Ezra Klein draws a powerful parallel between the Iraq War and current trade policy debates on his podcast. His insight: both situations allowed broad coalitions to form behind bad policy because everyone projected their own preferred outcomes onto deliberately vague messaging.
"There were really dozens of these, which is how you got as broad a coalition behind as bad a policy as that together, because everybody said: 'you know they're being a little bit vague about what's really going on here and why we're really doing this. I bet you if you go into their hearts, what they want is the thing I want, even though the policy doesn't quite match what policy you would get starting from my premises'."
The key insight is about the danger of giving away clarity in exchange for trust that there's a hidden strategy:
"You're giving away a lot of clarity just on the trust that what is happening is that people are keeping a good hand of cards with a good strategy of poker hidden from you, as opposed to what's happening, which is what we seem to be seeing in public: Donald Trump is a chaotic and erratic person. They are making policy in a chaotic and erratic way, and that policy is having chaotic and erratic consequences."
This resonates beyond trade policy. It's a warning about any political movement where supporters fill in the blanks with their own preferred interpretations while the actual policy remains chaotic and contradictory.
The Iraq War example is particularly apt—people convinced themselves the Bush administration secretly shared their specific goals, whether humanitarian intervention, realpolitik, or homeland security. The vagueness wasn't a feature enabling coalition-building; it was a bug that allowed disastrous policy to proceed.