon President Obama withdrew

the troops and let the place fall

apart again. Mr. Obama also assured

Syrian oppositionists that the U.S.

would respond militarily if Bashar

Assad used chemical weapons and

then didn’t.

It would be nice if the U.S. could

provide steady, wise and endlessly

resourceful leadership. It would be

nice if each of us, in our own lives,

could be everywhere and do every-

thing. That’s not life.

Lots of people think they know

everything they need to know about

Donald Trump’s withdrawal of U.S.

forces from a corner of Syria by

who made the decision. It was im-

pulsive, shameful, self-serving and

wrong, because it was made by Mr.

Trump. But even a man who pays

little attention to his briefings

would have heard by now that the

U.S. position presented an unten-

able dilemma.

Turkey is an Article 5 NATO ally.

We have obliged Ankara for two de-

cades by designating its Kurdish

separatists as terrorists. The U.S.

has never advocated breaking up

Syria (or Iraq, Iran or Turkey) to al-

low a Kurdish state. U.S. support for

an autonomous Kurdish enclave in

Iraq was dependent on the Kurds’

recognizing Baghdad’s sovereignty

and not using Iraqi Kurdistan as a

base to subvert neighboring states.

We talk loosely about U.S. troops

being a tripwire, but we don’t actu-

ally leave soldiers vulnerable to be-

ing run over by a hostile force. If

Turkey threatens to invade northern

Syria, the U.S either has to remove

its troops or back them up with

enough force to protect them from

the Turks.

Remind yourself, too, that our

president is President Trump. His

strong suit is domestic guerilla po-

litical warfare in a situation where

large numbers of voters and insti-

tutional enemies deny his legiti-

macy. You might give him some

credit for recognizing his limita-

tions here.

The Kurds aren’t stupid and nei-

ther should we be. They have rap-

idly formed a new marriage of con-

venience, with the Assad regime

and its Russian and Iranian spon-

sors. This is nothing new in the

Middle East merry-go-round of fac-

tional and religious strife, among

people who have known and lived

with each other much longer than

they have lived with the U.S.

Yes, the U.S. bug-out could have

been better prepared. Kurdish mili-

tiamen were sitting on 10,000 Is-

lamic State prisoners. But this was

never going to be a stable solution

once the Turks or other regional

powers, all of whom have previ-

ously played footsie with Islamic

State, decided to start doing so

again.

President Trump is good at cre-

ating a narrative about himself that

he is a wild man, tweeting about

buying Greenland, denouncing the

press as an enemy of the people.

In the inner sanctum, however,

the choices he faces, like the

choices of any president, are con-

strained and usually come in sev-

eral different flavors of non-ideal.

His Syria decision was certainly

politicallyunwise (witness the con-

sternation on cable TV). This is

why presidents usually opt, in the

famous phrase, to “kick the can

down the road”—i.e., to make non-

decisions that don’t reverberate on

TV. But arguably the low-risk

choice here was to pull out. A lib-

erating factor (also enjoyed by Mr.

Obama) is deliverance from having

to worry about the price of oil (ac-

tually down since the U.S. bug-

out). Mr. Trump is freer to fry

other fish.

And the Mueller fiasco will echo

through our politics for a genera-

tion. It won’t go away.

Vindication settles nothing. Mr.

Trump’s ill-advised words with

the Ukrainian president are one

upshot; there will be a fight. His

institutional enemies are only

more desperate having damaged

their own credibility with the

American people to a degree they

are loath to admit. An unsettling

constitutional possibility is com-

ing into view: a president re-

elected by the Electoral College

after being impeached by the

House. “See you at the polls,” Mr.

Trump said to Nancy Pelosi in

some of the most pregnant words

uttered by a U.S. leader.

Not for the first time in Ameri-

can history a foreign ally of the

moment finds itself jilted because

the American people have matters

to hash out at home. That’s life.

BUSINESS

WORLD

By Holman W.

Jenkins, Jr.

The Kurds are not the

first foreign ally to be

sacrificed to America’s

domestic battles.